As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.

--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Me: "If today's demo to the client goes well,i will get my first cheque"
My server:"If today i stop working,it will be great"
Android Studio: "If i force a gradle update,it will be just fine".

*crying*
Fuuuuuck.Why nothing goes my way when I want it to????Whhhhyyyyy??

Me: This is good, but here’s a small tiny change that will make it even better!
Tests: 1 success, 3628 failures, simulator freezes and crashes computer
Me: never mind...

!security

(Less a rant; more just annoyance)

The codebase at work has a public-facing admin login page. It isn't linked anywhere, so you must know the url to log in. It doesn't rate-limit you, or prevent attempts after `n` failures.

The passwords aren't stored in cleartext, thankfully. But reality isn't too much better: they're salted with an arbitrary string and MD5'd. The salt is pretty easy to guess. It's literally the company name + "Admin" 🙄

Admin passwords are also stored (hashed) in the seeds.rb file; fortunately on a private repo. (Depressingly, the database creds are stored in plain text in their own config file, but that's another project for another day.)

I'm going to rip out all of the authentication cruft and replace it with a proper bcrypt approach, temporary lockouts, rate limiting, and maybe with some clientside hashing, too, for added transport security.

But it's friday, so I must unfortunately wait. :<

HTTP 200 responses on failures… 😒

About a year ago, while giving interview for a pharmaceutical company. (role of software developer)
Interviewer : So why do you want to join X?
Me (in mind) : (Ok, be calm, I have practiced this and i know what to answer, just follo tbe script)

Me : (Following the script) I would like to join X because I think X could give me exposure to meet people with various skills. (Cant remember what was next) And i also think working in X would make my father proud as he always wanted me to become a Doctor.
After that I just sat there for a few seconds staring at desk contemplating my life failures and I suddenly remember Im in a INTERVIEW.
Me : And thats it. (smiling as if nothing happened)
Worst Interview ever.

So just about to head to the pub and I got the dreaded call from my boss.

The support team had developed some fixes. They "tested" and deployed without letting us know... And you guessed it there was failures all over the shop!

So it turned out their testing was running on a local base install with no integration compared to the live system with 15 years of customisation and complex integration. My they thought this was acceptable I don't know...

And the best part was the developers who made the changes didn't understand their own code (I found the tutorial they copied online) they just blindly copied it without understanding how it worked!

So 4 hours later we found the bug, nothing like having a query and s SQL connection but not executing the query....

There goes my Saturday evening. Now we're was my beer!

tl;dr: Bossmang blaming my code for a database connection issue thrown from outside of my code. Bossmang doesn’t listen. Bossmang doesn’t want to believe it’s a connection issue.

———

Bossmang: The code you wrote is causing insane spec failures in the release branch! It’s hard to follow because it’s so insane, but the cause is your code not properly handling undefined settings! Look at this! <spec>

Me: Specs pass on my machine. I ran it with both a set and nil value. <screenshots>

Bossmang: It works when you set it to nil.

Me: But a setting that doesn’t exist returns nil? <screenshot>

Bossmang: Not seeming to.... So this is the spec failure from the release: “No connection pool with id primary found. <stacktrace that starts outside of my code>”

Me: ... That’s a DB connection error. It’s also being thrown outside of my code, and from a `super` call to Rails.

Bossmang: But <unrelated> and <unrelated> and <other spec> is failing, and if I set the version, it has <other failure> instead! That calls your code first.

Me: It’s a database error. Also: <explains probable, unrelated cause of other failures, like someone didn’t mock a fucking external api call>

Bossmang: But if I restore a DB backup, it fails again.

Me: Restoring uses a dB connection, which could be exhausting the pool depending on the daemons you have running.

Bossmang: perhaps.

...

Bossmang: I still think it’s related to spec ordering.

🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️
This is tiring.

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

Being a backed developer is like being a spy. You are only known by your failures. You will never get to know a good backed developer or a good spy.

Some people say that they've built something with blood, sweat and tears. They've clearly never built anything serious. If they did, they'd know that it costs that, an unholy amount of alcoholic beverages to account for the crippling depression caused by the inevitable failures, and a shitton of cursing. FUCK!!

C=consultant
M=Me
D=my Dumb boss

M: so how are you guys planning to implement the block all accounts feature?
C: oh it should be easy! We will just loop over every account and lock it!
M: what about implementing a flag that just blocks anyone from accessing the site till further notice?
C: what? I’m sure it’ll work. Just need a list of all accounts, we don’t need anything fancy!
M: what happens when we want to revert back to the pre-block state?
C: oh, so we will just unblock everybody
M: even people who were previously blocked for good reasons?
C: i guess so, unless you think otherwise
M: we r….
D: listen! We just need to be able to block all accounts, who cares about this details! So long as we block all accounts! We need this nuclear option in case something bad happens…
M: but what about when that bad thing passes and…
D: when it passes it passes who cares!

Arghhh so much rage here… like first at the stupid engineering design of looping over all of the accounts instead of using a simple flag. Like 1 http call (from one microservice to another) is a lot better than O(n)… not to mention, we won’t have to deal with failures and retries.

And second for my boss being a dumbass… ok you deal with being to afraid to unblock people after we used this “genius nuclear option”!

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

I did some grave and irreversible mistakes in my life

- Never gathered enough courage to mingle with women when I was younger and now the hope is lost

- Compromised my values and mental wellness when I met a narcissistic bitch

- Did not invest money wisely when markets were sailing low and allowed that good sum to sit in bank

- Did not plan health and term insurance at early age when premiums could have been low

- Out of fear, did not follow my gut to purchase gold because my father was acting crazy (or else my money would have been doubled)

- Did not plan my taxation well (or until now would have paid almost zero tax)

- Did not define strict boundaries and allowed people to overstep (or else I would have better friends and family relationships)

- Did not quit my job early and stuck with low paying shit with negative learning, for years (or else I would have grown exponentially)

Thankfully few things I did right are, spending more time with my mom and learning from my mistakes.

I hope I don't make such stupid life choices again.

Had a 1:1 with my boss last night and together we figured out a tricky bug related to my PR. However, either my PR or that bug patch broke a tangentially-related test. Queue my usual exhaustion, and I gave up trying to fix it.

This morning, I'm looking at it and nothing makes sense. My change should not have broken the test. So I reran the controller's tests, and... they all pass?

What is logic.

Good thing, though; that test leads to a few rabbit holes I haven't even begun exploring yet.

Oh, never mind. It broke again.
Ergh, here we go. 😔

Well, if your tests fails because it expects 1557525600000 instead of 1557532800000 for a date it tells you exactly: NOTHING.

Unix timestamp have their point, yet in some cases human readability is a feature. So why the fuck don't you display them not in a human readable format?

Now if you'd see:

2019-05-10T22:00:00+00:00

vs the expected

2019-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

you'd know right away that the first date is wrong by an offset of 2 hours because somebody fucked up timezones and wasn't using a UTC calculation.

So even if want your code to rely on timestamps, at least visualize your failures in a human readable way. (In most cases I argue that keeping dates as an iso string would be JUST FUCKING FINE performance-wise.)

Why do have me parse numbers? Show me the meaningful data.

Timestamps are for computers, dates are for humans.

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

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!

Testing hell.

I'm working on a ticket that touches a lot of areas of the codebase, and impacts everything that creates a ... really common kind of object.

This means changes throughout the codebase and lots of failing specs. Ofc sometimes the code needs changing, and sometimes the specs do. it's tedious.

What makes this incredibly challenging is that different specs fail depend on how i run them. If I use Jenkins, i'm currently at 160 failing tests. If I run the same specs from the terminal, Iget 132. If I run them from RubyMine... well, I can't run them all at once because RubyMine sucks, but I'm guessing it's around 90 failures based on spot-checking some of the files.

But seriously, how can I determine what "fixed" even means if the issues arbitrarily pass or fail in different environments? I don't even know how cli and rubymine *can* differ, if I'm being honest.

I asked my boss about this and he said he's never seen the issue in the ten years he's worked there. so now i'm doubly confused.

Update: I used a copy of his db (the same one Jenkins is using), and now rspec reports 137 failures from the terminal, and a similar ~90 (again, a guess) from rubymine based on more spot-checking. I am so confused. The db dump has the same structure, and rspec clears the actual data between tests, so wtf is even going on? Maybe the encoding differs? but the failing specs are mostly testing logic?

none of this makes any sense.
i'm so confused.

It feels like i'm being asked to build a machine when the laws of physics change with locality. I can make it work here just fine, but it misbehaves a little at my neighbor's house, and outright explodes at the testing ground.

*In a lecture

Lecturer: Consequences of Distributed Systems
Students: **attentive as fudge**
Lecturer: Heteroginity
Students:
Lecturer: Independent Failures
Students:
Lecturer: No global 'COCK'
Students: WHOOOOA, global what?...that escalated fast
Lecturer: I mean no global 'CLOCK'
Students: yeah right, can we use cock though?

The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".

I use to have those same thoughts years ago.

It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.

So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.

Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.

These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.

May be she found a compilation error in your love letter. An uninitialised love object.
Or writing in HTML without CSS would have made things less stylish.

Source: Instagram

I just received a 400€ workstation motherboard like this...

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

How many failures
Does it take
To achieve
Just one
Success

God, the iPhone 11 pro's triple cameras ARE SO UGLY. OnePlus 7 has three back cameras and it's not ugly, so it can be done! It's just so, so fucking ugly. It looks like where you might plug in a high voltage power cable or something. And of course it still has a notch. That's two design failures in one expensive phone. No thanks!

(From owner of iPad Pro - not an Apple hater!)

Building my own accounting software because everything else is overly complicated and is trying to compete with enterprise accounting tools. All I want is some budgeting, some bill tracking, and categorization.

Writing in Ruby because I'm a masochist. Using built-in minitest because again 😈.

I have currently around 62 assertions. As soon as I add ANY new test that's literally asserting true, everything comes unglued and 20+ failures pop up. Take it out, 62 passes.

I feel like I'm going crazy at this point. The errors also don't make ANY sense. Shit like, "that record doesn't exist" when it's clearly a part of fixtures and is only used in ONE test(the one that's breaking).

Installed minitest bisect, and it's like 🤷‍♀️"lol get fucked bro!"

So I came here to rant about this before my battery dies and I go drink myself to sleep.

Thank you for coming to my dev-talk.

Fifteen minutes of coding
Fifteen minutes of specs

Five minutes of debugging
Two minutes of specs (just failures)

Thirty seconds of tweaking
Two minutes of specs

Ten seconds of tweaking
Two minutes of specs

Realize I made a typo due to RubyMine input lag
Two minutes of specs

Ten seconds of fixing and tweaking
Two minutes of specs

And so it goes.
All. day. long.

Sometimes it repeats.
That’s sort of nice.

Is it any wonder I can’t focus?

Back to work after vacation.
And WTF do my collegues ignore the hardware failures and save that shit for me?

Did you ever feel like mad rage for the junior devs when they blame you for their failures?

This whole corporate numbers game is killing me. I know I'm getting paid to do what I'm asked, I know. But the metrics are so one dimensional

You fixed the data of 20 tests? Doesn't count because you didn't code
You implemented a function to reduce recurrent failures in the future? Doesn't count because those already pass with time consuming workarounds
You spent half a day communicating and coordinating across teams to fix an issue? That's 1 test, this other person changed 1 line in 5 files, you're 4 tests behind

me: proudly opens PR "fix random failing tests"

jenkins: Tests run: 1367, Failures: 1

Me, two weeks ago, adding yet another function onto an increasingly complex webservice: "hey uh this is getting pretty confusing, why don't we structure the request this other way so at least it makes more sense."

Manager: "just leave it as is, let the other team worry about how confusing it is. It's their problem now, I want you to move on to a new assignment."

Now- the other team is confused by the webservice and does the requests wrong, resulting in failures. Does it become my problem again when they report that my webservice isn't working?

Yes, it does.

Its 1:30am (South Africa) just had my 8 drive raid 50 fail on one of our main servers after 3 sudden drive failures at the same time after lightning struck our network and blew 2 Cisco 48 port switches...

Its gonna be a longgg fucking night.

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

A vendor gave us what is turning out to be a very stable storage appliance/software, so we're happy for that. But even so, disks fail. So we need an automated way to identify, troubleshoot, isolate, and begin ticketing against disk failures. Vendor promised us a nice REST API. That was six months ago. The temporary process of SSHing(as root) to every single appliance(60-200 per site, dozens of sites) to run vendor storage audit commands remains our go-to means of automation.

YOU ARE YOUR OWN TEACHER. The failures I got in the past , failed to build a simple app , I get to where I am today because I failed many times.

My best teacher for this will always be my mistakes , my mistakes are the greatest teacher

Tfw you accidentally chmod'ed the entire root of your cloud server, because you've misplaced a "/".. Thank god, that there is such a thing called a 'backup'.

The amount of sweat and stress I had when the SSH disconnected and I couldn't log back in, the Apache and MySQL services that began to throw failures..

It's on moments like this, that you really appreciate the 24/7 customer-support! 😂

And all this while I was at my job, working for another company..

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

Noticed a new version of our primary customer management application was deployed to my machine. Its been a while since I've seen it, so I decide to see all the 'improvements' over the 'old' one (~18 year old app written in Delphi).

Wow, it's slow, several seconds to open. Tried to open my account..really, really slow.

Notice a lonely edit box with no label, and button right next to it with no caption, so I click it and get the attached error.

Tried to place an order, I must have done something 'out of sequence' because I clicked another button and the whole app crashed.

In less than 5 minutes I found a dozen or so UX failures. I suck pretty bad at UI, but good lord...what the frack happened to basic usability.

The leaders of the Windows-army:

Major Failures
General Problems
and last but not least...
Kernel Damages

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

My boss told me(less than a year experience) I am the project lead now.... Makes me nervous that 10 minutes ago I was comment bitch/business analyst..... How much should I panic? He was serious and I command 20 people who have never used git

I'm on the fence about if the existence/mass production of shit like this is a good sign of a slightly more inclusive economy... or an early indicator of the apocalypse.

The circled part highly amused me.

It does give me s sense of peace and order due to it being sold by menards. They buy up bulk failures to launch and use their large audience to quickly dispose of them... so whoever had this stroke of 'genius', likely lost significant capital.

Conversation in a debug meeting, after a series of confusing failures:

Senior dev: “This is stupid”
Junior dev: “Me too”

Almost a year and a half. I was so overworked and my failures were so impactful. I would go home and obsess over work all evening and have fever dreams on nights that I could sleep. It was so mentally painful that I was going to jump off a building after a few drinks to make it stop. A military turned civilian doctor told me that I showed symptoms like soldiers in prolonged conflict. He told me “quit or it will kill you” without even knowing about the suicide stuff. So I quit the job and to this day still suffer flashbacks and have crazy mood swings.

Burnout is real. Dangerous stress is real.

The job wasn't bad. I started as an intern in a startup. The company did have its problems but the people were nice and I liked the job. But holy shit, I was insecure. I was constantly worrying if I was doing okay or not and even though nobody ever said anything even slightly negative. Since it was a startup, projects did fail and I usually felt guilty and blamed them on myself. Failures that I now understand did not have anything to do with me or my coding abilities and were mostly because of other issues (management, marketing, finances, etc). But all in all, I liked it and I improved a lot. Both technically and non-technically.

What if people, life, humanity, the universe is just a cluster of CPUs running a giant Recurrent Neural Network algorithm? 🤔

-Sun and food == power source
-People == semiconductors
-Earth/a Galaxy == a single CPU
-Universe == a local grouping of nearby nodes, so far the ones we've discovered are dead or not what same data transport protocol/port as us
-Universal Expansion == the search algorithm
-Blackholes: sector failures
-Big Bang == God turns on his PC, starts the program
-Big Crunch == rm -rf

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

Anybody else felt a pressing why crisis leading to procrastination, a sense of impending doom, and and constant failures or feelings of failure.

After 18 months of failures and frustration I finally got a driving license... damn it feels good :)

Failures (lots of them) + the mentality of: "do more now, do less later".

I am building my portfolio website and added a contact section. In the API call to the backend, I am logging potential API failures to Firebase Analytics. Is it ethical to include the request data (content of the contact form) in log data?

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Debugging TLS failures.

In Java.

With the funny certstore cause "we need to do this by ourselves".

Fucking shitty broken pile of cunt code.

At least the debugging output is good.

As much as I love TLS, debugging it is a nightmare and when a programming language like Java decides to wrap it, it becomes Ctulhu.

OS
- TLS Library
-- TLS Certificate Chain
- JDK
-- JDK SSL Handler
--- JDK Certstore
---- Java Library Abstraction, eg. WS SSL

Joyfully fingering of a tentacle arsehole.

Remote work as a sure thing. WFH 4EVER.

Currently I'm still not confident that most companies will keep or adhere to a remote-first culture because those are full of managers who can't see past their own insecurities.
We will probably see a wave of company failures and bankruptcies (sorry, I should have said "industry consolidation") in a few years while those few that managed to automate away their future-averse middle bosses take over the world.
The day you can't tell if your boss, that you only see in a Zoom window, is organic or a fully virtual #SFW #Professional interactive LinkedIn ad? That is the day I longe for.

only took about 50 millennia, but i finally have windows 1903 on my work laptop... without exaggeration, took about 25 hours over three days to update, with two failures
someone end my existence, please and thank you

This semester, we have a lecture called IT Security by a guy, who absolutely know his subject.
Nevertheless, he wanted to show us that sha256 is broken by an existing collision. (Google that, fellow ranters!)
There are two pdf files by google researchers, that show the caption „SHAttered“ both on different backgrounds, although they give the same SHA-hash.
He then tried to share us these two files by moodle and wondered, why he uploaded the same file twice.
Guess what happened? The moodle backend checks new uploaded files for their ... hash ... and then decides, weather to upload or the file is already existing. So, it did just a new symlink to the old file.
Ironic, that an exercise, that should show us sha collision failures on sha collision 😃

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

Rebooted the two oldest EC2 instances in our network today. It went as badly as expected. They were supposed to be identical

* One server rebooted perfectly
* Second server rebooted with data loss, permission issues, configuration failures.

Okay, so yesterday was crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm not even typing this on my phone. I'm typing it on an LG G4.

So, I took an Uber out to a Sprint store I'd been told did repairs. My phone's vibrator was broken. So, basically I thought just like that R&M episode "20 minutes adventure in and out" - only to find out they'd need to wipe my goddamn phone, and then send it to Texas. I now have to wait 6 days for my phone lmfao.

So, in the meantime, they took an hour to get me this G4 which makes me miss all the finer things in life - I miss my USB-C and not having to give a damn about how I plug it in and I miss my fingerprint reader (I know, I'm a lazy fuck with first-world problems. I don't care to hear about how fucking stupid I am for either of those thoughts, STFU). Also the G4 is prone to hardware failures, so they said they weren't too happy about giving me this, but it's the only one with NFC.

So in the middle of setup, the Sprint store's power went out. FUUUUUUCK. The phone was pretty much at 5% battery and was being slow as hell, so you can just about imagine the irritation me and this guy had when the phone died in the middle of setup.

The next thing is an unrelated story, but I'm sure some of you older guys here will love this. I was at a place called Triangle Park last night. I go there for burgers, but they also have a bar. Sometimes I get sent to the bar and the bartender gets me my food. So last night I went to pick the food up from the bar for takeout.

The bartender must've had an accident and messed something up, so she told me to sit at the bar. I thought it was obvious I was only 19, so I barely sat. I'm literally not old enough to sit at the bar, even though when I was younger my dad and his friends used to let me sit with them because I had a history of saying stupid shit that made his friends laugh. Nonetheless, I sat with my ass hanging off the edge because I knew it was wrong :/

She comes back and asks what type of drink I want. I had to tell her that I was 19. I wasn't gonna sit here and lie because I'm pretty sure she could've lost her job for serving a minor. I exited and waited in the lobby.

But are we at the point where 19-year-olds look like 25-year-olds? I don't want to think about this because it means I'm getting older. That's a lot to take in. Later in the night it was still gnawing at my gut.

Yesterday was one hella day man.

Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.

I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.

People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.

In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.

In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.

But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.

In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.

The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.

Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.

I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.

I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).

Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.

Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.

My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.

I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.

I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.

The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.

If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

Yeah, handouts create lazy people I'm not impressed with
You want something in life, then why don't you go and get it?
Actions speak louder than words do, it's pretty quiet, isn't it?
Look at the world we live in, defined by comment sections
Surround yourself with people that challenge how you think
Not people that nod their head and act like they agree
Those people will cut you open just to watch you bleed
Always be yourself, not the person that you pretend to be, no!
These people gon' tell you that you will never make it
Then when you do, they gon' say they knew you were goin' places
That's just how it works, next thing you know you'll be overrated
Hearing people say they miss the "old you, " it's crazy, ain't it?
And perfect people don't exist, so don't pretend to be one
I don't need pats on the back from people for my achievements
When I die I wanna know that I lived for a reason
Anyone can take your life, but not what you believe in, no

Just remember this

Yeah, don't take opinions from people that won't listen to yours
If money's where you find happiness, you'll always be poor
If you don't like the job you have, then what do you do it for?
The cure to pain isn't something you buy at liquor stores, nah
The real you is not defined by the size of your office
The real you is who you are when ain't nobody watchin'
You spend your whole life worried about what's in your wallet
For what? That money won't show up in your coffin, woo!
Yeah, anger's a liar, he ain't got no respect
I fell in love with my pain and I slept with my regrets
Happiness saw it happen, maybe that's why she up and left
Joy called me a cheater, said she ain't coming back
I've always had a problem with relationships
But that's what happens when you see the world through a broken lens
Mistakes can make you grow, that doesn't mean you're friends
Who you are is up to you, don't leave it up to them, no

Just remember this

Yeah, they say you got into music, you signed up to be hated
That's kinda weird cause I don't remember signing my name up
Coming from people that give advice but never take none
I like my privacy, but, lately, I feel it's invaded
I heard that life's too short, don't let it pass you by
We waste a lot of time crying over wasted time
It's not about what people think, it's how you feel inside
My biggest failures in life are knowing I never tried, woo!
I look at the world from a different angle
People change, even Satan used to be an angel
Think twice before you're bitin' on the hand that made you
Don't believe what you believe just 'cause that's how they raised you
Think your own thoughts, don't let them do it for you
Say you want a drink, don't wait for people to pour it on you
Cut out the liars, stay close to the people you know are loyal
Grab your own glass and fill it, don't let your fear destroy you, woo!

Dear Managers; we do not appreciate how comfortable you are behind a facade of ignorance. Your inaction is directly responsible for the failures of your team; both technical and cultural. You are why we are unhappy, you are why we stop growing, you are why we do not care, you are why we do not innovate; and most important of all, you are why we leave.

*laughing maniacally*

Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...

*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*

Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...

Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...

*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*

*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*

*I/O looks like clusterfuck*

Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.

*half an hour later*

Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.

Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...

They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.

Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.

And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...

One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".

Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...

The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...

And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.

I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@

TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation...

Once there was this fucking recruiter who actually had the nerve to call the head-secretary of the entire R&D department of the company my girlfriend works at, to ask to be put through to her after explicitly telling the secretary what the reason for the call was.
I mean, even if my girlfriend wanted to be contacted by some shitforbrains single-celled lowlife like you, how stupid can you be, calling the head-secretary for at least 400 people and then telling them you are headhunting?

On a project that will crash and burn due to a badly projected date given to the business. I'm team lead and the Developement manager. I'm not sure how to save my career from this one. 22 years at this company and this may end my employment.

Can't change the date because the business has had it with deployment failures. Not enough time to do any of the technical debt and I'm not sure one if the issues has a solution.

Time to create a resume I guess. Been a really long time.

Let me know if you want a developer in Des Moines!

I've been compiling the project for about 5 hours now, still no successful build due to bad tests generating intermittent test failures...

All I wanted to do was to release the web project to the customer not fucking wrestle Cthulhu!
The worst part is that the release is set up so that you need to release the entire project internally before you can release one part.

Untested code has bugs that cause catastrophic failures in code and I get asked "How the hell did you even find that?!" by a manager on another team.

I pressed enter to post form data.

Weekly summary: 1 of your workflows have failed

- shit

The below workflow had an unusual number of failures:
Workflow X
Failed 1 times

- oh so it is failing since yesterday?

*swaty click*

8 h ago - Succeeded
1 d ago - Succeeded
[...]
6 d ago - Succeeded
1 wk ago - Failed

- Oh. Great. Perfect time and way to notify me.

My biggest bad habit (for now!) is rushing changes. I have no real deadlines, yet I rush commits and cause failures in our CI tool every week

Introduced software that created failures to a product line and then let it sit for a week while contracts got argued.

Why is it such a hassle to get Android Studio to work? Spending several hours filled with with installs, reinstalls, downloads, googling, troubleshooting, more failures, suicidal thoughts, env variable tinkering, crashes, total apathy - before I can finally start writing some fucking code is fucked up.

Person : Today you worked for 18 hours. What did you accomplish?

Me : I did no progress in the code base.

Person : How is that possible? You were on the IDE all the time.

Me : When you have a huge package pulled in, that takes 3 hours to build, for every single change you do,

And the build path is screwed :D

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

ATTENTION PLEASE! Important announcement following:

Please check your interface implementations for correct byteorder according specification BEFORE YOU START COMPLAINING ABOUT DATA FAILURES ON EXCHANGING DATA.

Freakin hell, if I'd get some money for every byte order mismatch on testing interfaces, I'd be a be a billionaire.

And why are all those highlevel I-know-every-fucking-framework developer incapable of checking the real memory content of a datatype, and the real data content on the interface even if you tell them that their byte order is obviously wrong?
No, your system is not the centre of the universe and I don't care how you get your less-than-32bit-datatypes-are-for-assembler-usage-frameworks to change byteorder. It's not rocket science, if there's no ready-to-use-function then write those 4 lines yourself.

Next time I get to specify an interface I'll go for mixed-endian, just to make sure everybody involved knows the concepts of endianess afterwards.

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Geeezzzz tech failures everywhere...

iPad + Apple pencil ONLY for note taking during lectures

Yay or nay?

Got any other combos that arent ms surface with a pen? (Bad experience cause of ssd failures)

Or what about those Wacom tablets? Are they even good in terms of pen to screen response latency?

Educate me if you saw me as an ignorant piece of f but are there any tablet with stylus pen support that are almost input-lag free like the apple pencil with iPad? I once tried it in the store and boi did it truly impress me, also I haven't seen anything else close to it, I tried the Samsung ones, they didn't look to me as fast as the apple pencils

Do you have like out-of-the-box ideas that are not pen and paper? Do write them down

- make absurdly large refactoring on
- run unit tests for the first time on this branch and expect dozens of failures
- everything works
- be like WTF!

- git status
> on brach master

And this is how to troll yourself.

A couple of years ago, I was invited for an interview after applying for a part time job as a C/C++/Assembly developer with customer contact to earn a bit of money while studying at university.
Throughout the whole interview they didn't ask me a single question related to the work I was expecting to do. Just a couple of questions about my team skills, how I would react in certain difficult situations and how my studies were going. Nevertheless they seemed pretty pleased with me and asked when I could start.
I was somewhat irritated by that, especially because I was still a beginner in some areas and made that quite explicit in my application. I asked what kind of projects I would be working on and what skill level was expected of me.
"It's pretty straightforward. Just pick up the phone and go through the checklists we'll provide. You'll pick it up quickly."

Wait what?!

Turns out they didn't have an opening for a programmer. They were looking for somebody for a first level phone support minimum wage job and simply used an old ad for a programmer's position "to attract more technically minded people".

I rejected respectfully...

What the actual fuck? Who even does something like that?

I have last few months left out of graduation and i don't know what should i learn. There's so much things (web dev , ai/ml, blockchain, android , cloud, ,hybrid apps, gaming, ar/vr, data analysis, security,etc) and as a cs student, i feel i should be knowing them all.

In last 6 years ,

Techs that i liked or got success in :
java, Android,python, data analysis, hybrid apps(flutter)

Techs that i didn't liked or failed in : ai/ml, cloud computing , webdev(css/js) ,hybrid apps(react/angular/ionic/...)

Techs that i didn't tried : security, cryptography, blockchain, open cv , ar/vr, gaming

I am not bound by my likeness or success.

My failures was mainly because i didn't liked those techs and continued further in them. And my success comprises of just launching a few apps, passing in some certification or grabbing an internship opp because of those skills.

But if you think a particular skill is necessary to have as a cs professional then let me know. I just want to earn a lot of money and get out of this mess asap

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

That I take everything too serious and it keeps downing my creativity and concentration.

I simply shouldn't give a fuck and learn through failures, because that is much more effective but I got educated to blame myself for mistakes. Stupid education. Takes time to truly understand that though.

Finally, after days of research and failures, I managed to understand and tweak TensorFlow's program for image classification.

The feel of power, arcane knowledge and fascination is just incredible.

Might not seem much these days, nobody was interested in it. But I, deep inside, knew: I was proud of myself.

I think it was very useful for developing soft skills like time management, teamwork, dealing with failures, the willingness to learn and how to approach a problem, etc.

It's not about learning a technology or programming language super good and be the C++ or Web expert after finishing your degree. It's about self organization and problem solving IMO.

So we started to get build failures because the build server is full. Team leader asked the co-owner for more space. Got told we should just do less builds. You know stuff is outrageous when even your team leader goes on a rant about how stupid that is and how things are going to crash and burn in the future but nobody gives a damn.

As if the day could not be worst.

I've a delay with an app for a school project, my stomach hurts like hell, I'm sleepy, my phone's SD card fucked up.

At least I still have some soda left, though

I'm helping my teammates with the problems that they face in debugging an issue or fixing a Dev environment.

Sometimes ppl go too flexible and ask for my Dev VM. The help I have to offer is tell them cause of an issue and tell them the fix that they have to give. What the fu*k they do? What did they gain as experience all these years.

Ppl don't know how to make draft commits. They can't fix but failures. They don't know anything.
They just sit at office and age as it is their only job.
Seniors take so much salary. Why don't they feel bad that they are not doing justice to their work.

Is it safe to write down all your failures and worst moments in life? Will it help to deal with them or just make things worse?

Aaaaaaaarg GCC! Stop caching my failures. I do correct my code, stop pulling the old copy from /tmp you bloated piece of C

Whatever I'm actually working on without giving up because dear god I cannot have any more failures

Considering making a plugin for my test running just for this gif:

Would make failures more interesting

ran the test before fixing an issue
result: 5 failures, 0 errors

ran the test after fixing the issue
result: 4 failures, 11 errors

all errors in one place

SharePoint have something called 'event receiver'. An event is triggered when the user inserts a new record in a list. That event must update a column in the same item. After a few minutes it starts to throw conflict errors while trying to update said column. Doesn't happen with every user. Also I wasn't able to reproduce this behavior in the dev environment.

So now I just recursively call the update method, passing an iterator parameter, repeating the same method until it successfully update the record. Or after 6 failures email someone to see what's going on. Just did it today and published at 7PM. Tomorrow gonna be a long day and I know I deserve it.

One success outweighs a million failures.

Oh for fucks sake! Why so we have threading when we synchronize EVERYTHING with a singleton... and when I actually show you that even unthreaded spaghetti code runs 40% faster under real life conditions than your shit you just brush it of because I'm still at university and don't know what I'm talking about... And not because changing it would require money or time we don't have... no, just because I “lack the necessary experience with such things.“

"Hello World!"

Yep, writing a "configure" script that passes despite the failures, is an excellent way to piss me off. Oh, did I mention that the errors weren't visible in the summary? And you sit there thinking why the compiled soft isn't linked with proper libraries.

In my head: Look man, I'm not saying you're lying. I just need examples of these reported failures. Call times, caller IDs, etc. I am trying to track this issue for you, but we've had no failures, and the call samples you provided show that the calls went through. We've tested the calls and they went through. You tested the call with your cell and it went through. Can you please provide examples of failures? That's what I need to help you. I'm not calling you a liar. Oh, and by the way, GO FUCK YOURSELF!

Not a webdev so I don't care about how a website looks, but logical failures can really trigger me at times.
E.g. this German federal page you had a bunch of options to fill in your employment status. Though being incomplete it forced you to choose one from the list and then at the end you have to checkmark that you filled in everything correctly reminding you there might be legal consequences otherwise. Thanks.

Amusingly on the same page their enum to string converter seemed broken or they just didn't care. So options to choose from read like: Enum_marital_status_unwed_coupled
Fucked up the screen shot so I can't show, but made me chuckle.

I was trying to build this AWESOME react native application.
1. install npm and react native [3 min]
- oh wait install yarn [about 10 min]
- how about expo 1 min
- and install expo on my phone [ 1min]
2. create a react native app
umm install pod [10 min]
run npm ... figure failures and stuff [20 min]

it's been almost 1 hour now and I forgot what I was building.

Working on a multi-year college project, going through tests from previous team.
Every test is not working quite right. They're almost all intermittent failures.
The reason? Every single test class extends some test class, which usually extends from some primary test class.
That primary test class opens up their whole UI, and outside of their UI test package, the only thing that gets used is a variable named session (a string), which isn't even specific.
WHY THE FUCK WOULDN'T YOU JUST MAKE THE SESSION NAME STRING A VARIABLE IN THE TEST FILES YOU DUMB FUCKS
THE ARGUMENT VALIDATION TESTS DO NOT NEED TO OPEN THE UI, LET ALONE CREATE THE WHOLE FUCKING DATABASE JUST TO VALIDATE ARGUMENTS, WHICH YOU DO APPLICATION SIDE
(Also they made it so every session has their own tables as opposed to having session IDs. E.g., "person_sessionID1" and "person_sessionID2" exist.)

What's your prediction on when Apple will have a great fall, with recent failures of mobiles technologies?

I just want to be able to concentrate on writing code for at least 3 hours without power failures,

my brain is stuck in a debugging loop and my PC is off

this country is fucked up, the herdsmen might as well come for my head

Trying to optimize web-scraping has been one of my greatest failures in life. 4 hours later and all my data is finally gathered. : (

Let's be honest - given the state of the world today, the more I listen to Megadeth, the more I relate to what Dave Mustaine has been pissed off about for a few decades now. Oh, you don't know who Dave Mustain is? He was, like, the 5th guy in Metallica. Rather, he was the bass player until he got fucked over because he was a dick and thrown off the first album Metallica did. Don't worry - he did OK. He formed Megadeth and still had quite a successful musical career. Why am I ranting about him? Simple - A lot of his lyrics are darker than Metallica's. I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my software/personal/professional life right now. I've got ideas & dreams, but all this COVID shit is just draining the fuck out of me. Sometimes I feel like I've failed - most of the lifeforms on this planet manage to procreate. Well, that didn't happen for me. On the down side, I didn't get to be a father. On the up side, I didn't punish the life of a child with my own brands of mistakes, ignorance, and stupidity. My life is littered with male failures. My biological father (paranoid, schizophrenic ) died at 58, doing everyone around him a favor. My grandfather on my mother's side died of colon cancer at 69 (so-called reformed alcoholic, manic depressive on lithium with great abusive tendencies). My step father who adopted me? Sure - he loved me. He just never understood me. "Computers are just a tool". Fuck you, 'dad'. Go play with your horses and tell me what I'm doing isn't meaningful. Where was I? Oh yes, almost killing myself last summer. I think between COVID and my own colossal screw ups & paranoia I went over the entire fucking edge. I pulled myself out of it with the help of medication, counseling, and learning to just let shit blow up because "it's not my problem". I'm still angry. Perhaps that's the only thing that keeps me going from time to time. I'll leave you with a quote from Ghandi - No, not that idealistic, limited one, Mahatma Ghandi. From his grandson, who managed to really pick up what he was putting down - Arun Ghandi:

“Use your anger for good. Anger to people is like gas to the automobile - it fuels you to move forward and get to a better place. Without it, we would not be motivated to rise to a challenge. It is an energy that compels us to define what is just and unjust.”

After several brutal company failures to build yet another "Groupon Clone" internally back when Groupon was cool, it was pitched as an idea to bolt a clone onto the successful site.

Legal ramifications aside, I am still utterly amazed that project got shut down in a culture of yes-men.

(Note for dfox: I love this place and i would really like to have all my posts/ ++s/comment data available to me . Current system does not allow me to see posts more than some months old. is it possible? I hope devrant is not deleting old posts)
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Stream of thoughts coming through

#justAthought 1
If you feel you are mentally unique (Not in retarded or disable kind of way, but having a different view of thinking, a different perspective, not-a-sheep-in-a-herd kind of mentality) , then you PROBABLY ARE, its just those who are not that mentally unique will find your thoughts absurd until you are proving yourself to be a successful person.
Even though you feel something is wrong in a current situation, and you can put some valid points in your argument, there would always come a point where your personal failures or average-ness would overshadow your valid points (kind of personal experience than a thought :/ )

#justAThought2 (Disclaimer: i am no fraud guru or priest, just a 9-5 curious , sleepless student-cum-professional)
I sometimes feel that the only good, meaningful goal that i could think for my life would be : to earn enough money to set up a small experiment environment , where I would initially take, around 25-30 people for 1-2 years. It would be an environment with totally $0 value for materialistic things like money, jewels, property,etc . Everyone is living free of tensions of basic services like food, clothes, house, taxes, work to live etc. Together we all will be collectively doing just these things: Making ourselves healthy , and more kind, spiritual towards other humans, animals, plants and environment, and thinking of ways to eradicate the value of "value".
We have already reached a point where we are generating even more harmful Technology than useful tech, how about changing the way of thinking and taking a small pause? I know a lot of people would be reluctant to do any work in such environment, but i believe one day or another, every one of these people has to come back to their usual jobs , but this time, not for money but for humanity.
Do you think this kind of environment is possible for the whole world? Because today most, if not all thinks that money is the ultimate goal. can we change that, and would that change be good?

#justAthought 3 (Disclaimer : 1. Its my mom's thought/whatsapp status , i kind off liked it. she is super religious by the way ^_^! | 2. more relevant for india/multi religious countries 3. for Indians: kind of thought from movie "oh my god")

There should be a regional law during so called "acts of god"(floods, earthquakes, other natural disasters) under which the donations given to religious places(temples, churches, mosques,etc) would be used to provide relief to affected areas.

After several Firefox/Mozilla failures (getting rid of proper addons, supporting censorship) Waterfox looks like a promising alternative. On Windows it runs great, sadly on Kubuntu LTS it does not - binary package only works with quite new std c++ library :-(. Damn it, why can't they distribute all their libraries together like Tor browser does (it's also Firefox based)?

Yesterday we had discussion on with developers about continuous deployment. When I asked one of the senior developers why they can't uncommit what commits you made to integration branch and which led to integration test failures. He said it's against the basic philosophy of git to uncommit... I don't know how git works...but seriously you can't use previous version of code or can't uncommit??

How do I overcome the fear of failure as a developer? I know that failures are a daily thing in the life of a developer but I'm severely afraid to mess things up. My colleague explained something to me that also involves making changes to the database but I'm really afraid to make mistakes. How does one overcome that initial fear? And did anyone experience the same as a junior developer?

How can a novel emerging challenger software (written in Rust) take me 4 hours to install (still ongoing)?

Today I have decided to give Pijul a go. Pijul describes itself as a theory-sound alternative to Git, which I have wanted to get away from for a while now, due to various reasons -- many of which I saw Pijul advertise to have solved on design level.

So I set away a day to learn Pijul, today. Well, 4 hours after I sat down -- after a number of hilariously wonky failures of "Rust ecosystem" to do the right thing as I had to install Rust with some shell one-liners those insane wizards recommend for installation process (all in the name of "stability but not stagnation") -- Pijul has now been installing with the blasted `cargo` for an hour now (that's after 3 hours of getting to the point where `cargo install pijul` stopped exploding in my face) -- telling me I only have 40 crates more to install. Are they throttling me, perhaps? I don't care -- I should have been installing Pijul from a repository in accordance with my Linux distribution, or -- at worst -- download a BLOODY COMPILED PROGRAM IMAGE.

What is it with the hipster developers today? Everything they get of tools, they subsume and churn out intricate complexities the likes of which we hadn't seen yesterday. Tell me fellow developers who think installation of your software has to require three and a half novel "installation solutions" to which I can't be arsed to be made privy -- do you think your life today is easier than, I don't know -- wrangling with a Makefile and a C compiler (which today thankfully can do rather good job of standards compliance)?

I mean I wouldn't mind Pijul being written in Rust -- but it turns out Rust's advertised elegancy in practice is wrapped in so much "giftwrap" I feel like what desire I had to learn Rust myself, I'll stear well clear.

Here's an advice for developers in general -- an advice continiously ignored for decades -- stop blowing your original scope of delivery in auxilary packages you think you need to reinvent just because you can or because your mom is out of town! For programming languages like Rust this most certainly entails NOT writing your own package manager, with its own package delivery mechanism that has its own configuration file format and virtual machine to configure dependency resolution or what have you!

You wanted to write a programming language that has novel features you think we need? Fine -- write one and stop there. Watch it grow, and watch people who are busy working on other parts (scopes) of software to integrate your offer.

What a shitshow. Stop smuggling alternative package managers, installers, and discombulators with your actual product -- I only want the latter, I don't want the rest of your damn piping, walls, roof and a cathedral on top of it!

Don't be that guy starting with a pin, and ending up with a fucking diorama miniature of a pig farm in Netherlands. Jesus.

I'd like to ask peoples opinions on building cross platform apps. So basically I'm on windows, and these insatiably annoying project leads (I fell for the "you code make me an app" one) want it to be cross platform. My first thought was PWAs, but then read that apple are dicks and some of the most important features are not actually supported (#!@?). So then it's ionic or Cordova, but who likes CSS? Or Angular 2? And for a native experience, I'd want to follow both iOS and android design patterns in the same codebase which is way beyond my pay grade. React native comes from Facebook, so I already hate it. Should I just build an android app and cross the iOS bridge later or build a not very native feeling, not vertically centred cross platform Cordova thing? Anyone who's had experience using Cordova care to comment on their successes / failures?

"To clarify, add detail. Imagine that, to clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design." - Edward Tufte

Failure teaches us that success can't. Agree?.... Share your biggest failures.

Yesterday's programming failures are today's product managers.
Today's project managers are morons.

That moment when the project lead shows up with a fake smile at 11pm Friday after a 3 week crunch and tells you the last two days of ridiculous overwork from 9 am to 6 am where pointless because Mr. big shot CEO has a better idea for the meeting with the client on Monday.
So now so we have to work over the clock the whole weekend to cover their managing failures.