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]

Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜

Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.

First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.

Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.

Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.

Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.

Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.

linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)

How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!

One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)

Dealing with different kinds of attacks:

Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.

So yah, hereby :P

[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!

I love coming home from classes to get some work done on my setup.
My thought is; if I'm going to be sitting here for hours at a time working, may as well make it a comfortable environment.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.

Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.

Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.

If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.

Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.

They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.

A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.

And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.

They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.

This is what happens when you have business people develop code.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Designer Friend: Yeah, WordPress is a good tool of making website. I don't need your help next time.

Me: ... So how the hell can you setup a WordPress environment?

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

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

A senior engineer with about 8 experience in my team and company for almost a year now. Believe it or not, still hasn't setup local dev environment.

Every time we ask this person to set it up / refer to guide in Confluence / or just use the docker image the person says ok.

Starts sending code for pull request. The code would not even compile in most cases just from a quick scan. When questioned how was this tested, answer would be more or less 'oh my local setup not working, could you test it out for me.'

Doesn't know how to write tests. Fairly recently instead of storing string values in a list, (I swear am not kidding) decided to come up with 20 string variables.

8 years plus experience! I think this is retarded even for a fresh grad.

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Completed Angular 2 course on codeschool, really liked improvements and simplicity of Angular over Angularjs. Decided to do quick start guide in official website. Oh my f**king god... I need to setup webpack, typescript linter, typings, polyfills etc angular2-cli is no better, crawling with errors... why... why can't one just start a project and work instead spending loads of timing configuring all of that... AND WHY WE CANT HAVE PROPER SUPPORT FOR LATEST FEATURES...

I don't even know what I am ranting about... I just wish to spend more time creating things than configuring for ages development environment.

I switched to using Ubuntu as my primary development environment about a month ago from Windows and I couldn't be happier! The initial setup was a pain in the neck (esp. display scaling issues, which Windows 10 is much better at than Ubuntu), but now that it's all set up, I'm lovin' it!

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

I spent four hours just getting my dev environment working again today.

Whenever I switch branches on this project, I keep to run a script that does migrations, seed data, test db setup, static test info, etc. etc. etc. It takes 12-15 minutes to run.

Today, that script failed.

Apparently one of its steps requires running some of the project's code to produce valid objects. Makes sense. However, my ticket involves breaking a crapton of models (removing accessors) which I've already done, and then patching the behavior, which I haven't. Which means a lot of things are currently broken. Makes sense why the script fails.

However, I can't run the script on a different branch and then switch back because that simply doesn't work (for reasons), so I needed to find some workaround. I eventually did, but every attempt cost me 12 minutes.

Today was not fun, and certainly not productive.

I wonder when they're going to fire me 😅

!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

Soooo

I kind of always knew that you can make the terminal background transparent. But I can't believe I never thought of this

There's something so calming about my terminals now. I just can't explain what it is :^)

Here's my desktop setup running Ubuntu 18.10 with Gnome. Drop a screenshot of your desktop setup in the comment section, would love to see them!

I really, really, fucking god damn it REALLY need to move a legacy project from the grave yard server and get it in git, and then build a dev environment for it, so I can stop making incredibly volatile changes direct to PROD (backend, frontend and DB all at once and then test it while it’s live and being used, but fuck me if I can be bothered digging through a 10GB code base and attempting to make it work in a multi-environment setup when it’s going to be a long trip down the error logs until it works again 😱🔫

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

Usually I develop in python, mongo, cordova and node. Few days back I installed Windows on my laptop cause I needed to use the Visual Studio for a specific task. Then I thought that if I can setup the python, mongo, cordova and node stack on Windows then I don't need to switch between Linux and Windows frequently. And that was a horrible decision.

It took almost 8-10 hours to setup that shit, and still I couldn't make it work. There are so much complexities and those do not make any fucking sense! I mean why the hell I need to add the python path to the environment variables, and then again add the pip path separately. Then mongodb can not autostart. And finally I needed to make and build a package, and that waa the moment when I just scrapped it.

It takes me 2-3 hours to setup a fresh Linux box (which supports apt) including the OS installation. Same for the osX. I still wonder that why Microsoft does this! If Windows is for non-dev and non-tech people then why don't they release a Windows developer edition? Developing anything except ASP.NET and Java in Windows is a fucking nightmare for me!

So here's my setup.
Minimalist and clean, the only environment I can work in.

My laptop spends way more time at home now-a-days since I bought the iPad Pro 12.9 2017... It's just so practical to take to lectures.

As for my desktop... well my keyboard definitely needs an upgrade... Any suggestions on a good keyboard?

My alcohol shrine, keeps me sane 😂😍. Let's see your setups.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Goddamn, why is Android SDK setup such a stupendous pain in the ass?

"Wah wah, can't find JDK!"

Wtf are you talking about you stupid fuck, JDK is right there, all IDEs find it, environment vars are set, it is the right version and is used on this machine for a billion development purposes! Stop being a useless cunt!

And this is everytime. Had to setup up Android SDK four or five times by now on different machines and it has NEVER gone smoothly. There is always a plethora of different issues and you end up wasting all day going through fucking dependency hell!

Read a book on ergonomics, you colossal android fucks. Just because you got JetBrains behind your IDE and they actually know what they are doing, doesn't make your setup process any less of a braindead nightmare.

Fucking hell.

I'm having an existential crisis with this client.

We are spending millions of $s every year to make sure the product's performance is perfect. We are testing various scenarios, fine-tuning PLABs: the environment, application, middleware, infra,... And then we provide our recommendations to the client: "To handle load of XX parallel users focusing on YY, yy and Zy APIs, use <THIS> configuration".

And what the client does?
- take our recommendations and measure the wind speed outside
- if speed is <20m/s and milk hasn't gone bad yet, add 2x more instances of API X
- otherwise add 3xX, 1xY and give more CPUs to Z
- split the setup in half and deploy in 2 completely separate load-balanced prod environments.
- <do other "tweaking">

- bomb our team with questions "why do we have slow RTs?", "why did the env crash?", "why do we have all those errors?", "why has this been overlooked in PLABs?!?"

If you're improvising despite our recommendations, wtf are we doing here???

One day I will crack. Hopefully, not sometime soon.

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

I hate windows.
I hate windows update.
I hate windows update rebooting my PC and not reopen everything from last session.
I hate windows update trying to install updates while running from battery in power save mode.
I hate windows not being able to figure out where to put windows on dual head setup.
I hate developing in windows environment.

Man I'm glad that I use windows at home only for gaming.
Man I'm glad that I can choose a non-windows PC on my new workplace.

I’m really shocked at myself but as a last resort I chose Lubuntu for a light live USB environment because all others kept fucking out or lagging etc but holy shit I’m really digging Lubuntu!

Got a sweet conky setup started, Firefox quantum, some tweaks, my basic software stack and I’m almost good as gold!
Lubuntu for the recommendation! 👌🏼😁

I’ve been at this job 4 months and I feel like I’ve been here long enough to make an accurate opinion of it. From day one I have not felt welcomed. There is no communication within the team.. none of my questions are ever answered.. and when I do ask questions I get snarky answers. I don’t expect my hand to be held, but as someone who is new, I’d like you to give me guidance. Especially since the code is mostly legacy and no one else on the team seems to know anything about anything.

Oh and there are not daily stand ups, project managers, or direction in the tickets themselves.

I guess I should have expected this on the first day when I asked for a SIP or documentation on how to get my environment setup I was practically laughed out of the office and then had the nerve to ask me why it took me the entire day to get 5 environments up and running.. not giving me the custom mappings or the global UDFs.

Today was my last straw.. when I asked a question in three different forms of communication on multiple different channels and was never given an answer.. and then was asked why I did something the way I did instead of doing it the way they wanted me to.

I think the saddest thing is that I felt tricked into this. I was told this position was going to be one way but ended up being something else. I was excited to share my knowledge and best practices to the team. Instead, I’m an outcast and get only be negativity and excuses when I politely bring up suggestions.

I no longer have the will to code here.

When IT installs a new hard drive without creating an image of the old.

My Windows friend: They say I need to setup Environment variables!!

Me: Oh! I've done that before.

After 5 minutes...
Me: How do I get into that Advanced Settings???!!!

[least fav part of wfh]
Not being able to have a conversation with coworkers.
No whiteboard.
No spaceous modern desk setup.
No distraction free environment.
No free coffee and lunch.
No 1500W sound system.
No 2gbps internet.

!rant

Me and my bestfriend joined a hackathon way back since we were in college. The task was to fetch JSON data from a REST APIs then we were given a sample link so we can compare the output between the expected output with our own. But the response from the actual API is not in JSON format, it's a string so we need to do dozens of string manipulation to match the expected output.

To submit our work we are given our own subdomain to upload our work and setup the environment and the URL will be submitted. We know how to complete the challenge but the time is running out and we were in panic mode so my friend mistakenly submitted the URL used to compare the output. We already expected to fail the challenge but what the fuck, we got a perfect score and won the challenge.

I finally bit the bullet and got a 2018 macbook pro i7 with 1 terabyte ssd. I've been needing a personal laptop for development for awhile. I thought about going full Linux but it's tough finding Linux laptops that support thunderbolt 3 charging.

I tried to make Windows and WLS work. But it's a pain getting my Golang, GCP, and Kubernetes workflow setup on it. I keep having to jump command prompts and it annoys the shit out of me. Going multi monitor helps a lot, but I like to be at coffee shops and code.

I feel sick a out giving Apple more money especially $3,000. But it was money well spent. My workflow is seamless and unlike on my Windows laptop I dont spend 3 to 4 days just setting up my environment.

Ahhh... the 3 day setup of a new machine. I love working in a corporate environment.

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 😅

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

I have finally decided to stop helping people setup a proper machine learning environment inside of their machines with Proper GPU support.

I-fucking-give-up.

Goggle Colab, EVERYONE is getting dey ass sent to Colab. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK about privacy and shit like that at this fucking moment, getting TIRED af of getting messages about someone somehow fucking up their CUDA installation, and/or their entire machine (had one dude trying to run native GPU support through WSL 2, their machine did not have the windows update version 2004 and he has on an older build, upon update he fucked everything up EVEN THOUGH I TOLD HIM NOT TO DO IT YET)

.......fuck it, I am sending everyone to Colab. YES I UNDERSTAND THAT PRIVACY IS A THING and Goggle bad and all that jazz......but if you believe in Roko's Basilisk then I AM DOING THEM A FAVOR

I work hard to get our robot overlords into function, let it be known here, I support our robot overlords and will do as much as possible to bring them to life and have me own 2b big tiddy with a nice ass android.

I should also mention that I've had a few drinks on me already and keep getting these messages.

Started new job at startup and finished all the development environment setup started development it was going smooth for one week.all the created API were working fine on the next day morning without any changes API's were giving cors error.asked my senior what must be the problem he said bypass cors and figure out the problem after trying for 1hrs i couldn't figure out what was the problem but API's were back to normal without any changes. then after sometime same day in zoom call i asked what was the problem he said show me the error but I couldn't reproduced the same cors error he then lectured me for 1 hrs and after that he said that learn to solve by your own dont come with silly mistake like this to me.
I don't know what was the problem he even refused me show to what the problem was.

Tonight, I gave birth to my first fully functional and deployment-ready dockerized application, "lestadium_web_1"!!
The big baby contains a Laravel showcase website with some React already in production! Big bonus with that, it's connected to a database, and I managed to setup some environment variables so nothing too dangerous is built within the image!

Fuck, that was exhausting but I'm so happy to finally understand how to make my stuff work, how they work and how to find some examples to get inspired from 😍

I need to setup a Windows Server with an AD (and therefore an own domain) that can be reached from a Linux host for a test environment... Holy crap I totally forgot what a huge pain in the ass that crap is!

Pro Tip: If youre connected to a Server via VPN and RDP and you create a domain and subsequently get logged out from the server, you're fucked.

Fed up with f@_#-$&@_ Microsoft bullshit, computer refused to install IIS without a reboot first. Rebooted, got bluescreen with some error like APC_Index mismatch since it was hooked up to an external monitor (this has happened before, but only when booting into Windows, not Ubuntu), god knows why now since it was hooked up to same monitor before reboot and worked just fine. All this because some stupid school related task requires Visual Studio and a web project-solution that takes ages to run/debug which I would rather build and devug through attaching remote debugger to the running IIS-process. Instead I get into a boot-loop when the screen is connected, and when I connect the screen after a normal boot it restarts itself. Why is it always like this? Most of the time is spent just to setup the environment or making Windows work. F#&#_ this and the assignment, goodnight.

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

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.

The fuck is up with venv, conda, pip, pip3, python3, CRYPTOGRAPHY_OPENSSL_NO_LEGACY and "you can't install packages in docker based environments" DUDE STOP WHAT THE FUCK

How the fuck is that the scripting language of choice? It has by far the most confusing and messy runtime setup. Like it's easier to make sense of Javas version-shenanigans than this bullshit.

And then you think well what gives. Runs > python ...
"This environment is externally managed and you can go kill yourself, JUST LOOK UP PEP-666" LIKE NO YOU FUCK, JUST RUN THE FUCKING SCRIPT!

It's nice you thought about separation of versions but DOCKRR DOCKER DOCKER THERE ARE CONTAINERS WHY THE FUCK DO YOU DO SOME BULLSHIT WITH ENVS IN FOLDERS REQUIRING SOME RUNTIME BULLSHIT WHAT NO STOP WWHYYY

I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.

I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).

The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)

So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬

But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.

Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏

F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...

> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....

More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?

Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????

Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???

When learning new tech, it takes me forever to get the environment/dependencies setup because of the million different errors I get.

Am I just too dumb to follow installation instructions?

To make matters even worse, my manager gave the horrible client also access to another clients environment just to 'compare' things, and nitpick over configuration that he is missing, but just hasn't setup yet...

Fucking fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck my manager, what a total 🌰🔩🥜nutjob

It took literally days to get our software installed onto the client VMs and get the services started correctly.

On our own test VMs the same task takes all of about an hour or so. Mind you these VMs are supposed to be created and match the client's environment almost too the T. Same configurations, same third party software, same environment variables and the whole 9 yards.

This was not the case at all.

Environment variables were not set, third party software was not installed, and I honestly don't remember the list of things wrong with how they setup the VM. Sparing the details, the errors were also not helpful.

They also gave us critical information we needed for development days before we were going on site to test. The amount of hackery we had to do could be a completely separate rant on its own.

While desperately trying to to stay sane long enough to get our services started, the only thing I could think was how great it would be if there was a fire or something. Anything, just to have an excuse to go back to the hotel and actually sleep. The second day there we finally had everything installed and running.

I shit you not, just as we began our first test, the fire alarms went off.

At this point in time the team was extremely (pissed tf off) annoyed to put it mildly. Assuming it was just a drill, we left our stuff and went to eat dinner. After we came back we found out it in fact was not a drill...

Moral of the story:
Don't wish bad fortune on a customer even if out of impulsive spite.

Other moral of the story:
Don't leave your belongings behind only because you think the fire alarms are just a fire drill. It may not be.

P.S. Karma's a bitch.

Fucking experimental technologies. I feel like doing webassembly stuff is like buying a smart device, it's not worth any of the trouble for now.
I wanted to do some webassembly-stuff with rust and yew (basically react for rust). I was really hyped because it all looked promising and i found this cool band "heilung" whose music made me my coding feel like black magic with complex incantations and shit.
A basic webassembly setup did work, but everything afterwards was pure shit. Crate installation didn't go as expected, i get weird errors even though i simply copied the example (and checked the versions). The best i got was when i tried to compile and rust told me to go fuck myself because i cant use feature XY in a package in the stable environment. Why the hell would someone even publish said package then? After losing half a day because of this i give up for now. I don't feel like a badass magician anymore anyways, more like the guy that puts mentos into coke and gets hit by the foam.

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.

Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.

Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.

There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.

Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...

So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.

And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.

Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.

I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

We're doing a huge demo in half an hour for a governmental branch, and for some fucking stupid reason I decide to tinker with the deployment setup. And yes, all our staging environments went down, including the environment set up for the demo. Managed to get it up and running again though 😅

Spent the whole day trying to help setup the environment for a colleague. In the end of it all... The whole day went off without any actual productivity. Zero progress on the tasks I have in hand...And then I discovered devRant... Some things happen for a reason...

Integrating Google recaptcha into my web service. For some reason it always errors, both on a production and development environment, correct domains configured, and with he simplest setup. I'm fucking lost, documentation assumes it actually works. Similar errors on stack overflow and Google groups either got no answers or have obvious issues.

Fuck this man

Hello everyone :)

I left a job a while ago (8 month maybe a little more), before me alot of the team left, and the lasts ones left after me.
They hired back an ex teammate from years ago (he actually started the POC), but he doesn't do php so much and don't know symfony and he's alone. I'm not either (i don't like php), i was doing python and admin sys for them, but i saw the project going/evolving for two years, so i can help them.
They contacted me a week ago, asking me some help. I said yes, (because i believed in the company and i'm too nice i guess), so i spend two days making a new script to setup the environment and serveur and also had to do some package update on the project (late shit with pear php apparently).
I don't have any way to make a bill, i don't own any company. So I'm not sure what i should ask for money, and if i should keep helping them.
(it has been my first serious real job, and i put some money in the company that i took back).
Should i keep helping for nothing even if it's only few hours the month or should i change this situation fast?! (already worked 20h for them, and the boss a nice guy)

Thanks devRant

Downloaded VirtualBox and an .iso of Ubuntu 18.04. Now I only need to setup my *entire* development environment so I can see if my engine compiles on anything other than Windows 10.

Ever since I downloaded Intellij, which was 10 years ago, I have tried to move into more hype oriented editors ... Atom, sublime, vs-code... But nothing beat intellijs sense of fullfilment! Its like you are in a sand box that offers everything you need to do anything you want! Need plugins ? Right there! Terminals? Right there! Git ? Right there!! Distraction free mode/zen mode? There! Spice up your editor with a background image? There!!!

I think for those who take the hype of editors need to check their goals/aims. I have learned that whenever i tried to change the environment i work in, the reason was always unsatisfactory projects, or boring projects!
Your coding environment (no matter what it is) is your sanctum sanctorum. Change one bit of it and your whole world is disrupted.
And thats a piece of advice for those who use Vim to notepad to intellij to whatever is more advanced then intellij!

Also includes a picture of my setup!

Android Studio is by far worst development environment I've ever seen. Slow as fuck, messed up and cumbersome, not much better than eclipse. Menus are hilariously fucked up. On top of that, clear new setup (on Windows) may as well melt up your PC if you have that shit running overnight: after a weekend I came to the office and my MBP is fucking screaming and breathing hot air... I was WTF is that, and when I logged in, this fucking garbage android studio was taking 100% of all 8/16 cores ... WHAT A FUCKING HIDEOUS PILE OF SHIT FROM GOOGLE. Google: please kill this project, no need to improve or fix it, it's garbage. Start over.

My past 16hours activities

Woke up > destroyed a healthy running environment while trying to setup dual monitor on my manjaro kde > found out the nvidia driver was the culprit the whole the > the whole thing was a PITA > reinstalled the kde with windows dual boot > did the previous task 4/5 times till I felt satisfied ( call be a dumb but it is what it is ) > and now after wasting the whole fucking day I am setting up the environment finally.
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this shit before 4 am in the morning . It's now 1.26 AM .

Life is an interesting loop of hell .

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

Trying to set up and begin a project in laravel has been the worst environment setup experience I've ever had.

when the setup of programming environment takes more effort than the code.
and you're like fuck it i'll do it online!

Finally took the time to start learning Angular 2. I wanted to do it right so I set up the development environment with webpack. Man does Angular 2 take a lot longer to get setup properly versus Angular 1. I mean it's worth it to do it properly but it was a lot more labor intensive getting a good dev environment setup than I had anticipated.

>first time working for big tech company
>first couple days with no sudo, cant setup environment :(
>however
>first couple days mostly debating new peers on if water is wet
>verynice.jpg

Me: "Yeah so I have this problem, I generated an environment and setup a NodeJS docker image on it and it returns "Cannot find public IP address", help"

SO: "Yeah but what are you trying to achieve? Here is a link of the documentation everyone saw and that didn't help at all."

Me: "I just want to... reach the fucking server? Without trouble? Please?"

Some people need some cocaine in they morning coffee, if it can help then open their fucking eyes

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

Based on the current trend of show-your-workspace pictures doing the rounds, let me ask this...

How important is your workspace to you, specifically in an office environment, i.e. type of setup, amount of desk space, open plan/cubicle/office, number of colleagues on your proximity, noise pollution, etc., to your overall productivity and performance? And have you/are you able to do anything about?

So I'm returning from parental leave on next week...
One of the projects I'm involved in, was at 10% progress when I left, had planning and documentation made by me, development environment and test suite setup by me and had tests and was being reviewed.
Right now it should be arround 75% progress, no longer is being reviewed, planning is not being followed and no tests have been made since I've left...
Why bother with dumb ass devs!

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.

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.

I love open source. Really.

BUT I hate maintainers/owners who do not respond to any kind of message/issue/PR for months.

Also of course they dont tell you how you can setup the dev environment yourself :)

When your IT VP starts speaking blasphemy:

"Team,
We all know what’s going on with the API. Next week we may see 6x order volumes.

We need to do everything possible to minimize the load on our prod database server.

Here are some guidelines we’re implementing immediately:

· I’m revoking most direct production SQL access. (even read only). You should be running analysis queries and data pulls out of the replication server anyway.
· No User Management activities are allowed between 9AM and 9PM EST. If you’re going to run a large amount of updates, please coordinate with a DBA to have someone monitoring.
· No checklist setup/maintenance activities are allowed at all. If this causes business impact please let me know.
· If you see are doing anything in [App Name] that’s running long, kill it and get a DBA involved.

Please keep the communication level high and stay vigilant in protecting our prod environment!"

RIP most of what I do at work.

One thing I have realised these days is that I don't like the work from home setup.

Maybe it's the because of the bad working environment.

I actually appreciate office space more now. Once, out of office, it was easier to zone out of work mode and I didn't feel this much tired when working in office.

I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.

Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...

Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.

What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):

* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).

I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.

There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.

Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.

In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.

Starting a new role as a lead dev for a company that currently outsources their work to an agency in another country.
Finding out that some of the environment setup scripts don’t work as php5.3 is not in the Debian repository anymore ☠️

You know that feeling you get when there is a bug in Prod and to identify the cause, you setup your dev environment with the exact same codebase as Prod. But the bug won't show it's ugly little mug in devo...

Yeah, Fucks me up too... -_-

Genuine problem, not a rant

Started a new frontend developer/designer/graphic designer job recently. I feel technically capable, no problem there. Just noticing a pattern of repeatedly missing deadlines.

Its a very busy office, with various people all coming to me with things they need me to do. Never worked in an environment so busy before.

Doesn't help that they force me to manage my tasks by spreadsheets, communication by email, deployment by filezilla and no version control, but not convinced I'd still meet deadlines if I had a better setup.

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

I have an opportunity to buy a cheap ThinkPad which I want to install Arch Linux on to get more familiar with Linux. So I want to setup the environment and try to use it as my home PC to write code, watch YouTube etc. No gaming.

Is it worth it? It’s not a lot of money but definitely not free either. Does anyone have any experience going from OS X to any Linux/GNU? I’m not expecting to enjoy it so much that I’ll switch permanently but who knows.. And what about ThinkPads, good stuff?

To add a bit more context to my last rant.

The following situation happened today and similar situations are at the moment common as fuck.

Situation started roughly 1 1/2 months ago as a deployment failed.

Seemed to be a DNS problem for the devs, so my basic assumption was that they checked their shit.

As I was and I am currently more than swamped, told them it had to wait if it is an DNS issue...

Well.

Backstabbing product manager complained to upper management as it took so long.

Backstabbing manager even went so far to propose alternative solutions - think of switching product to work around issue and throwing away a year of development of a 5 man team...

So additional to my work I had to deescalate and prevent complete nonsense.

Today I finally found time for the problem.

After 2-3 hours of turning every stone inside the DNS setup, cloudflare, loadbalancers, etc...

Well. Devs. Don't trust them.

Turned out the devs misconfigured the environment entirely.

Its not so obvious in this product as it is rather complicated, though the devs documentation explicitly mentioned that if one overrides the configuration for e.g. several languages, one has to make sure to set two env variables for TLS mode...

There was only one set.

:(

8 fucking weeks of backstabbing and blaming others while they could have just read their own fucking documentation and fixed that shit in 5 minutes.

Finally!! The rust team fixed the environment setup thingies for Windows. Finally! I can run rust without needing to do all those bullshits like downloading things manually and installing thingies.
Thanks rust team. Good job

Last week I hired a friend of friend to work on my projects. Hes a young and friendly guy. However he never worked in actual office and it shows. During the meeting he brings his phone and in the middle of explaining he pulls out his phone to respond someone back. Basically lacks professionalism and has this young person cockiness where he thinks he is competent to handle everything while in reality last week he did 2-3 hours worth of work. I want to set up some boundaries but I dont want to seen as a harsh dictator. On the other hand Im paying him over the top even though he doesnt have skills, but the least I want to is a decent attitude and effort. How u would advice me to approach this and teach him to get his shit together? Im already becoming resentful and next week if he keeps treating his work like a school project I will let him go.

Im really trying to setup a nice environment for him to work at, I rented a nice office in a hub space and also bought entirely new laptop plus monitor setup for him to work. I even took him for drinks and lunches but for some reason I start to feel that hes taking that shit for granted and Im being too good.

Hes not proactive, it seems that he will do bare minimum that I give him.

I hate when programmers never want to go out their comfort zone. They should be relegated into a hell spinned inside a Virtualbox instance.

I have this *** angular setup. We want to try to keep the dev environment congruent between all the colleagues.

The decent programmer would use a node version manager, or try to keep up with everything. LOLNOPE THEY FUCKIN' SPUN A FRIGGIN' VAGRANT VIRTUAL MACHINE RUNNED WITH ADMIN PERMISSIONS which is slowing everyone down. A single "npm i" now requires half an hour.

I tried to use YARN that is faster and makes a mergeable lock, NOPE WE SHOULD KEEP USING THAT STUPID NPM INSTALL that is slow AF and sometimes messes up the versions.

I tried to make 'em use the peerDependencies correctly but LOLNOPE WE SHOULD RELY ONTO THE AUTOMATIC PEERDEP RESOLVER INSIDE NPM7, SO YOU DON'T KNOW IF YOUR VERY SAME LIBRARY IS INCLUDED OR NOT.

Thank god i'm changing job.

Spending hours trying to setup your dev environment just not for reading the instructions

Hi Guys,

As you have seen this week again we have a problem with data imports from <tool 1> and <tool 2>. Clearly the existing setup is not working. We are now encouraging more and more people from the project to start using our portal and we need a stable and up to date environment.

Can we have a call please to discuss the following topics:

1. Portal data integrity
2. SLAs
3. Project Communication
4. Development efficiency

Thanks
<Drama Queen PM>

Today at work, I had to do a dry run of our new production environment config for our VM server.
So I setup ESXi in a vm in my workstation. Installed it it, no problem. Setup some VMs, still going good. Then my supervisor came and said I have to make some tweaks and use vCenter. I thought: meh, that came late but ok. Download the vCenter installer from our internal CDN and ran it. Sorry general config, blah blah blah. "Setup with embedded or external platform service controller?" -"Embedded" - "minimal requirements: 11GB ram, 250GB disk storage, 2 CPU cores". Well... Fuck me. My workstation specs: 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, 4 cores.

What the bloody fucking hell does this stuff need 250 GB disk space for?!

Well at least I've got a permanent upgrade for my workstation.

Any Go devs in Windows out there? I'm interested to hear about your dev environments.
IDE, Powershell vs MinTTY, native windows vs WSL, other tools?

Been trying to setup my Python environment for a week, but virtualenvwrapper fucks it up. Emotionally broken.

Setup SSH keys from your Dev machine to every development environment then configure a putty profile to use that key with your login.

So jelly of all you people out there with a good enough internet connection to setup your own server environment at home. Sitting here with max 10mbit/s down and 2mbit/s up

Environment setup with a dying laptop :/

Anyone got recommendations on a monitor setup above 1080p and 24" for developing in a unix environment? Don't know if I should go vertical, dual, or widescreen. I've seen research that dual monitors creates distraction. Thoughts?

Funny how things comes around...
So... project start-up... everybody learning and designing the future new system. Then we get to a point that we saw that we'll probably need someone outside or dev team to setup all the environments CI/CD pipelines... Our PM said "what about we get a Devops guys to take care of that?" Most of our team members agreed but our Techlead said "Devops is not a job, it's a culture.". Ok, nice... I understand that point, but for a system of the size of the one that we're building...It would probably be a good idea to have someone to take care of that for us. BUT, he (the techlead) said that he will be taking care of all that himself (along with coding part of the backend).

RESULT: We're stuck in the point that we're unable to test our system in the correct environment, we've no pipeline for automated deploy of our sprints...

Guys, I think the Devops is no more then somebody that is going to take care of some tasks in the project, like the backend, the frontend, the tests, the management...

Quiet Sunday and the family are out.... Fancy just doing a little PoC and seeing if I can create a new bit of functionality in my app..... Seems like a simple bit of work I could do in an hour...

Its been two hours and my laptop test environment keeps failing the setup for no apparent reason....

Family gonna be back in the hour and still debugging why the lab stopped working...

I have some app ideas and improvements I'd like to add to some existing apps. Currently these are just end up as notes in my to-do list because I don't want to setup the dev environment again at my parents place... On an ancient desktop...

Which I just use to download anime since jdownloader can be installed... But apparently all the download link are either dead it it can no longer get around the latest truck AdFly is using...

TLDR I'm procrastinating from all coding projects that I would be doing if only I we're back at my place and instead binging on anime and tv

I created an advanced script to setup some environment variables correct. Since some things could potentially go wrong i put a few exit 1 in the script... it worked for a while until I realised my misstake
Outsmarted myself again.

I've got a dev server where I run some test sites in WP using EasyEngine, because I want to get accustomed to WP in Docker.

It asked me to update, and I was like "sure". Now whenever I want to setup a website I get "easyengine couldn't create username"

I figured ok I'll use WordOps, which requires migrating from EasyEngine to it. I was like sure, and next thing I know the "migrated" websites that it was supposed to properly migrate automatically are down, and I can't get an SSL issues for my new site.

All threads on both issues don't help.

It was supposed to be a 5 minute job and it turned into 3 hours trying to troubleshoot. Now I'll spin up a DigitalOcean server and install a quick WP site.

Fuck both EasyEngine and WordOps <3

I thought EasyEngine would be cool but seeing the very limited community activity it's not worth the risk even having it in a dev environment.