Boss: I need you to start on this new project, how long will it take?

Me: well, hard to say with no specs whatsoever...

Boss: just your best guess

Me: 4 to 6 month I guess?

Boss: so 3 months it is. When can you start?

Me: no specs, sir...and I said 4 to 6

Boss: the specs are almost ready, I know you can simplify it

Me: ...

Boss: just start with the basic infrastructure already

(4 months later)

Boss: here you are the specs, they might change a little in behaviour and design, but all the main stuff is here

(Hands me a A3 with a total of 21 pictures in InDesign)

Me: o....Kay. what happens when I click here?

Boss: oh, we should still talk about the app workflow, I'll get you updated

(2 weeks and 16 total rewrites of the "specs" later)

Boss: you told me it was a 2 months job, why aren't you finished yet? We must deploy in 3 weeks!

Me: ...

My shower renders temperature as a boolean. 😩

I'm trying out a new rendering engine, it's pretty slow but I'm getting somewhere.

My (6 years old) client is sitting next to me and is kind of picky and tells me exactly what to do.

No payout though 🤔

I wonder when there will be the first manufacturer to introduce the "cool" new notch design to normal screens. 🤔

Gets me every time! XD

„We love open source, so we'll just buy all of it!“
— Microsoft, 2018/06/04

HR Project update meeting.
Duration: 1h
Content:
1) recap of previous meeting
2) overview of what we will discuss in next meeting.

Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.

Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.

Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.

Didn't know jackshit about twilio.

Meeting with client:

Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*

Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.

Dev: Hey our current server is starting to chug a bit. Can I get approved for $1200 additional spend to double the speed?

Manager: *Sharp inhale*. We need this project to cost as little as possible, we really can’t justify spending any additional money for any reason right now.

*2 days later*

Manager: YOU ARE APPROVED FOR $100,000 TO IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT SOMETHING RELATED TO NFTs IN ANY OF OUR APPS. THE BUSINESS NEEDS TO EXPAND INTO THE METAVERSE ASAP IMMEDIATELY. I NEED AN ETA BY EOD AS TO WHEN THIS CAN BE ROLLED OUT.

Dev: …

Boss: hey mech eng, we need a setup modification

Mech: no prob, boss, we can have it prototyped in 3 weeks, industrialized in 2 months

Boss: oh, right then, go on

---

Boss: hey, Soft Eng, we need a functional modification

Soft Eng: no prob boss, we can develop it in 4 hours, tested and documented in 2 hours and integrated and shipped to the client by tomorrow morning

Boss: what??? One day?? You just need to edit a couple of lines of code! I want it ready in ten minutes top!

Me: Discovered a bug during testing, but I have no idea what's causing it yet.

Project manager: Can you give me an ETA on when the fix will be done?

Me: <eye twitches>

$ alias sudo='sudo '
(note the intentional space within the quotes, allows using aliases with sudo)

And then:
$ alias fucking=sudo

Allows stuff like:
$ fucking rm /important-stuffs
$ fucking service foobar stop
$ fucking reboot

Enjoy!

Looks like that took some time 🤔

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

'lashed out' to a client for the first time yesterday.

Clients have the habit to call after tickets and while its annoying, it's manageable if it happens *sometimes*

It was happening the entire fucking morning and when a client called for an update about a ticket for the second time, I couldn't help but sound frustrated.

"how far are you with the ticket?"
"i have other things to do as well, you know, you're not the only customer i have to help right now"
"i understand, do you possibly have an eta?"
"no. You're next in line, is that clear enough?"
"okay" *hangs up*

*crap*

He e-mailed me afterwards apologizing, that was nice.

I'm sorry sir 😥 nothing personal but it can become so fucking annoying sometimes.

Watching a movie at a friend's house.
The subtitles look legit.

QA: Please Look at this Defect.
Me: Okay not a problem!
QA: Thanks
Me: <Starts to look at Defect>
QA: 2 mins later. Do you have an ETA on when it will be fixed?
Me: Not yet, I'm still looking at it.
QA: Do you know what time it can be fixed? I have a deadline.
Me: I don't know what's wrong yet, I can't tell you when it will be fixed if I don't know what's wrong.
QA: Okay. Update Me.
Me: Opens Dev Rant.

One month ago. By email.

Boss: so, this client A has a problem with one of our devices and he believes that it's a bug in the software.

Me: all right then, what happens?

Boss: well, he says that the parameter P in the option menu does not changes the device's behaviour as it is supposed to. I'll forward you his mail. You will find attached an excell file with the results of his test performed with and without the parameter active.

Me: < read mail, read excell file > well, boss, his tests are performed in completely different conditions, how could he expect to infer a meaningful results from this?

Boss: damn, you are right. Send him a test plan and follow up.

Me: < send detailed test plan >

No answer in a week. Then...

Client: hi, there, I made this tests, I attached the excell with the results, can you check the software now?

Me: < read another bullshit filled excell file with none of the suggested test performed >
You know what? Just download the procedures you are using from the device and send them by mail, specifying the software version you are using so we can perform some tests here in the lab and get yo a solution asap.

No response. For a MONTH.

Super Boss: client A still has his problem, how could possibly be that it takes more than A FUCKING MONTH to solve his issue??

Me:...

I'm starting to lose faith in humanity ... I mean recruiters ...
But then I start thinking to myself: "Did I ever HAVE faith in them?" 🤔

Spotify just asked me for my ZIP code (to verify my family plan again after like a year).

I typed 00000 and they accepted that 🤔

Me at work right now.

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

C: hey mate, what's the best tool to open up this 31.1M rows x 106 cols CSV file?

M: Umh...Pandas DataFrame or R DataTable I guess?

C: all right, Excell will do, thanks!

M: erhm...yeah, anytime?

Your git commit history on your personal branch when you're freaking out and cry tears in joy because the code you spent the whole previous week on to somehow get it to work suddenly DOES work.

Ops person: “Hey! Can you come fix this? I‘m trying to add a user and it keeps giving me an error saying that the phone number must be unique. What’s the ETA on a fix?”

Me: 😓

I hate when I'm being questioned when I wander off to the kitchen to get a sandwich for 5 minutes when the smokers at the office have their sixth smoking break that usually takes about 10 minutes.

Let me enjoy my non-smoker breaks 😒

Some of my working colleagues occasionally forget to lock their PCs even though they're told to, so a while ago I started opening YouTube videos or image galleries of Nicolas Cage on their desktop so that they learn.

One of them is very resistant to it though and left earlier (it's Friday and he will be back at Wednesday) without locking or shutting down his PC.

So this time I flipped his display, set Shia LeBoef as his wallpaper with a dia show also featuring Nicolas Cage, Ryan Gosling and Daniel Radcliffe and set Nicolas Cage's face as his cursor image.

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

Product name: K.I.D.

Product version: v2

Project duration: 9 months

Deployment to LIFE ETA: within next 24 hours

Tests' status: GREEN

uuhhhh soooo exciting! Hopefully this time deployment tools do not fail, like they did when releasing v1. Thanks God it still ended well.

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

So a coworker made a backup script that asynchronously copies the backup to the remote backup space and then deletes the backup:

scp backup.tgz remote: &
rm backup.tgz

Spot the bullshit.

Been wearing sunglasses to the office for a few months now because I'm sick of bright screens, light themes of co-workers, the daylight outside that shines through the windows (I moved to another desk further away from the windows), the ceiling lights that are always on (even when there's daylight from outside, thanks boss) and people expecting me to have my eyes open in meetings when there's nothing to look at so now I can just close them and switch to "standby" while I'm still listening.

I am a devampire.

When a co-worker creates a six page website that has over 60 separate CSS files?

Bought new laptop, in stock.
Eta: 10. Dec
28. Dec comes and order has not shipped.
Ask support whats up. Their answer was, that they have supplier issues for an in stock item?!??!

Client wanted to send us e-mail addresses.
Client sent an image inside a Word document showing a list of e-mail addresses.

Luckily ShareX has an OCR feature.

Booked an Uber...
ETA: 10 minutes...
*Checks 4 minutes later*
ETA: 12 minutes...
*Calls the driver to confirm pick up*
*waits for another 4 minutes*
ETA: 8 minutes
*Types in this rant with passive aggression*
ETA: 10 minutes...

So, I've waited 10 minutes after an initial ETA of 10 minutes and now I gotta wait 10 minutes extra.

Arggghhhhhh!

I'm not sure who the fuck is at fault here?
The devs? The ones who design the flow? The ones handling the execution at low levels?
Or us, the customers who keep on coming back to their services succumbed to the fact that we don't have many options!

Update: I've had to wait for half an hour till my cab could reach me.
HALF AN HOUR = Practically the time it would have taken me to walk to the cab!

Hell yeah!

... oh ... wait ... 😒

!Rant

How do you deal with open space offices?

I find it quite difficult to focus, the constant chatting, the constant questions, phone ringing, surprise meeting, more question, arrays of interruptions and questions again. I believe I would be a lot more productive if left alone in the total, undiscontinued silence.

Have you found your escape, your zen, your inner focus? Please share, I need some ideas

I think devRant could maybe have some kind of mascot or superhero!

I scribbled this guy attached here as an idea, but as others have brought up, we could also have a super duck (like the devRant cape duck but more special)!

SO has now a totally different meaning

Ugh, I hate when customers refuse to pay for staging systems but then randomly complain about stuff that's WIP and not working as expected yet ...

"Yes, sir, this house doesn't have a roof right now because the basement isn't done yet."

According to my LinkedIn, everyone is a Project Manager

Training Google's "efficient" net b7 be like epoch 1: ETA 6 hours
I come back in the afternoon and see this:

So some client has their own server with their website that we made and maintain.

Recently they've revoked writing permissions for our user for whatever reason but expect us to change stuff.

This has been the case for a few weeks now and they still haven't given us writing permission back, but insist of us making the changes.

Major state insurance provider, all past and current members data stored unencrypted (including SSN, date of birth, home address, etc.). All developers and contract developers had read access to it. Reported it, nothing was done. Reported it again in my exit interview. Was basically told they had intrusion detection systems in place so it was not an issue.

Being lazy is ok.
But I believe there certainly is a special place in hell for people that use "transition: all" in CSS.

I'm finally done with Windows Insider Builds 😌

I broke the system!

This rant has the same tag twice, because I manually added the one that would be added by the category I chose 😏.

CC: @dfox

After more than one year, finally i am on vacation.
16 hours in, my Slack is on fire.

!rant
Looking for advice, serious advices.

I work in C.
Also, I work in Python.
I have worked for a couple of year in C++.
I have a fair knowledge of the Data Science workflow, and some experience in Machine Learning.
I have tinkered with some other languages (Java, Ruby, Go, JS among the others, nothing serious nor professional)

I'm the kind of person who needs constant problems to face in order to keep engaged, satisfied, happy. And I need to learn new stuff, or refining my knowledge constantly, or I stagnate. I believe that this is true for quite a share of people here.

I would like to spend some spare time (I seldom have) in a project. Personal projects are rarely good enough to improve one's cv, so I thought I could partecipate in some Open Source projects.

Does anyone here have some suggestion about some interesting and satisfying OSProject, or some general suggestion on the matter?

It would be so apreciated.

When our company (past employer) got acquired by another company and everyone got to have a meeting where you got a black or blue envelope. One indicated you were being let go, the other indicated you were being offered an "opportunity" if you would relocate to NJ. What was an awesome company -- they destroyed the soul of it in one day.

Oh well their CEO got let go after a US Congressional investigation earlier this year. Karma, bitch!

So apparently our windows domain admin now disabled screensavers.

I was always happy to return to my desk while looking at the pixel city screensaver I had and now it's just black.

I am mildly angered 😑

!rant

StackOverflow now has a devDuck!

So last night a friend randomly found a raw not-yet-installed WordPress instance on a public domain that he found on a Facebook site (it was already linked for I don't know how long, but just not installed).

He told me about it and, being the guy I am, I signed up an account on some free MySQL hosting website, set up a database and used it for that WordPress site.

I then left a kind little note on the front page for the admin telling him that I just saved his ass since others could've done the same but posted racist shit or something and, also, told him not to use WordPress.

Even though I had no bad intentions, I used proxies and VPN connectsions because you never know how these people might react.

Hopefully they'll learn from it 😇

When you're trying to publish your first Cordova app and the PlayStore release including signatures and stuff takes you 2.5 hours, while the AppStore release takes you 5 days (including getting a huge Mac on your desk, signing up a D.U.N.S. for your company, figuring out the signing/provisioning process and fixing CSS/JS exclusively for iOS).

When Nautilus is copying file 271 of 211...

Sometimes I wonder how software development in (bigger) teams worked in the 90s.

Take the first Pokémon games for example. It was the mid-90s and the final product would be Assembler code that goes onto a cartridge with limited space.

I believe version control systems didn't really exist back then (Git & Mercurial: 2005, SVN: 2004). So probably people took backups of the chunks of code they worked on, copied around a stitched-together code, threw everything together at the end of the day, etc. etc. ...

Does anyone here know if there is some kind of documentary about that topic or did anyone here experience that first-hand?

It would be really interesting to see how that stuff worked back then 😊

I don't get much spam, but when I do, I rant about how badly those mails are crafted.

I mean, yeah, for non-devs or typical old people, those badly made Google fake mails (that use the old Google logo, the logo in Times New Roman or something) or ISP / phone company mails with malicious attachments may look good enough.

But, seriously, if I were a dev paid to create spam mails, they would look like the real deal, if I may say so myself, as I would actually put some effort in them.

What do you think? Wouldn't spam made by real developers like us be "better"?

Maybe send some examples from inside your junk box 🤔

So apparently Firefox can't handle (quick) animations from opacity 0 to opacity greater-than-zero and glitches around. Instead you need to animate starting from something greater than 0, like 0.001.

I had to debug this shit and it just adds to my reasons to dislike this browser.

The moment they expect you to say a ETA before explaining the blueprint....

ETA to explode - 5, 4, 3...

Joined a startup which does webscraping. I never knew that webscraping can be so much monotonous. I feel like I am doing a damn support job. Apart from that websites keep blocking the scrapers, and that is another thing to be fixed. jesus christ, non devs keep asking for ETA about how long would it take to complete a certain task. Thanks to remote work, I have been burnt out every day, and have been working for 14+ hours everyday!!!!! God help me!

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

Ugh, all these mails about updated privacy policies really annoy me.

Luckily it'll be over soon.

Putting every file, even SHADER CACHES (that huge cyan flower here (this illustration was made with "gource"), yes, every of those tiny little dots is a file) or even complete libraries into their git repository.

**it's 17:47*"**
Dev: Hi manager I have those 13 tasks on me and I won't finish on time.
Manager: Well all those items needs to be finished on Time, how YOU are going to resolve it?
Dev:😵😵😭😤🥺
Manager: there is additional defect to check please take it on priority ,it a real easy one , I'll do it my self in 5 min but I'm too busy
Dev: ETA?
Manager : by the end of the day.
Dev: Well it's already end of the day.
Manager: Exactly, I knew I can count on you .
Dev:🥺🥺🧐
****Next day *****
Manager: Hey sorry to call you on your cell but I see there were no progress on yesterday issue.
Dev : Sorry Manager I'm sick.
Manager : O.K feel well (🤬)
Dev : thank you so much (😎fk you asshole😎)

I really don't get why creators of already-suspicious looking software (and the related suspicious looking website) put terms like "NO VIRUS" or "100% free of malware" next to the download area.

I mean, why would that help anything?

(I understand those typical virustotal scan widgets though, those are fine)

My boss has been working in web development for roughly 10 years now.

Today he learned about the existence of try/catch in JavaScript and asked me in which browsers it's
supported in 😢

So the free WiFi at the Paris airport CDG bugged out for me earlier. Since it doesn't allow you to sign out, I had Schrodinger's WiFi as the login page said I'm connected but I wasn't (nothing worked).

I still remember the moment when I found out that there's something other than Internet Explorer ("The Internet program" back then for me), named Firefox (v2.7).

It was simple stuff like tabs that fascinated me, it's an experience similar to learning a second language and opening up your mind and understand the abstract idea of everything.

Hey devs! I'm new here and I don't know any people on this network, wanna talk about things?

Anyone else ever had a scrum master or a project manager that just drives them insane?

Like they bug you every hour asking "what's our eta?", "are you done yet?", etc.

And they turn everything into a 2 hour long meeting (including standup) where everyone on the team is required and then they wonder where all the budget went.

And you have to explain the same god damned thing to them over and over again at these meetings. I wish they could be just technical enough to understand.

I recently updated all the stuffs on my Raspberry Pi 3.
Now nano* occasionally NULs out files I edit 🤔

*best CLI editor ever, change my mind

Atleast give me some ETA ...

That moment when you're connected to a server to adapt a setting in the SSH service config and it errors into your face when you attempt to reload it.

Schrödinger's SHell 😰

I just subscribed to my own rants 🤔

When your coworker is having issues with an old ColdFusion app, and says "Nevermind, I am just going to rewrite this in ASP". Yes, he is writing a "new" app in Classic ASP. 😒

That we awesome moment when you want to know your bus' ETA at the official government website and...

#aspclassicftw

when the project manager asks you if you have an ETA on the project you're trying to finish because deadline is a few hours. You have never done the thing you're trying to complete before so you have no baseline for it and they know that.... nope but you'll be the 2nd person to know when it's done, maybe next time don't promise deadlines without consulting the devs?

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

Sometimes I really hate designers.

I was collecting the colors used in a new layout and this only the part with gray colors of what I've ended up with.

(I may just merge some of those, like 7 and 8. Also none of them are results of transparent shading, I made sure)

When customers start a project with your company and you're the one to create the software, then after a while the communication kind gets kind of placebo'd down until there is hardly any communication and your contact only replies to / mails you every 12 weeks or so and then after almost 1 year they urge you to get their shit done asap, telling you it'd better be done yesterday but you still lack information you asked for in one of your mails.

Fun fact: the record of them not responding was 20 weeks.

!rant

Every type of doctor is a different kind of debugger for the Human Operating System 🤔

They debug system services like "ear", "throat" and "poop".
Sometimes they even repair or take apart systems for different reasons!

I like how devrant devRant is from other websites 😊

!rant

Decided to become a devRant supporter, so here goes 🤔

So apparently I cannot save my Google Maps "Less interested in ..." food place preferences when my selection includes "Vegan". 🤔

Does someone else have that too?

Sometimes at night when I'm creating something new (or adding to something) and I get into that zone when stuff suddenly works better than expected or when the thing I'm making is just awesome, I feel a need to turn on "evil" music, such as music with deep voiced male choirs, the soundtrack of Portal 2, some classic music like those evol geniuses in movies or comparable.

It just makes me feel like I'm gonna destroy the planet once my evil creation is done.

Any DVORAK users here?
I don't really see myself willing to learn how to use it, but I'd really like to hear from people that adapted to it, when and how they use it and why!

When someone cooks bacon in the break room early in the morning and doesn't bring enough for everyone. #hungrydeveloper

Irony - The new TLS certificate was finally issued after 10 days of waiting. The project management portal I need to upload it to crashed this afternoon. No ETA on recovery time yet.

I'm so, so tired of stand-ups. We have JIRA, and basically all we do is read the board—ticket number, ETA, blockers. We've done some Slack stand-ups, but my managers insist we all be in the room to communicate the same shit we communicate very effectively on Slack.

I casually solved a problem in some private code at work today that I didn't manage to fix the previous two evenings.

Then I forget to push the changes and remembered at home that I turned off my work computer which normally I never turn off so that I could TeamViewer into it (I don't have VPN
access).

Wanted to work on that code this weekend 😒

(Well, we were in a "progession session" meeting right before leaving the office so I kind of forgot about it because of that)

Interior Design Architect.

I *always* have ideas on how to use spaces.

Recently our management department discovered the advantages of setting up CloudFlare DNS and their CND for a website. In our case that made perfect sense and also helps a lot with the performance.

A while ago someone noticed that in the backend of the CMS the site uses, stuff that is being loaded via AJAX is not loaded at all and just displays an empty container.

3 hours into debugging I discovered why: Someone thought it would be a good idea to base a condition on whether there was a certain HTML comment inside an element, rather than using a class or something else.

A comment.

The HTML minifier removed that, so I ended up having to disable HTML minifying, at least for the backend.

Thanks, whoever thought it would be a good idea to base logic on the existence of a comment.

So I wanted to check on an iOS app in my company's Apple account but ...

I don't know, this thing used to be a login.

So I tried to fix an app today that we made for a client ...

It's a Cordova project that's basically jus a wrapper for a certain section of the client's website that's displayed inside an iframe inside said app (with a bit of additional CSS and such). It's all working fine.

Said section of the website offers two to four different options to choose from, then scrolls down (triggered by JavaScript, window.scrollTop or JQuery's equivalent) to the next selection panel that's dynamically added to the DOM tree, the content's depending on what the user selected before.

The problem is, said scrolling effect inside said iframe does not work inside the iOS version of the app (does, however, when the content of the iframe is viewed (by just visiting the URL) inside Safari), instead, the iframe just scrolls back to top.

So after five and a half hours of depression, anger and rage, also some repetetive cursing towards Apple (just like every time something has to do with their awful products), my boss walks in, looks at me and says:

"I'd be fine with it, if I just had to manually scroll instead".

.........

If it wasn't 5pm already (I usually go home at 6), I would've just left the room / gone home or gotten my salad from the fridge to have something to release my anger on.

Seriously though, what the fuck!?

TIL following two lines are NOT the same in JS with webpack, even though logically they should be - it should be just an application of an eta reduction... First line works, second one crashes, probably because mysteriously executed too soon, before obj is initialized.

export const t = (...args) => obj.t(...args);
export const t = obj.t;

Sometimes I really hate JavaScript magic.

Epoch 2/4
777/1054 [=====================>........] - ETA: 45:31 - loss: 2.6682

Screw you Keras model

So I've tried to unsubscribe myself from a newsletter for the past two weeks ...

It's a service I used exactly once and apparently I got signed up for their newsletter somehow.

When I got the first mail two weeks ago, I clicked that unsubscribe button in the footer to get to their unsubscribe landingpage and hit that confirmation button.

It said something like "... within 24 hours ..." and I was okay with that, but I kept getting a newsletter / offer / whatever every single day for the following two weeks.

Today I figured out, why the unsubscription seemingly had no effect.

I used a GMail alias for that website, so my address contained a + character.
Apparently they just put that mail address into some unsubscribe link template without urlencoding it, so that + turned into a space and they attempted to unsubscribe some mail address with a space instead of a + ...

Remember kids, always urlencode stuff in URLs!

That one user case you could have never prepared for. SMH

ETA for patch: 1 month, "maybe"

Fuck TeamViewer.

I've been using it to control my home PC desktop from remote for a few years now (booted PC via Wake-On-LAN, done stuff, shutdown). I started using Chrome Remote Desktop a while ago too, but its ports are blocked at work, so I had to rely on TV some more.

Recently TV more often told me that I was offline (but I wasn't) and more importantly they started blocking my connections due to "commercial usage" (it's my private shit, yo), so now I've moved on to RDP via SSH.

That really makes me feel relieved as I wanted to move away from it for a while now anyways and SSH tunnels also are the real shit.

Today was a good day.

How do you guys actually estimate any given task..?? What do you consider..?? Or do you just guess it as per experience..??

That must be almost an eternity

That feeling when the direction lights of your car and the car ahead of you are in full sync.

!= rant

Does AngularJS still have momentum. I toyed with it for a while on a side project. Since then .Net Core launched and most of my work (both day to day and side projects has been in MVC 5 or .Net Core)

I wanted to go back to tinkering with that one side project but it seems that some of the hype surrounding AngularJS has died off.

!==rant

Are there any good cloud-based IDEs that:

1.) Supports C# (ASP.Net Core / MVC)
2.) Would work on a Chromebook

Last employer -- a major health care insurance carrier -- had over a million current and former subscribers data in SQL database with no encryption on SSN or other personally identifiable information. I reported this as an issue, and was told that since they had intrusion detection, etc. they don't need to encrypt the data. Guess they have never heard of zero day vulnerabilities or disgruntled employees?

We're slowly migrating to VSTS (sigh) from Mantis and SVN for tasks management and code repo.
It's been 4 months now and we still have to move the code from SVN to GIT, asked management when they plan to do that and they still give no ETA, and when asked to make sure our commits stays intact after the transfer I got told "no need for that we're just gonna copypaste the last version of the source code". And most likely the local SVN server we're using is gonna be dismissed.

On top of that, by the way they want to use it, VSTS is being terrible for tracking stuff. I'm so used with other tools at home for some side projects and even though I expressed my concern about VSTS I got ignored over and over...

Bonus (not so) fun fact: branches are something mythic here so everyone else commits straight to master and it's a pain in the ass everytime, because people happen to break things most of the time.

And no, unfortunately this is not a small company.

Send halp please 😭

I would say this can be done in 5 minutes.
And then ETA becomes 5 months

#Suphle Rant 8: Strange star discovered

I was searching for a project I'd starred earlier, on my github feed, when I realised a user had starred suphle at some point but for some reason, it wasn't reflecting on the stargazers. I was half overjoyed and half confused. Overjoyed over unlocking the milestone.

User seemed legit –an Italian with projects in C that were not forked. Followers and commit graph are organic. Did he star in error, feel the project is a stinker, or encounter installation challenges? Luckily, I found his email address but all his repositories are in Italian so I wasn't too sure he'd understand English, or if the mail was being attended to. Yet, I took my chances

He surprisingly got back to me, affirming that the star-unstar was actually deliberate. He withdrew the star cuz project's documentation is not hosted online and still requires npm start.

I try to persuade him by reminding him it's just a one liner but that markdown files are equally rendered directly on github. Never heard from him again, sadly

I'm kind of bothered cos I find it funny I thought suphle's APIs are all cast in stone, but the more I work on the docs, the closer I am to spotting something that doesn't sit right with me, and diving in to modify it. This not only prolongs ETA, there's the risk of someone who may have stumbled upon it and is studying it, having the rug pulled from under their feet. Things like validator rules and route-collection service-coordinators have been converted from methods and classes to native decorators. I guess I'm safe since nobody has indicated any signal to the contrary. It'll be pedantic to start tagging versions for each change.

Another consideration is that these breaking changes would go to the first segment of the semver scheme, which is hilarious because the rate at which I push such changes is so alarming, we'd probably progress through 15 versions under a year