Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

My girlfriend sent me this error message from a BIM software which she uses at work. I would like to see more sophisticated error messages from a software with a 4K price tag.

When you design something and it becomes something else but you're too lazy to re-design it.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

A student sent me his code to look for the cause of an error. I spent 2 hours researching if there are any breaking changes in the latest version of AngularJS. Everything looked fine. I could not spot any errors. I tried copying and pasting my own script and link tags, and it worked. I put back his tags, and again got an error.

I almost shot myself in the head when I saw type="text/javascritp" in the script tag he used. I didn't know how to react. It could happen to anybody but I wanted to punch him. Feeling better now.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

0-headphones
1-coffee
2-Laptop
3-npm
4-IDE
5-wifi
6-devRant

What features would you want in a logger?

Here's what I'm planning so far:
- Tagged entries for easy scanning of log file
- Support for indenting to group similar sequential entries
- Multiple entry types (normal, info, event, warning, error, fatal, debug, verbose)
- Meta entries, so the logger logging about itself, e.g. disk i/o failures.
- Ability to add custom entry types, including tag, log-level, etc.
- Customizable timestamp function
- Support for JS's async nature -- this equates to passing a unique key per 'thread'; the logger will re-write all the parent blocks for context, if necessary. if that sounds confusing, it's okay; just trust that it makes sense.
- Caching, retries, etc. in the event of disk i/o issues.
- Support for custom writers, allowing you to e.g. write logs to an API rather than console or disk.

How about these features?
- Multiple (named) logs with separate writers (console, disk, etc.)
- Ability to individually enable/disable writing of specific entry types. (want verbose but not info? sure thing, weirdo!)
- Multiple writers per log. Combined with the above, this would allow you to write specific entry types (e.g. error, warning, fatal) to stderr instead of stdout, or to different apis.
- Ability to write the same log entry to multiple logs simultaneously

What do you think of these features?
What other features would you want?
I'm open to suggestions!

Spent 4 hours debugging a “button” styling, worked fine locally but not on production.!

After striking out “cache” issues, “browser” versions, “fonts”, “sass errors” the error was with a stupid chrome extension that appended a css class attribute to the “HTML” tag 😡

And the other developer thought that was a part of what was written in the code !!

Hate these kinda plugins that manipulate the DOM 😪

P S the plugin is "Grammarly".

Just visited a relative whose flat number was: 404!
As anti-climatic as it could get, I could easily find it 😜🤷🏻‍♂️

is it 'undefined' as a tag, or 'undefined' as en error?

I am currently learning angular.js and in index.html I call two different controller files. I have spent the last 5 hours of my life looking for the error when the issue was that when I opened the script tag I didn't notice that type="controller.js" instead of src="controller.js" because of auto finish please kill me now for this terrible mistake that has almost annoyed the fuck out of me and forced me to walk away from my computer on multiple occasions to try and figure out the issue

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

So you look for tags starting with `error` on stackoverflow ...

So....

I'm loving my personal project in Node.JS but I have to say, whoever would use this for any involved professional purpose is a fucking retard.

A complete fucking retard.

Errrors related to their weakly typed bs would have been caught by a compiler in literally ANY OTHER LANGUAGE. Yeah it would take more time to tag objects etc, but then it would be DONE RIGHT and a look-ahead compiler wouldn't be necessary to tell you 'oh the reference could point to a completely different type ! nothing will warn you of this, but if you sort of hover after a certain line the source of the error it took a fucking hour of runtime to produce will be clear !'......

remember just say @NoToJavascript

due to some error on GCP, my and friend got locked out of a prod server over ssh.

And the fucking admin was not giving us privileges to do it through serial port, why you ask cause submitting keys from dashboard was not working.

Later, found out google runs a startup script from startup-script metadata tag.

It felt like showing a middle finger to the admin and google

I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.

For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.

Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.

To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…

And all of a sudden the code worked.

All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.

So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?

PM comes into my office: "Hey, if <client> asks about his edits, just tell him they're scheduled for this week."
me: "I thought they were scheduled for this week, I thought that you were currently in a meeting to get final specs so you could tell me what needed changed."
PM: "Yeah, he wants to take the plugin from 5 steps down to 3, we told him it wouldn't be a problem and we would have it done this week."
me: "Ok, there are limitations as far as what I can cut out of the process, his tag line when he started as a client was '5 easy steps' and I built something that did what he wanted in 5 steps. Changing things this late in the game is not simple, I'm talking a minimum 6 hours of work."
PM: "Well I tried to make sure that what he wanted was possible but I didn't have a developer in the meeting. It shouldn't change anything that much."

He ended up scheduling a meeting with me and the designer to go over the edits Thursday afternoon. So I will have the new specifications which I said would be a minimum 6 hours of work and I will be given ~10 hours in which to do it. I sure hope nothing unexpected pops up while I'm working on this.

I'm also the only developer this week (and technically speaking I'm junior) since our senior dev wrecked his car over the weekend and isn't planning on being in all week. I'm the only computer literate person in the office of 50 or so, which means that if there is any kind of tech issue I'm ripped away from my desk for 'emergency help'. I have two other sites to get ready for client approval meetings by Friday afternoon and if the clients approve I will be launching their sites that afternoon as well.

The sign on my door currently says "Error 500: unable to handle your request" I need something to throw at these people.

The superpower to understand all error messages! 🤓

So another story of our stupid trainee, this fucker talks to a customer while i was comming back from my lunch break. He aks me if i can tell him how to fix the problem of the customer. I walk over to his place and look at the error message. It says: "Tag: customer_country is missing. Needed by supplier". Sometimes i wonder why this dude is even here.

browse stackoverfloe javascript tag

a lot of new question is type error

smh

today my friend wanted to publish his swift 3 library in cocoapods, set up proper github repository, made a releass/tag then tried to upload cocoa pods. first was success but somehow it turned out to be empty then we changed some settings in cocoapods (moved paths etc) then it started to give errors and such. strangely every fkin time different kind of error.
first realized he is using xcode 7 build tools which lacks support of swift3, then switchex to xcode8-beta tools but again that shit wasnt working. so i noticed that their app switching repo origin to their specs origin.
removed cocoapods from sys entirely, xcode7 as same as cocoapods and installed git cmd tools from homebrew to make it updated. started from scratch same shit also happened.

so i give up and fired chrome to look up issue, it turns out it was problem with xcode-beta and cocoapods entirely, even somebody just 30mins before us also commented on issue with exact same output problems
5hrs for shitty bugs fml...

Trying to run a web page from arduino with some js in it to draw a graph. And it craps out with some error about start tag.

It works fine saved as an html file on my laptop.

Wtf?

I don't know if my Ubuntu system is on high or anything, but I realized that if you remove a package, you also lose your ability to install it again.

For example, when I remove a package called `dmd`, and search it, it just shows the package `dmd` without any description, with the tag `residual-config`. And if I try to install it, it will split an error back to me, says that the package `dmd` doesn't have any release candidate. And if I `purge` it, it will magically vanish when I search it, and install it will just say `No apt package "dmd"`.

🐟💩The image i fetch from s3 is of type byte array

I return it to angular as an ArrayBuffer

Which then needs to be somehow converted to an image so i can fucking show it

Then after research i had to convert ArrayBuffer to Blob

And from Blob to URL encoded object which returns a string that now shows the full image in img tag

Somehow, by a sheer of trials and error i have just accidentally made a very secure way of fetching a very sensitive piece of document (verification document with user's personal data on it) and now in browser this is shown as blob:shit-image/random-hash. Not even the file extension. This means nobody can download this image. You fucking cant. Its a Blob motherfucker! Like a Blob Fish. It saves either a .txt when you try to save it (no idea how) and if you try to open the image in new tab it shows gibberish text. This means you can read-only this highly sensitive document image and not manipulate it, not even download it. Perfect. I have just made a very secure software by accident.

(this blob fish looks like my shit)