Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I built very involved code with multiple auth systems, async programming, business logic, error handling, and etc. I was asking for the missing environment variables during the call with devops and had a screen share going. Environment variables were the last thing I needed before knowing if it would work. I filled in the config and all the code worked perfectly.

The devs lost their shit. One suggested that I had somehow tested it beforehand because it is impossible that it would work the first time. “How? I didn’t have config details or access to any of the remote APIs until now.”

The dev lead finished the call with, “That was some big brain next level shit.” Then they went and reviewed and tested it after the call and didn’t have much to suggest besides naming nitpicks.

It was at that point I knew I was a hero to the other devs.

Windows environment variables dialog. What the actual fuck. For like 15 years you couldnt change the size of the fucking window.

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. 


Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

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.

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

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

Fuck me...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Me and that other guy who has a braincell: Okay so we made this simple object mapping code so that you have the option to use YAML or environment variables, because they're both awesome UwU (we use YAML for testing, then variables for container prod deployments).

Some dude who picked up the project: meh, lets ditch that, dotenv and get rid of the object mapping, because I like to do the pain manually.

AND THIS DUDE NEVER EVEN BOTHERED TO READ THE CODE CLAIMING HIS IS BETTER WTF

It took us enough testing and cofusion to get Object Mapping right and this guy just bastardizes work we've done for the past 2 years claiming "it sucks"

What a bloody bellend.

Hey, I´m through with the Win10 update.
That was fast. And no problems! Everything seems to be working.

Wait...
Android SDK not found...
Java not found ...
Seems all my environment variables are gone.
Even better all the standard variables are wrong too.
My Home Drive is now "H:" ?
What the hell?

So I wrote code to show the FUNCTIONALITY of my module , which has temporary variables and temporary code.
Boss after verifying : so it's done right ?
Me: no the code needs to be written .
Boss : but it's working...
Me : yeah , but this is a test environment , I need to put everything in place and test .
Boss : so it'll be done in 15 minutes right ?
Me : ...
Boss: ...

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

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???!!!

Windows 10 likes to set my Temp variables back to C after an update, as well as enabling Superfetch and Prefetch. I made a batch file fixing all that shit...

// My First Rant

We have a developer that almost everyone adjust to what he want to avoid talking or working with him.

I have office mates that doesn't want to give tasks to him just to avoid working with him.

Even our devOps guy just did what he want so he would stop talking.

One bad experience of our devOps guy with him is that his infrastructure or other AWS stuff was blame why his APIs is not working. It turns our that his url for the database has FUCKING SPACES.

Not sure if a good practice but he wants the base url of our Endpoint to be set in environment variables instead of having DEV/PROD/TESTING and base the endpoint from there.

He said that he was given permission to study a language but he doesn't even ask for permission.

Spend two days struggling with environment variables not being available in python script running on a docker container, tried providing environment variables directly, not working, tried providing a env file, not working
.
.
.
Turns out I was passing variables to the wrong container fml

I love python, but I hate dealing with python dependencies, especially on Windows.
I was tinkering and researching with neural networks, so I wanted to try out pybrain. I wrote my project, with pybrain installed via pip, and tried to build it.
Oh, what's that? Pybrain doesn't work with python 3? Well I'll download the version that's supposed to. Oh, that version has a deprecated numpy api? Let me just install those other resources. Oh, that requires a broken module that has no publicly available source?
Let's try python 2. Oh, now that's working, I just need to export environment variables for some "bls source". Some quick Google searching and the only solution that would work is building a bunch of cywgin modules by hand. That's fine, I have an ubuntu partition.
An hour later I'm compiling FORTRAN dependencies on Ubuntu.
Coding time: 1 hour
Dependency time: 3 hours

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 😍

Boss: "You hardcoded the redirect uri in the code (Early on during development and forgot about it, because apple OAuth is a piece of shit), but don't worry I fixed it by hardcoding the uri with the production host into the config file where clearly all settings are fetched from the OS Environment variables at runtime. This will surely fix the problem in staging we have, no need to thank me"

So… I prefer nano over other terminal editors (Mainly because I don’t understand how to use others properly) and I wasn’t really aware of the VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables. So on my Arch machine most things would default to vi. Vi to me is like an annoying pop-up that really doesn’t want you to close it (Tho, one thing I did learn eventually was how to close it ). So at some point I quickly wanted to edit crontab as root and I just couldn't manage to get crontab to use nano. So what did I do?

sudo pacman -R vi

ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/vi

I symlinked nano to vi and it finally worked. I know that there are probably countless ways this could’ve been done better but in that case I wouldn't have posted it here under wk81 ;)

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

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.

God....

Bash and substitution patterns is character diarrhea.

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

Still shitty, but more tolerable.

I will have an clusterfuck of nightmares I guess.

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

*dizzy*

Docker with nginx-proxy and nginx-proxy-le (Lets Encrypt) is fucking awesome!

I only have to specify environment variables with email and host name when starting new containers with web servers, and the proxy containers will automatically make a proxy to the new container, and generate lets encrypt ssl certificates. I don’t have to lift a fucking finger, it is so ducking genius

Just fucking use the defacto standard. Shut up. Quit being immature. You're not the main character. No one in the world will use your new standard you pull out of your ass just because you thought you were better than other people. You weren't. You're an average dev by any means. If you feel like no one respects you, keep your ego problems out of your work. Just because your emotions are valid doesn't mean all of us have to live with them turned into code.

If I needed a web framework, I would've used React. I don't use React not because I wrote my own framework. I don't need a framework, like at all. Unless you think that ~300 LOC utils.js file + no build system whatsoever is a framework that is.

Sorry, just encountered non-upper-snake-cased environment variables and wanted to vent.

Turns out our environment variables are not managed by environments but putenv/getenv instead ... great!

Apart of the fact that WordPress itself is one big hack, my most creative hacky solution was making it (dev) environment friendly.

First, I created a DB pull and push tool in NodeJS (on TypeScript). Then, because WP is so clever and stores internal URLs in full length in the DB, I had to create a DB migrator (find & replace) and attached it to the DB pull task.
After this, of course WP still has its config in one file, so I used composer to install phpdotenv and filled the config with environment variables.
Bundled with some good ol' Gitlab CI/CD magic, the website is now 10% sanely developable.

It feels like having to shovel piles of shit, but with a golden shovel. Everything stinks as hell but at least there is a tiny bling to it, temporarily.

But in all seriousness: WordPress is a god damn fucking pile of tumors!

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

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

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

Windows and non-functioning Path environment variables. Name a more iconic duo.

(This is the third time I'm talking about the same question I posted on stack overflow this week, but things keep happening that pisses me off)

Me: *answers my own question, clearly says I tried deleting the php path environment variable and that it didn't work, so that's why I added it back and now it's working perfectly*
Guy: *downvotes my answer* "you need to delete the php path environment variable, here's how"
M: "I did and it didn't work, that's why I added it back and now it's working"
G: "well, you need to delete the php path environment variable"

YOU MOTHERF-

G: "You need to check for all the references"

WERE? You literally only talked about environment variables, I told you I checked those multiple times. Obviously I don't know what I'm doing, if I did I wouldn't be asking such a stupid question like this one, so maybe a little guidance? I mean, isn't that what stack overflow is for? To guide people who don't know how to do something? Don't just say "your wrong" when I said MULTIPLE TIMES I did what you said and it DIDN'T WORK.

Seriously, asking a question there was the worst thing I did 😑

Anyway, he didn't answer back and everything is still working fine, with the php path.

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

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

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

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

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

Still just a learning project.

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

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

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

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

Isn’t the usage of environment variables common for golang apps?

I interviewed for a company which made me develop a golang backend service and I used environment variables for sql connection strings and client and secret IDs and all.

When I submitted them the project, the feedback was that the tech person isn’t familiar with dotenv configuration.

Any inputs about any other way this could’ve gone?

February will be the first full year at this company as full time employee.

I've updated so many legacy projects, optimized a lot of workflows as well as built new tools to improve efficiency and remove unnecessarily duplicate projects (sometimes literally only 3 variables were different between multiple projects)

My one co-worker taught himself enough code to do the job but doesn't think like a programmer though he is asking me for help and advice to improve what he does since ive proven i know a little. my other direct co-worker I'm practically teaching a Programming 100 course to them

My direct manager at one point said he was so happy he took a chance on me even though I didn't interview well

I like my job, I find it so much better than my last job which was horribly toxic, and more fun than my first 'real' job as a night shift help desk for basically a warehouse environment.

But I feel under paid sometimes for how much i do and all ive improved in my first year, I have my first yearly review coming up. I'm hoping to get a decent raise for all ive done and I want to somehow go over everything with the HR person to justify it. But I have no idea how to talk about my dev work to them in a way a non technical person could understand. I'm also not sure how the review process will work. Like will my manager be there. Or is it just me and HR, is there a paper I'll be sent to fill before hand,

I have been struggling with managing and keeping track of config secrets and keys. I know that keeping secrets in code is bad karma, but managing them with environment variables becomes cumbersome with multiple microservices running on multiple servers. To worsen this, add humans and access levels.

Whenever I Google, I feel like I am the only one who has this problem. Do you guys sometimes feel like this?

If you have any solutions, hacks or services that you use, please recommend.

le me wanted to watch anime after 10 hour work
"Hmm let's just open my work in a new tab"
"Wtf it's 500"
> read logs
> problem with webpack build
> after 3 hour debugging loaders, environment variables, decided to use a shady, less documented library I found in the first minute debugging called better-x instead of x i'm currently using
> works
> fml why don't I try it earlier, 3 hours lost gg

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.

Noob question

I’m trying to deploy my front end web app (my personal website) to GitHub pages.

In my app, I used react environment variables to store a api key I need in my app.

When I deploy my app with GitHub pages, will the app still be able to access the react env variables?

Let me know if that doesn’t make sense. Thanks!

Day of days! Insomnia supports environment variables! And has for a long time! I just missed it is all!

When you need proxy,
Connecting to Amazon S3
---
config.setProxyHost(URI);
config.setProxyPort(8080);
AmazonS3 s3 = new AmazonS3Client(Credentials, config);
---
So easy.
We need to move out amazon and start using google cloud storage.
---

Can't seem to find API Documentation for it.

Saw that they are using HttpURLConnection.

Fvck! They are not even reading proxy information set via System Environment Variables!

Help! Stuck on it for 3 days already.
.°(ಗдಗ。)°.

Microsoft announced a new security feature for the Windows operating system.

According to a report of ZDNet: Named "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection", which allows applications to use the local CPU hardware to protect their code while running inside the CPU's memory. As the name says, it's primary role is to protect the memory-stack (where an app's code is stored during execution).

"Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" works by enforcing strict management of the memory stack through the use of a combination between modern CPU hardware and Shadow Stacks (refers to a copies of a program's intended execution).

The new "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" feature plans to use the hardware-based security features in modern CPUs to keep a copy of the app's shadow stack (intended code execution flow) in a hardware-secured environment.

Microsoft says that this will prevent malware from hijacking an app's code by exploiting common memory bugs such as stack buffer overflows, dangling pointers, or uninitialized variables which could allow attackers to hijack an app's normal code execution flow. Any modifications that don't match the shadow stacks are ignored, effectively shutting down any exploit attempts.

the main issues for DevOps seems to be environment variables.

Cuz thats what they always talk about. I mean.

Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…

So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?

Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes

Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)

So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?

Some background:

About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.

So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).

Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.

Everyone is happy.

Fast forward to last Thursday night.

“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.

I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?

So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...

The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.

What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...

His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.

Now we have

POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback

The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...

But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!

Arghhhhhh

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.

Getting REALLY sick of OpenShift right now >:( I'm trying to connect to my database with JDBC (using Java servlets and JSP pages) for an assignment, but it doesn't seem to be acknowledging the presence of any of the environment variables. Or it's refusing to save values to the session, I can't really tell. But I've been trying to figure this out for several hours a night the last three nights, and it's still doing nothing

I hate AWS ec2 instanced with it shitty handling of environment variables...Why in hell it is so hard to set an environment variable which will be re-set in case the instance will be restarted? For hours I'm fighting through manuals and non of the described procedures work

Installed NVM with administrator on my new assigned device by company. It has windows 10. I set environment variables and did everything. But the laptop still ain't recognizing node 😤

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

so...

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

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

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

no.

its because cmake sucks.

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

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

lazy fucking cocksuckers !

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

Linux: sudo apt-get install IDE dev-libs etc
Windows: install wxMSW, extract compressed binaries, set environment variables, set preprocessor/project settings in VS2017, set search directories, etc.

Why is it so ANNOYING to set up a simple GUI development library for C++ on Windows?

!rant
//serious

My Android Studio has refused starting up. Problem started after I downloaded v3 which is unstable and thought it could co-exist with v2.3. It messed up my project on v2.3 but I managed to fix it.

Then I did an upgrade on the same v2.3 then everything went south⬇. Now it doesn't start. I've tried changing environment variables for Java. Uninstalled and reinstalled but no luck.

Pls, how do I remedy this?

N.B: right now I am installing IntelliJ as an alternative

What the actual fuck. I turn my my computer on and all my environment path variables are removed i can't use npm Java python or many other things i use until I put them back in the env path. What the fuck 😑

But I should have made a backup with all of them so its my fault I guess

when you haven't touched or changed your eclipse environment variables

but eclipse decides fuck it, can't fucking find em , get a separate unrelated error