Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.

Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.

So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.

Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.

The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

Took yesterday off to sort out a new passport.
Today on the stand:

Manager: "So we've been trying to get app X running on a dev environment for client X but we couldn't expose it to them"

Me: "Well yeah it's a dev environment if you want to give them one give them access to staging"

Manager: "Oh well we're still going to give them access to dev because they asked for it. It's due for 10am but we couldn't get it to run. You have to get it running since we edited the config files"

*accessing dev environment*
half of config files is missing, random files committed to the repo, SSL certs manually edited, eth0 down and found swan vpn installed.

never taking a day off again.

Just last month we finished a big project for a client. The company had their lawyers make a contract to transfer ownership for the website to them.

One of the requirements was to deliver all code in a word file. And just that. In the whole contract was not a word about transfering the production environment to their servers. Or supplying a working version. The files and database. No just the word file.

As of today still wondering what they where planning to do with a word file with hunderds of pages of code.

Offcourse we deliverd a working version to their servers. But why are there people making decisions about things they understand nothing at all.

I HOPED I WOULDN'T BE BALD AS MY DAD BUT AT THIS RATE I WILL BE HAIRLESS FROM TEARING IT OUT ON MY BLOODY OWN

I got hired for cleaning up a 2 year project of rushed spaghetti code , where they previously only had 1 programmer aND HE WROTE 37 THOUSAND LINES OF CODE!

OH WE NEED A NEW FEATURE?! LEMME JUST RESEARCH THIS COMMENT-LESS CRAP FOR MULTIPLE MILLENIA BEFORE I CAN GRASP WHAT THE FLYING FRICKIN FRIDGE CODE DOES

To top it off, I've about ONE MONTH LEFT BEFORE BETA RELEASE TO FIX THE CODE!

I'm super grateful for this job as it's my first programming job BUT I'M GONNA SET THE REPOSITORY ON FIRE SOON AAAAHHHHHH

HOW CAN YOU, THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER, WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WHERE MOSTLY ALL FILES ARE +2000 ROWS OF UNDOCUMENTED CODE

OH AND JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER:
"You can just remove the unused code and refractor it some, izi"

IZI MY SHITTY POOP CAR
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Now with that out of the way, how would you recommend handling a stressful release deadline?

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

I showed a friend of mine a project I made in two days in Docker and Symfony php. It is a rather simple app, but it did involve my usual setup: Nginx with gzip/cache/security headers/ssl + redis caching db + php-fpm for symfony. I also used php7.4 for the lolz

He complained that he didn't like using Docker and would rather install dependencies with composer install and then run it with a Laravel command. He insisted that he wanted a non-docker installation manual.

I advised him to first install Nginx and generate some self-signed certificates, then copy all the config files and replace any environment-injected values (I use a self-made shell script for this) with the environment values in the docker-compose files.

Then I told him to download php-fpm with php 7.4 alpha, install and configure all the extensions needed, download and set up a local Redis database and at last re-implement a .env file since I removed those to replace them with a container environment.

He sent an angry emoji back (in a funny way)

God bless containerized applications, so easy to spin up entire applications (either custom or vendor like redis/mysql) and throw them away after having played with them. No need to clutter up your own pc with runtime environments.

I wonder if he relents :p

Imagine this clusterfuck:
A small company creates its own CMS on PHP 5.5 and MySQL, coded by fresh junior devs who apparently just got into coding.

My new employer sadly is one of their customers and now I got the task to migrate a group of tightly linked websites on subdomains to an actually sane and maintainable CMS...

Fuck me...

Apparently the continuous extension of the websites over the years got so labor intense, that the mentioned company lacks the manpower to fulfill further development wishes.

I've looked into the code today... let me tell you, PTSD is helluva thing.

- Each subdomain has a complete copy of the Crap Management System, there is no use of composer packages and each of the 50 folders in the webroot contains a mix of source code and images or other resources.
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests.
- There is no central file for environment variables like a ".env".
- Each website uses at least 5 different versions of jQuery, of which some jquery.min.js files were manually modified.

Don't get me started on how the DB is organized...

My work on this has just started, there will be more I've yet to uncover.

"C'mon, man! Gimme a break!"

!rant
What is your editor/coding environment fashion setup?

Here is mine and I am very proud of it:

Termite terminal + dvtm (like tmux) + Nano with semi-custom syntax files.

Left language is C, right top C2 (c2lang.org), right bottom my build-system

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:

Me:

Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files

Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software

Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP

IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files

Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp

Network: No internet access, internal company network only

Web browser: IE 6

Graphical design software: msPaint

Version control: Emails

Team communication: Emails

Software distribution vector: Emails

Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers

Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

<rant>
I fucking HATE the Arduino environment right now.

First of all: you can't fucking put your project files in a sub folder to the main file. I can't write #include "src/motor.hpp" because it doesn't fucking know what that means.
Turns out you have to put all your header files in the fucking library folder common for all Arduino projects!

Secondly, you can't call your cpp headers hpp, they HAVE to be called h, or the Arduino environment throws a fit and begins whining about being unable to find the fucking files.
Not just that! You can't reference other Arduino libraries from within your library because the environment doesn't know what that means either.
To get around that you need to fucking include the library in your main file, AND THEN you can include it in the library file that uses it. After all, it should be the programmer's job to soon feed a so called IDE, right?

I'M SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT! 😤

I'm ready to either program the Arduino directly with an AVR programmer or even port the entire project to the raspberry pi where I have a proper fucking Linux environment with a proper fucking directory structure so I can code proper fucking C++.
Hell I'm even fucking willing to spend all weekend porting all the code myself if necessary.

It's not reasonable that correct fucking C++ code is invalidated because I called the files something "wrong" and put them in the "wrong" directory.
</rant>

"user friendly project board" my ass

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

(Dev)Life in the past 12 hours

Oh boy have the last 12 hours been a roller coaster ride for me. Noob me decided to "compile" AoSP for my device to get a taste of how custom ROMs are built from source. Overall it was fun but the errors were a very good excercise for googling, SO. Couple stuff I learnt ( possibly useful for anyone who comes here )
* The shebang line ( #!/usr/bin/env python ) on my system translated to Python 3.7 environment instead of the expected Python 2.7. Best solution I think to avoid confusion is to create a python 2.7 environment and source it.
* Get your trees right. A jar file called WfdCommon.jar ( apparently known as wifi-display common ) was the cause of several hours of hunting the fault. My vendor tree somehow didn't have this file so dex2oat was borking out like mad. I'm still amazed how I figured this one out almost by myself. ( Basically I had to check every file included in the boot class path, and find the odd one )
* I wasted a lot of time in finding the right files to change version numbers and all. Maybe I didn't search XDA properly for a guide ?

Overall it was a fun experience. Also if anyone's experienced in this area could you share resources to learn more about custom ROM development? Specifically on the tweaking part where you mix features from different ROMs to make a great ROM ( like AoSP extended or Pixel Experience ). All I could find were on the zips and not on sources.

Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.

I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.

So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.

Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.

Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.

BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"

I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"

And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?

I'm amazed so many people have "one" favourite editor. I have a whole bunch depending on the situation:

- IntelliJ whenever dealing with Java files
- VS whenever dealing with .NET
- VS code whenever dealing with Salesforce
- Notepad++ when just opening "any old file" to do some quick editing (never been won over to Sublime)
- vim when needing to edit files in a console environment
- nano as the second choice in the above situation when vim isn't available
- Emeditor when needing to open / work with very large files

I've never even remotely found a "one size fits all" solution.

A newly joined developer (who was supposed to be very senior) comes and asks me how to write a test cos for some reason the person didn't know how to mock.

In Java,
(same for any other implementation which has an interface)
Writes Arraylist list =.....
Instead of List list = Arraylist...

Deployed code (another engineer from another country helped to deploy since this new senior dev didn't have access yet.

But the new senior dev didn't update relevant files in production code which brought down the site for nearly an hour. Mistake aside, the first reaction from this new senior dev is 'WHY DIDN'T THE DEV THAT WAS HELPING DIDN'T DO THE FILE UPDATE?'

This was followed by some other complaints such as our branching stragies are wrong. When in fact the new senior dev made a mistake by just making assumptions on our git branching strategies and we already advised on correct process.

Out of all these, guess this is the best part. The senior dev never tested code locally! Just wrote code, unit test and send to QA and somehow the test passed through. I learnt this when I realised this dev... has not even set up the local environment yet.

I keep saying new but this Senior dev been around like 3 months! This person is in another team within our larger team but shares same code base. I am puzzled how do you not set up your environment for 3 months. Don't you ask for help if you are stuck? I am pretty sure the env is still not setup.

Am I over reacting or is this one disgusting developer who doesn't even qualify for an intern let alone a senior dev? It's so revolting I can't even bring myself to offer help.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.

Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.

Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.

Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.

-Rant-
How do you (not) secure your Rest based web service?
1. Chain it to shady organic authentication system built by a hoard of monkeys high on Tequila.
2. have secret keys that get copy pasted into config flat files, and index them on your code search engine.
3. make the onboarding extremely platform specific that you need 500 environment variables, 50 scripts, 5 fancy device presses and a tap dance to make a GET call to the service.
4. fish through 500 rotating log files that the authentication system generates for each API call made.
5. Leave traces all over the host so if you have to start over, you should sudo rm -rf / and set fire to your computer.

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.

The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.

I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.

I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.

We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.

"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"

"Duh of course -- but let me check..."

When you finally have some servers racked and configured in VMware to build a lab environment for the team....

But to access VMware you need to run citrix receiver from a mac to launch Chrome on Windows to access the VMware ESX Web UI but only on the HTML5 version as Flash doesn't work....

Now to spin up virtual machines that you can only upload via ova images but not locally cos that tries to show you the Windows citrix local files....

Do I even dare ask if I can access this via API so I can actually provision this with Ansible like I want too?!

God....

Bash and substitution patterns is character diarrhea.

And said Bash "script" consists of multiple shitton files with sources and Environment variables and other stuff that makes me wanna poke my eyes out and cram it into my arse.

Still shitty, but more tolerable.

I will have an clusterfuck of nightmares I guess.

All these # will gangup with the ~ and then the ? will start an knife attack to rip out their intestines. But all fails as the ! shred everything to bits by blasting it with anti tank sniper munition.

*dizzy*

I'm living it.
I started an internship at this web store made of different pieces and following no apparent rule or convention. They asked me to do this landing page, but I can't access to the development environment, nor push, create a docker, kill myself, nothing. I have to build from the DOM and write with inline style a page copied and pasted, with 300 lines of CSS already in the tpl, overwritten bootstrap 3 and two main CSS files linked. And "they don't do !important".
I wish I could say I'm learning a lot, but not. My life has become a waste of hours trying to please a company stuck and aged.

Got in trouble yesterday for deploying to a QA environment and NOT sudo vimming a file to change the hardcoded email recipient... Maybe, the dev who wrote that file should use our configuration files instead of hardcoding it!

There's no provisioning script. Code repo's there, but no configuration files. Missing folders that break the app. No documentation on what to install, what directories to create, NO instructions. Nothing. Just an empty Ubuntu vagrantbox and a git repo. Took the entire morning and then some, just to replicate the dev environment. Fuck

An idea for a website:
A page where you paste a github url and it clones the repository on the server and presents it to you with a IDE interface, lets you apply little changes and build it.
A "development environment as a service", in few words. Seriously, browsing github files is a pain and I can't obviously clone all the interesting projects I want to explore!

I'm crying internally. The project(s) i work on have configuration files with dev and prod-info, the prod is just commented out. But thanks to reasons everyone has a different dev environment so there are many dev-config-blocks. I just use mine and carry on, BUT SOMEONE ALWAYS COMMITS THOSE FILES. I JUST THOUGHT OF IT NOW, BUT I'LL PUT THOSE FILES ON A BLACKLIST. FROM NOW ON YOU CAN ONLY COMMIT THESE FILES DURING A FULL MOON.

There's also this codebase to create licenses for our products. The license data fpr every customer is there, commented out. If you wanted to create another license, comment something and comment out another thing and you're good to go. THAT'S NOT WHAT VERSIONING IS FOR.

so if i get this correctly :

1. mongodb( community server) is going to create some files in my system which will be called "databases/collections/document bullshit via its own special process called mongod (similar to mysql , but ok)

2. my python flask app is going to connect to it via its official driver pymongo (which could be used directly)
3. mongoengine is a library (more of a wrapper on pymongo) providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

4. flask-mongoengine is library (more of a wrapper on mongoengine providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via mongoengine via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

5. flask-pymongo is some another bullshit library/wrapper that took away 6hours of mine which again is "A FUCKING WRAPPER PROVIDING EASY WAYS FOR CONNECTING TO MONGODB VIA PYMONGO"

seriously, fuck web development. Why can't the original driver (i.e pymongo from mongodb devs) could have simpler wrappers? and why does my fucking tutorial instructor had to use the most fucking rarely used flask-mongoengine (which i accidently read as flask-pymongo and got f**ked) to teach newbies? fucking day wasted trying to understand this crap.

I don't like monnopolies, but its somewhat good that the mobile environment is still in the hands of nononsense players like google and oracle(java) . atleast we don't have people releasing wrapper over wrapper over wrapper and then fighting about which wrapper is better to use.
Like , even when devs started cmplaining that android dbs are too difficult to understand, google themselves created an actively supported wrapper that shutted down the fight over which wrapper to use(sqldelight, realm,sql bright etc)

So I created a little script for my mother because otherwise she had to combine 70 spreadsheets manually, I just couldnt sit there and do nothing. So I wrote a simple Python script in like 30 mins, decided that it needed a GUI because in the end it is for my mother. So wrote a GUI and partly learnt PyQt during that in an hour, which was all working fine.

Then I got to the point where I actually had to hand it over to my mother, preferably as an executable so that there is no hassle at all. So found this tool, Pyinstaller which seems to work great. Created an executable with all the dependencies and stuff in a single file, it worked on my win10 machine (because I developed on Linux of course). So I distributed it to her and she immediately gets an error. Of course there is no description and stuff because I made it a simple program, no log files and such. But fortunately she told me that it errorred when she wanted to run it, so I knew it had to be due to the executable.

Turns out she is still using windows 7 at work, which of course is different that windows 10 and here I am at 11pm, installing updates on a fresh windows 7 machine just to create a new build in that environment and make it work on her machine.

Fuck you, windows update. I swore to never see that ugly ass progress bar again, but yet here I am. Send halp.

I am almost just at the point where Im going to teach my mother how to run a python application from the command line because wheels are actually available for all python dependencies (instead of compiling them)!

Are there better python executable creators out there for wincrap?

It's only took me all morning but I got git properly setup on our server.

We have a folder in the repo that holds the distribution files. They get split to the distribution branch. Then the hosting service clones that branch.

Finally we we got some proper version control and a good testing environment.

Oh yeah the distribution files are minified using grunt.

Got engaged to set up the CI for a project. Worked with the main developer to set up the dev environment only to find out that he deleted 80% of the migration files because he didn't know what they were

I think my worst trait is my lack of organization outside a work environment

I spent a few hours cleaning my old hard drives and I freed up 600GB of just duplicate files. Everything from driver backups and progam exe's to simple text documents

Most were in subfolders of a folder named some variation of 'sort_later' :/ oof

Once I maintained one of the most used and fucked up codebases on the market with almost 1M+ daily users. (cannot say more, sorry).

It's written in PHP and is absolutely terrifying,
the first time I saw some lines of code I was about to scream and cry.

- spaghetti code
- no indentation
- random SQL query unoptimized
- unused vars
- Code is split among several files with no logical reasoning
- Mixed procedural and oop programming
- Unsanitised user input (yes, you got it right)

No test environment, no backup database, every commit goes straight to production.

It's a real disaster but the company prefers to keep it as it is without refactoring or anything else.

Just to make it clear:
It's not hatred against PHP, it's against the code's current status and the older programmers which used to work on it.

Im gonna get a new laptop soon and on my old laptop I want to install linux (cant do that on my main laptop because Im a windows dev at the moment).

I am not new to linux and have used 3 major ubuntu versions and it was all trouble, autoremoving files after update etc.
So I am planning to go Manjaro but which desktop environment shall I use? I've heard great things about i3 and Cinnamon. Gnome is not something I liked in Ubuntu.

Which desktop environment do you use, why and how did you make the choice?

FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.

- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

Ugh... some people...

Just left the office early because of the toxic climate. That one infamous collegue is basically unable to communicate without being a narcissistic 5-year-old and was arguing whether we should write a test (I was going to write the test) that would need a single additional branch in the build system.

(The test was for a parser and it should test whether it can handle absolute paths. A simple regression test with a file and an expected output. Because absolute paths are different for every platform and user, the files to be parsed would have to be generated with appropriate paths before the tests were run. Well that would require one single python script and a single line in the script that runs the script and DONE)

Well that guy was unable to focus on his own work and started an argument about whether that test was necessary.
Even though I still think it is necessary, it might have been a reasonable argument if he would have acted more agreeable. But he was saying the feature was useless anyways "everyone will use relative paths only anyways" and "because noone here cares a ratass about maintaining the tests it will all fall on me again" ..

Wtf was this guys problem, I (CAPS) was going to write the stupid test and since when do we not write tests in order to better maintain our product? I get that he worries that the test environment will get more messy, but thats better than having the product code go messy or unfunctional! And c'mon guys, how are absolute paths a redundant feature...

“OhhHhh please fill out an entire fucking excel sheet for our test environment deployment. It helps us manage everything better and gives us a reason to fucking thumb around in our holes all day and pretend like we really mean something as managers.” Like absolutely no, you can go fuck yourself with a condom filled with broken glass shards and diseases is what YOU can do. You are a parasite.

“Senior lead developer” - but they don’t have a title - says: “please just give me the list of files I need to manually change on the env in real time”. Bitch, do you even know what CI/CD is?!?!? The fact that you have been doing this for a year straight makes me pity how much of a fucking dumbass you really are. Even if u don’t use a pipeline, just look at my fucking git changes. That’s literally why we have it. You are a fucking disgrace of a developer and I hope you know that everyone who is a competent dev would rather bathe in a bath filled with lemon juice and cactus spikes, before EVER working with YOU EVER AGAIN!!!

I think UPS' Api documentation and service must be the worst documented and build API I have ever seen from a corporate.

1. The developer website is a mess. A total mess. You can barely find the API type you are looking for.

2. When you get the API and download the documentation, the files, .pdf etc is still a mess. Pages long that most are craps.

3. Each request returns Status Code 200. Even if it is an error. This blew my mind.

4. Each request, based on error type or based on tracking activity returns different JSON schema.

For example, the JSON Schema for a shipment in transit is different from JSON schema for a shipment that has been delivered. A shipment that has been returned, a shipment that required signature etc. They are different from each other.

5. And the worst. They do not provide with test tracking codes. I have found some on internet, but they do not work in development and production environment.

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

IF YOU WANT MULTIPLE COMPOSER FILES PER ENVIRONMENT AND NO LOCK FILE YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW COMPOSER WORKS!

Pulled my hair out over one today (and a week ago when I first saw the issue)

Setting up development environment. Created test user and test database and used mysqldump to copy data over.

MySQL was executing a function as the wrong user. Checked my config files, checked my config reader, checked my database connection, checked checked checked. Checked everything twice, I felt like Santa.

Changed the password in the config file to make sure it was logging in right. It threw an error still but not one I had expected so I figured the login still worked (My bias was that I thought the config file was not working or the mysql library was caching authentication. Both were wrong but this blinded my debugging. Foolish, I have forgotten my training)

Logged into the database directly via client. *didn't bother executing the function because I was only testing auth*

Think
Think
Think

Search entire project for database username. It's gotta be hard coded by accident SOMEWHERE.

It's not.

Why
Why
Why

Wait.

-- Flashback to how the test db was created -- What's actually in this damn script?

DEFINER `production_user` CREATE PROCEDURE `old_db`.`procedure_name`

Two issues: definer is old user (this is the error I was seeing) and its creating the procedure on the old db (this would be the next error I would have found if I kept going)

Fuck mysqldump. Install mysqldbcopy. Works

Put hair back in head.

Best: ...😓...

Worst: having to deal with excel data import in C# in a server environment without drivers for working with excel files 🤐

... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.

so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.

BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.

and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.

and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.

autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.

in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.

upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.

at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.

remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.

it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...

it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.

and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.

it was a transcendental experience.

and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.

and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.

... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...

The positive side of EnvVars...
So a couple of weeks ago I moved all api keys and db passwords to environmental variables on the server so that I didn't have to keep worrying if I'm live in my test environment.

Earlier I shat myself after an apt-get upgrade broke php and apache somehow decided it's a great idea to serve all .php files as plain text. I was super relieved to find no confidential information (apart from logic) was made public.

gradle is infuriating.

firstly there are so limited resources to understand how it's building a java/android code. everything happens by magic and hit+trial

secondly the plugins and the tasks works in mysterious ways. sometime they work when applied in the project root's gradle file, other times they work when applied in module's gradle file, nd other times they need configuration at both levels.

then there are gradle tasks like build ,test, assemble , clean etc. these are less of an action and more of an alias to run a bundle of actions.

then we have 3rd party plugins which attach themselves to these "fat-actions" and run before/after them

and finally we have the fuckup from the java world where the only available code coverage plugin is jacoco and IT FUCKING SUCKS!!! it is a test environment plugin, it should impact test tasks , but somehow it's fucking with the assemble taskin such a manner, that the jars ans aar files generated via plugin are giving runtime errrors. yes , runtime! as if we are back in the messed up js world of "everything is good unless running live"

even if it was a compile time eeror, i would have considered. but runtime?!! fucking runtime error?! i barely understand this shit, there is absolutely no info available as to which classes are being used to create a build and how, and i am supposed to fix this? wtf?!

Fuck Drupal. Fuck the work environment I have, and fuck CMS in general.

I have a task that consists into removing any @extend from the different SCSS files so the compiled file is lighter than before (so far it went from 10mb to 750kb). Everything went okay but suddenly PHP decides that the fuckton memory it has isn't enough anymore and wants more. And makes VirtualBox freeze. Which makes Windows 8.1 freeze. It's 11:10 AM when I write these lines and I haven't been able to do SHIT since 9 AM.

The lead developer just told me "you touched some PHP code you shouldn't have approached in the first place". DUDE I haven't written anything in PHP IN TWO WEEKS !

Also, why does fucking Kint exists, when Laravel has dd() and Symfony has var_dump, and they work as fine as Kint, but they don't need 580 Tb of RAM to run and load a fucking page?

Having to work with this fuckery of a CMS is something, but having to work with Windows 8.1 makes me feel like working on some cancer with a computer built before the first World War

Now I finally go back to work, that's cool, I only lost 2h30 of my fucking day doing nothing but restarting VirtualBox and my fucking computer. FUCKING YAY.

Front-end web development is like a fucking cancer to me right now

I need the following behavior from my development environment if I don't want the webdev experience to destroy my sanity and tempt me into suicide by making me waste my valuable lifetime configuring shit that is ultimately meaningless to the software I'm trying to create:

- I should be able to open the webpage in the browser at localhost:<some-port>
- the page should refresh immediately as I save my files
- I should be able to import node modules installed with npm without using a script tag linking to some CDN (for instance, I want to do a get request with axios instead of the fetch API)
- I should be able to do this without spending more than two minutes reading the documentation for a tool that would enable me to do it, ideally without ever coming even close to touching a configuration file

Right now I know about browser-sync and webpack, or webpack-dev-server or some such fucking shit fuck fucking fuck.

browser-sync seems to fulfill most of these needs, except that I can't seem to bring npm modules into my application and import them. Webpack seems to be able to do this, but at the cost of slowly throwing my life away reading documentation for over-complicated configuration files that do not aid me in actual software creation and therefore do not interest me and never will, all in the hope that I *may* at some point dig out enough shit to find how to do such a use case (i.e. seamless, smooth web development) that to me feels reasonably common and expected.

Is there some tool that enables me to do *seamless*, pleasurable web development without the hassles of over-complication and over-engineering? Is there some hidden command for webpack that allows me to run such simple shit without ever needing to edit some pointless configuration file?

Please, I beg of you, let me know.

The importance of not using static salt / IVs.

I've been working on a project that encrypts files using a user-provided password as key. This is done on the local machine which presents some challenges which aren't present on a hosted environment. I can't generate random salt / IVs and store them securely in my database. There's no secure way to store them - they would always end up on the client machine in plain text.

A naive approach would be to use static data as salt and IV. This is horrendously harmful to your security for the reason of rainbow tables.

If your encryption system is deterministic in the sense that encrypting / hashing the same string results in the same output each time, you can just compile a massive data set of input -> output and search it in no time flat, making it trivial to reverse engineer whatever password the user input so long as it's in the table.

For this reason, the IVs and salt are paramount. Because even if you generate and store the IVs and salt on the user's computer in plaintext, it doesn't reveal your key, but *does* make sure that your hashing / encryption isn't able to be looked up in a table

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

When it comes to config files for any kind of application, I tend to make sure that I understand what each config does, and that for each environment, they have the correct settings.

However some of my co-workers don't bother understanding what the configs mean and so I have people copying and pasting config details from development environments into staging and production configs. They think that just changing hostnames is more than enough.

So they ended up wasting a good 3 hours trying to figure out why sessions were always invalidating and cached objects were not caching. I had a look at the config and realised their mistake in like 3 mins.

Ik was helping a friend and needed quick a dev environment. Great, github codespaces to the resque! Fast dev environment with vscode editor online running a debian container. Perfect. But then it happened: "You're at 100% of your included usage for this billing period. For more information, view your billing settings.".

I can't access my source files anymore. Fuck, it was so much research

A jr dev was having an issue registering code with our data pipeline (prefect self hosted).

Turns out he's running vscode to launch a anaconda shell (didn't even know that was a thing) to launch jupyter notebook and running commands in the notebook (didn't know that was possible) all from Windows.

No it doesn't work. His environment configuration isn't right. I told him to just run Linux and get rid of all that nonsense.

Nothing is on git yet and were three weeks in! His code is full of hard coded absolute paths of files on his hard drive... He even had an example app to go buy, with a project layout to copy.

There's no helping some people

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

So far I've been pretty lucky... except for the code some of my professors at uni used in their assignments. A couple of them had this horrid habit of giving you a horribly-written, out-of-date (we're talking these chuckle heads used the same code for years on end and wondered why it didn't work on new versions of Java), messy source file with "fill in the blanks" sections like it was some kind of Java Mad Libs book. One of them had an entire jarchive of data structures we were required to use that he'd written in the '90s and NEVER UPDATED. Another one had a script he'd written for his own specialized assembly macro preprocessor that he'd been using without update for who even knows how long. Now, we were using one of those goofy virtual machines with its own simplified assembly language, and we were on the fourth version of the program. This guy'd written his macro processor in Java for the second version, never updated his Java source, only provided a barely-working .bat script for running it, even though the department's official preference was a *nix environment, and implemented this horrid "pretty-printer" that had a regrettable little habit of eating code. You heard that right. You'd run build.bat and it'd expand your macros then send it over to the pretty-printer which would very infrequently just replace the existing program file with an empty file. When we brought it to his attention, he goes "...huh. never happened to me." and proceeded to use the very same set of programs for the next three semesters, even when the assembly simulator was updated again. I heard wails of anguish from the poor sad souls that came after me as their macro processor created program files with deprecated operations, their pretty printer printed out beautiful, perfectly-organized empty files, and the professor responded to every second of a student begging for an updated version with "...huh. never happened to me." I never saw a single bug reported to either of those professors even acknowledged, let alone fixed. Some of the Java Mad Libs were the same ones they'd started using when they first switched the curriculum from Ada to Java. Thankfully after my first year I escaped into the bliss of the next three years, which were full of *nix and C and beauty.

Sometimes I think I am a weird nerd, one day I was writing something inside Ubuntu VM for practicing some DSP tech with Python environment on my office computer, someone DM me asking for tech support so I have to pause and go to figure it out. I wanna make some version control or backup stuffs to my little tiny cute .py files, so that I can pick it up when I was at home. And I just plugged my udisk in Ubuntu, copied those files to it, and switched USB port control permission to Windows, and finally git to commit. Actually the next time when I continued to write it at home, I hesitated for a while, should I pull it from git or just take out that udisk from my backpack? #IThinkShareFoldersAreUglyAndDirty
#ButWhyDidICommitUnderWindows?

Alright, I've got a confesstion. It's a confession and a question, combined, get it?

Anyway, I've been a happy Linux user for over 20 years now, and I've used all kinds of graphical envs, from tiling wms like dwm and xmonad (I didn't care for hyprland, sorry if that's weird) to full DEs like kde, cinnamon, gnome, etc.

The "question" here is why do people hate Gnome so much? It's the one environment that I keep coming back to, especially now that my main machine is a beast, and RAM usage is nary a concern. Even then, my system is sipping RAM compared to KDE (running two docker dev environments, three browser windows with several tabs - one of which is streaming music, slack, and steam is sitting on the fourth virtual desktop, chilling), and I'm still at just over 18 GB of ram.Being able to push one single key/key combo, and type anything at all that is vaguely relevant to what you want to accomplish, and having that thing be instantly available (including searching for individual files) is super nice. Easy virtual and multi monitor switching is intuitive; little to no effort needed.

Even when I want to do other stuff, like play a game, or edit a photo, video, or some of my shitty musical-aspirational material - GNU+Linux with Gnome has been and continues to be the easiest, most neato way to get shit done.

Why the hate, gnome haters? Maybe you’re using it wrong?

What part of cmake generates the link.txt files for gnu make builds ?

The project I'm building right now is consistently skipping adding -ltiff in random links, yet there seems to be no obvious error in the environment this should be happening, however it might be somewhere in the configuration with which I am not familiar.

Is anyone familiar ?

what is wrong with android storage access hierarchy?All i want to do is to make a file explorer app which could show user a list of all the files on their device and memory card(if available), but its been days and i cannot find a proper way for that.

I checked all the Environment class methods and context.getFileDir()/other methods of ContextCompat , but they either point to emulated storage or the app's folder, but not the sd card. I have scratched my head and pulled all my hairs out researching a lot deep into this area, but found nothing. The only thing that works sometime is the hardcoded paths( eg new File("/sdcard") ) , but that looks like a terrible hack and i know its not good.

I have also read briefly about Storage Access Framework, but i don't think that's what I want. From what i know, SAF works in the following manner : user opens my app>>clicks on a button>>my app fires an intent to SAF>> SAF opens its own UI>>user selects 1 or multiple file>> and my app recieves those file uris. THAT'S A FILE PICKER, AND I DON'T WANT THAT.

I want the user to see a list of his files in my app only. Because if not, then what's the point of my app with the title "File explorer"?

So I was building opencv some time back.
Nice enough package, like most python linked packages I'm finding though I know you can use it via c and its meant to be but why would you want to ? .. it contains a whole bunch of half finished crap that is actually useful in part including the capacity to tear apart video files and manipulate frames one at a time and then rewrite them back to a file. about the only lib that's easy to use that I saw that does that. hell I can even compose my own video frames. also the only other lib I saw that does that thus far.

so...

I post a bug, because of FUCKING CMAKE NOT WORKING. not conforming with the well thought out build environment that most GNU style c packages use.

you know like when you need an upstream source package to build the code, or a downgraded package to build the code and don't want to fuck up your host environment so you have to specify a bunch of lib paths and the like so that ld and gcc work correctly etc etc etc from your custom build location and so you can later use these same values to find the compiled lib and build software against it.

fucker closes my ticket saying i hijacked the c environment................

no.

its because cmake sucks.

they're using and i don't know why a module specifically written to find libtiff.

specifically written but doesn't find the only source on my system that provides tiff which my env variables point directly to !!!!

lazy fucking cocksuckers !

I want to code a solution this issue.
something that translates ac files and am files and cmakelists into something intelligent and easy to follow that doesn't sacrifice the flexibility of make and gnu shit and unfucks cmake based projects !

Despite already having a few years of professional experience dealing with Linux servers, I still, to this day, confuse, which environment file gets sourced and when...

There's /etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc

I think it's... Bashrc for interactive shells, profile for login shells.

But then I have examples like "ssh user@server 'echo $var'" that... Don't source any of the files!

You can enable user environment files for SSH that get sourced whenever a user logs on through SSH (~/.ssh/environment / environment specified for a key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys)

Is there some sort of master environment file that gets sourced *every* time, no matter what kind of shell starts?