As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

So, I needed a package installed on one of our Unix servers. The package manager--which is obsolete garbage--was failing with a message which can only be described as a variant of "Go fuck yourself". A quick Google search didn't help.

3 espressos and an eternity later, I have descended into a manic state. My hair has turned grey and I have started lactating. As a last-ditch effort, I try a new search query on Google, and the first link takes me to a forum with a thread discussing a similar issue. The last post in the thread has a solution which works for me. After fixing the issue, everything in the world feels right and I decide to thank the generous poster, who is like an angel to me at this point.

Guess what? The poster is none other than me. 8 months back, I had created a user account on the forum just to post the solution to a similar issue I had on another server.

Senior IT engineer enters the room and quietly talks to a coworker about a job related issue.

Another coworker decided to troll the sysadmin.

CW: *yells* "Open a ticket!" (That's the sysadmin's regular reply)
IT: *ignores*
CW: *trying to get his attention* "Open a ticket first! Then come back"
IT: *gives him the stare of death*
CW: "Go away and open a ticket!"
IT: *silently leaves the room*

After no more than a minute CW gets a reject from all networks outside the company's VPN.

IT comes back into the room, get's intimately close to CW's ear and says "Now open a ticket".

👋

🎤

Four months ago changed a laptop failing hdd and give it back to customer. Today I got a 30 minutes call because the computer "is not like before the repair, it doesn't work well".

*Thinks* Well, s#*@, before the repair the hdd had more than 2000 damaged clusters, which prevented even the os to start

*Says* "Could you describe me the issue?"
....
...
[ basically he was saying that since he started using IE as a browser, he didn't have Google.com set as the first page and that he had to bing it]
...
"When did the 'issue' start, If I may ask?"

>"Two weeks ago. "

Two weeks ago.
Two f*""#ng weeks ago.
Set aside for the nature of the issue, you blame my four months ago repair for a two weeks ago issue?
"The computer was better before"?
THAT F###ING MACHINE WAS LIKE A BURNING HOUSE - I RESCUED DATA FOR 2 DAYS JUST BEFORE THE HDD STARTED TO CRANK AT EVERY SPIN - I REBUILT IT TO GIVE IT YOU BACK FULLY WORKING AFTER YOU USED AS A FOOTBALL, AND NOW YOU BLAME ME BECAUSE THE
BROWSER ISN'T SETTED AS YOU LIKE

No,seriously, is like I rebuilt a burned house from scrap and now the owner blames me because in the kitchen sink the hot water tap is on the right side instead of the left side.
Seriusly, wtf.

First internship (ranted about it before).

- Had to google translate their entire internal crm.
- pointed out major security flaws and got a speech saying that "I shouldn't think so high of myself and I didn't have the fucking right to criticize their products"
- every time the boss came to the office after a failed sales presentation, we (interns) got called the most nasty stuff. Yes. We didn't have anything to do with that at all.
- I had "hygiene issues": window to the south with 35-40 degrees (Celsius) feeling temperature and no airco. Deo didn't really make a difference but wasn't allowed to use it there anyways. Details: I have a transpiration issue so I sweat shitloads more than other people, that didn't help at all.
- nearly got fired because I had to to to the doctor in company time for a serious health issue.
- was (no kidding) REQUIRES to use internet explorer and we were monitored constantly.

Self esteem dropped through the fucking ground there.

So I was going to write a rant but may I first address the biggest fucking issue with typing on the default Google keyboard...

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

1. Move to new house
2. Setup electricity account to auto-pay every month
3. Wait
4. Receive "disconnect" notice from electric provder
5. WTF
6. Call. Oh, yeah, our website doesn't tell you that you have to pay your first month's bill before you can setup auto-pay. It's in the fine print.

Okay people, here's my rant - if you manage a website that supports auto-pay and you're not PREVENTING your customers from signing up for auto-pay until there is a $0 balance in the account, then you're doing something wrong. Don't let your customers think they're about to loose their electric service because of a frontend guardrails issue.

I honestly have no energy to even type this out because this is so draining, but here goes.

I am usually very calm and can keep my composure well, but boy do you push my limits. Do you think my work is so easy that it’s just “a bunch of queries and simple logic”? Well, fine. YOU FUCKING DO IT.. right before I grab you by your fucking neck and shove your face repeatedly into the keyboard. You even have the audacity to give us a project and come the very next fucking day and repeatedly keep asking us “iS iT FiNisHeD yEt?” so much and annoy even the calmest in our team even when we clearly stated that it was going to take us 30 work days to fucking finish it. Do you not know what a working day is? 30 work days is not the same as 30 days you dumbfuck. You have no idea how any of these work and yet you preach your bullshit and waste our fucking time when we could have used that time better to finish our work. THIS IS WHY EVERY SINGLE EMPLOYEE KEEPS LEAVING AND WHY THIS COMPANY HAS A VERY LOW EMPLOYEE RETENTION RATE. You won’t even let me finish my fucking lunch in peace. We have 45 minutes for lunch and since I’ve been eating out for almost the past year (I live alone and don’t usually have time to make food at home because of my hour and a half long commute), a close friend of mine’s mom reached out to and said “Hey, since you’ve been usually getting food from outside, why not join us for lunch?”, so I did and it was the most amazing food ever. Mind you, this was the first time I’ve ever left work myself to have lunch since I joined. I did get 10 minutes late because lunchtime tends to fall around the time where the schools close for the day (no shit) and school traffic is usually insane, and you unsurprisingly decided to make an issue out of a non-issue especially since I’M THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON WORKING IN THE COMPANY and also dock my pay for that. Let me also include the time where our one of the others in the management gave us a quick project that was to be quickly finished while we working on an existing project so we put aside a day just to complete and ship the app and the features and as usual, you decided to make an issue out of a non-issue and decided to shame us publicly and even made (my now former) colleague cry. You’re just a spoiled, selfish, ignorant nit-witted fucking imbecile who has no idea how to even properly run a business. Get fucked in the arse with a cactus. I'm done. I've held on for so long but this is the last straw. I'll be handing my letter of resignation soon. Good luck with running a company without any employees.

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

Me: *Gets an error message I don't recognize.* fuck.

Me: *Googles error*
*First result is not StackOverflow but a github issue instead* oh FUCK!

Disclaimer: kinda non dev related. Just working to pay the bills right now.

The other day I ran for the train to work, don't want to be fucking late, right?

Arrived and this guy asked me this: (I have a sweating/transpiration problem but I'm fully aware of that)

"hey man, ever heard of fucking showers or deodorant?!"

Yes, I was sweating my ass off and you could smell me but I can't FUCKING help that.

It was very embarrassing and humiliating to get that kinda comment in front of like 30 people but I just swallowed it and went to work.

After the first break, a woman from management came to me and pulled me aside. A few people had complained about how that guy from before said some pretty humiliating stuff to me and she said that the guy received a warning and was told to fucking learn to treat people with respect, regardless of their (health) issues/appearance. I also got an apology and a sorry and if I could keep my eyes open for such behaviour in the future.

I'm very glad that she apologized although it wasn't her fault because I know I've got this health issue and I can't do anything about it yet but it can MOTHERFUCKING hurt when someone talks shit about me when I smell and I CAN'T FUCKING HELP IT BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY MY BODY WORKS TOO BADLY.

I felt protected and safe about my issue for the first time in my life.

Thanks management!

IBM

I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"

Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:

"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"

YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.

I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.

My first experience with Swift ended in me infecting myself with a virus (kinda). I wanted to create a macOS app that would listen for a global key event, catch it and then type a word.

During development I set it up to listen for ANY key event and to type "BALLS". So what happened? I compiled the code, everything looked good, I started the app and pressed a key which emitted a key event. The event was caught by my app and it typed "BALLS", just as expected. However, the typing of the word caused a NEW key event to be emitted, which the app also caught. The infinite loop was a fact. FUCK!

I tried closing down XCode but all I could see was "BALLS BALLS BALLS" everywhere. I tried everything I knew but it just kept typing "BALLS". I had to hold down my power button to make it stop.

I finally finished the app (which I named "The Balls App", I kept the word "BALLS"). I solved this issue by only listening for KeyUp and when emitting the "BALLS" word I just used KeyDown.

Got a "Very Dissatisfied" rating from a user because apparently his issue took 30 days to resolve when the fix was applied in 30 minutes. I'm sorry. It took you 30 days to respond to my first email, during which I consistently sent follow-ups to you and your manger and I'm the bad guy?

Someone on a C++ learning and help discord wanted to know why the following was causing issues.

char * get_some_data() {
char buffer[1000];
init_buffer(&buffer[0]);
return &buffer[0];
}

I told them they were returning a pointer to a stack allocated memory region. They were confused, didn't know what I was talking about.

I pointed them to two pretty decently written and succinct articles, the first about stack vs. heap, and the second describing the theory of ownership and lifetimes. I instructed to give them a read, and to try to understand them as best as possible, and to ping me with any questions. Then I promised to explain their exact issue.

Silence for maybe five minutes. They disregard the articles, post other code saying "maybe it's because of this...". I quickly pointed them back at their original code (the above) and said this is 100% an issue you're facing. "Have you read the articles?"

"Nope" they said, "I just skimmed through them, can you tell me what's wrong with my code?"

Someone else chimed in and said "you need to just use malloc()." In a C++ room, no less.

I said "@OtherGuy please don't blindly instruct people to allocate memory on the heap if they do not understand what the heap is. They need to understand the concepts and the problems before learning how C++ approaches the solution."

I was quickly PM'd by one of the server's mods and told that I was being unhelpful and that I needed to reconsider my tone.

Fuck this industry. I'm getting so sick of it.

If I run into a problem with code or a configuration of some kind, like a good little programmer, I Google it.

One of two things will happen:

1) I quickly find the answer to my problem.

or

2) After hours of searching, I can't find anything about my problem. At all. I change the search phrasing, adjust the advanced search settings, read all the somewhat related but still unrelated articles. Nothing.

If #1 happens, awesome, life is great, thanks Internet!

If #2 happens, it's because of one of two things:

1) I am the first person in the world to stumble upon this issue. Quick! To the Blog Cave!

2) I AM TOO STUPID TO BE DOING WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO BECAUSE MY MISTAKE IS SO UNBELIEVABLY DUMB THAT NO ONE HAS BOTHERED NOR WILL BOTHER TO WRITE ABOUT IT, ANYWHERE, EVER. I LOOK AT MY WORK AGAIN FOR THE 100TH TIME AND FINALLY REALIZE MY EMBARRASSING NOOBERY.

2.1 is a unicorn. 2.1's happen to other people.

I am dealing with a 2.2.

Me: ooh my eyes hearts, I have to sleep now, I fix this tomorrow morning.

(go to sleep)

Inner Me: hey
Me: ...
Inner Me: pisst! wake up
Me: what?? leave me alone I'm tired
Inner Me: remember that issue you had?
Me: yes?
Inner Me: this is how you can solve it
Me: great thanks, I'll fix it later
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now
Me: I'm tired, I'll fix it first thing in the morning
Inner Me: no no you'll forgot it
Me: no I won't, let me sleep
Inner Me: no no you'll forget and I won't tell you again
Me: look I write it down in my phone now leave me alone
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now.
Me: *crying* for God sake...

(gets out of bed and try to turn on PC and it's not starting, realizing that the power is out)

Me: you happy now, I fix it tomorrow.
Inner Me: no no stay awake till power is back on.
Me: SHUT THE FICN ON PICK OF CRAPE. Did SHDUHDBD DBDJDB

I got a call at 12:30 one night a few months back. Apparently some back-end scripts I edited to fix an automated test setup crashed around 75 test pc's and halted somewhere around 2000 tests. I quickly jumped on, fixed the issue, and got everything back online.

I was up all night certain I would get fired. First thing in the morning the client says welcome to the club some, of the best have done the same thing.

It's more than a story bear with me.
Open source world is big enough to scare a beginner like me, which happened when I started with my first contribution in the year 2015. So many platforms, lot of organisations, freaking images of coding languages, pull request, issues and bugs- these all were enough to freak me out.

The only thing which motivated me to stay and know about the open source technology was to develop my first program using python. I was in great difficulty as when I started writing my program I was stuck after almost every two to three stages of compilation, so I needed guidance. I started my search on Github by creating my repository, pushing my code and following developers. I was amazed to see such a good response from people around me, not only they helped me to debug and fix the issue but they also helped me to understand and build my program from a new perspective. Daily discussions and communication, new issue build up and solving them by the traditional way of GUI further motivated me to learn the Git using the command line tool.

I still remember the year I worked on a repo using the command line tool, it was amazing. Within months or few, the fear of open source tools, community, interaction all just flew away. With this rant I will like to suggest all the beginners and open source enthusiast to just step a foot ahead and ask openly to the world- "I need help" and believe me you will be showered with information and help from all the world.

Happy contribution.

Day 1:

Me: 'Hi'

Middleware guy: 'Raise a Jira. We have always been so accommodating. Contact your manager.'

*Jeez*

===

Day 2:

Me: 'Could you please start the server in dev environment? I am a new joiner. I don't have access. Here is a jira.'

Middleware guy: 'Deadlines may be for you. It is not for me. Wait until tomorrow.'

*Damn, did he get a divorce recently?*

===

Day 5: *An urgent delivery asap* 'Hi, could you please do the configuration of the new app in staging?'

Middleware guy: 'So, here is the split up...
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5 & 6
Your app will be configured by tomorrow first half hopefully.. Oh and you can escalate if it is too late..
'
*What a b...*

===

Day 8:

Me: *Doing late sit for pushing a task* 'Hi, we have an issue. The server is not starting. Could it be due to..'

MW guy in 'second' shift: 'Oh, we don't extend support on unusual hours'

Me: 'But this is second shift.'

MW guy: 'Yeah, but I have to go home early now...'

====

Day 10:

Team Lead: 'Any innovative solutions?'

Me: 'Let's go SERVERLESS!' :D

5 years ago, in my first week of starting this particular job, the CTO casually mentioned they'd been struggling with a bug for years. Basically, in the last few days of the year, it seemed that records were jumping a year ahead, with no rhyme nor reason why. Happened every year, and wasn't linked with them deploying new code. (Their code was a mess with no sane way to unit test it, but that was a separate issue.)

I happened to know immediately what might be causing it - so I ran a case-sensitive search in the codebase for "YYYY", pointed out the issue, explained it, then committed a fix all in about 2 minutes.

I was told I'd officially passed my probation.

(Search for "week year vs year" if you're curious & the above doesn't ring any bells.)

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.

I recently filled out an e-form that asked you to fill out your birthday in the format of:
DD/MM/YY
but it didn't accept 22/09/1997
I was confused at first. I'm over 18 what's the issue?
Turns out it would only accept 22/9/1997
What sort of monster does that?

Humble Request:
If you are going to close the issue please have the courtesy to share your solution first 😒

Today I ran the Windows network troubleshooter because my laptop didn't have wifi.

The troubleshooter ACTUALLY FIXED THE ISSUE!!! This is the first time I see a Windows troubleshooter actually FIX THE ISSUE.

So you think it's bad when your friends, family, strangers and others ask you to fix their phone or computer is bad when they hear you're a programmer, IT or good with computers?

You think it's bad when they ask you whether you're hacking when they see code or terminal on your screen?

You think it's bad when they ask you to fix a cracked phone screen because you work with computers?

Well, think again because today my teammate was asked to fix a vending machine by X from another department because, according to X the vending was not accepting X's other dollar bill. The first dollar bill was accepted so why wouldn't it accept the 2nd one? Because the 🤬 dollar bill is crumpled. That's it.

What wows me is what made X think this is an IT issue.

According to X.... "because it has power, lights and touch screen so IT can fix it That's what you guys do, right? You can fix anything".

Me: wait!?, what?, uhhh..., are you serious? Wtf? Why? Grrrr

Don't you just love it when upper Management people that never wrote a line of code in their life tell you, the software engineer peasant, to refactor all of your projects with Inclusive Terminology?

I mean I'll do it, the company is just protecting their image and money... But I blame the sick mind that came up with this in the first place.... It's implying that all sofware engineers are somehow racist and sexist and I'm somewhat offended by that notion. Whoever started this trend should seriously burn in hell.

P. S.
Apparently "the elderly" is also non-inclusive and should be referred to as "older adult"... What the fuck?

Do you not realize that you're just disassembling words and nothing else? Also "AIDS patient" should be referred to as "person living with AIDS"... Ok? Same fucking thing? If not even worse? At least "patient" kinda invokes that professional help is given... A person living with AIDS just implies you're infected and seeking no help...

You help no one with this non-issue bullshit. All your replacements will be deemed outdated and non-inclusive in the next 5 years again... Fucking hell... Waste of time and money

I'd love to develop stuff I find cool for a living and currently doing a first try but right now I can keep this up for a few more months until I have to get a job again :/

Seriously, the amount of motivation I have right now is goddamn high but money is going to become an issue soon.

First commit message at a new job:
"This is to fix an issue where {issue} was happening because of {reason}. {Detailed description of the exact changes and the reasoning of every single one}."

Second commit message at a new job:
"Did some stuff."

The first time I caused a massive error on production.

The good news was the site didn't go completely down. The bad news, however, was that it went down for 60% of our users, and because it's only partial, it got detected only after about two hours.

Everyone halted what they were doing to help investigate the issue. When it turned out that my latest commit caused the error, I was told to fix it... with the CTO and senior software architects watching.

It all happened because I deleted one too many line, an if statement, making the accompanying else statement a complete nonsense. It was a corner case code unforeseen by the QA guy.

The attached meme perfectly describes my feeling for the rest of the month following that accident.

it finally happened, PM/PO/SM is now also dev シ

each standup he now also gives update about his work in progress, with his diligently designed subtasks, perfectly sticking to the daily script, like a good well-behaved employee boi. it's weirdly cute

devs can't await to review his first PR. feeling the strong urge to spank his ass for each minor coding style issue or poorly-named variable...

Ah, my first issue!

What is your story of your first encounter with a Linux Distro?

Here's mine (Slight long version) –
Back in my 8th grade I used to buy Tech magazines that used to have DVDs filled with random updated contents like Audio/Video tools, Wallpapers and other stuff. There used to be this "Linux Distro of the Month" section that I used to ignore because I didn't know what it is.
But one issue of the magazine had a review of this "amazing new" Ubuntu 10.10. I read it and at first I thought it's some kind of theme for Windows (I know). But then I tried it out on my HP Compaq nx6120 which had a pure BIOS. No UEFI shit. Ubuntu came with it's wubi installer and it installed Ubuntu smoothly like a normal software. Later I discovered that it is a completely different operating system that doesn't run anything from my Windows. I was upset about it and I booted back to Windows.
But I never removed it. I felt like exploring what it was and why people use it.
It's almost 9 years later and I'm so glad with what had happened back then.

Got pretty peeved with EU and my own bank today.

My bank was loudly advertising how "progressive" they were by having an Open API!

Well, it just so happened I got an inkling to write me a small app that would make statistics of the payments going in and out of my account, without relying on anything third-party. It should be possible, right? Right?

Wrong...

The bank's "Open API" can be used to fetch the locations of all the physical locations of the bank branches and ATMs, so, completely useless for me.

The API I was after was one apparently made obligatory (don't quote me on that) by EU called the PSD2 - Payment Services Directive 2.

It defines three independent APIs - AISP, CISP and PISP, each for a different set of actions one could perform.

I was only after AISP, or the Account Information Service Provider. It provides all the account and transactions information.

There was only one issue. I needed a client SSL certificate signed by a specific local CA to prove my identity to the API.

Okay, I could get that, it would cost like.. $15 - $50, but whatever. Cheap.

First issue - These certificates for the PSD2 are only issued to legal entities.

That was my first source of hate for politicians.

Then... As a cherry on top, I found out I'd also need a certification from the local capital bank which, you guessed it, is also only given to legal entities, while also being incredibly hard to get in and of itself, and so far, only one company in my country got it.

So here I am, reading through the documentation of something, that would completely satisfy all my needs, yet that is locked behind a stupid legal wall because politicians and laws gotta keep the technology back. And I can't help but seethe in anger towards both, the EU that made this regulation, and the fact that the bank even mentions this API anywhere.

Seriously, if 99.9% of programmers would never ever get access to that API, why bother mentioning it on your public main API page?!

It... It made me sad more than anything...

CEO at work has a Mac elitist as a friend who somehow indoctrinated err I mean convinced him to get apple everywhere, now the most common issue is updating Microsoft products on the Mac.....

Mac elitist guys first name is Steve lol no lie, he also services the Macs which he expects to do so when no one is around, oh and did I mention he wants us to leave our passwords on our desks LOL, he doesn't work for the company and I really really don't trust him, glad I have a git repo, and I hope he doesn't delete anything on my PC (very reluctant to leave my password on my desk, so I may just convince everyone that my Mac is fine, which seems like it's doing it's thing)

First year at university, prepared to set up multiple electronics.
rPi, arduino Ethernet shield, laptop, and desktop.
Brand new netgear switch to satisfy my internet surfing needs....

After setting up my devices, I realized none of them have internet. Hm. The feed port on my switch wasn't blinking either. So I tell the front desk, and a short 7 days later the port is back on. Yay, problem solved.

One morning I arise to see the port dark and inactive. Furious I use my laptop to share an internet connection while my actual port is "broken".

Support ticket is reopened and this time I get an email saying the port was disabled due to a security issue.

Me: what's the issue?
IT: there was more than two devices connected to the port

(OnLy TwO dEvIcEs PeR port???)

Me: oh okay I will only connect two.

The next day the port is disabled, again.

Me: can you tell me why it was disabled?
IT: a switch was detected being used, security error.
Me: how do I connect more than one device to the port without a switch???
IT: ...
IT: Please only connect one device.

🤔

At an expensive Apache Spark training class. For hands on portion you use their system. When everyone logged on, their system couldn't handle the load. First they blamed the hotel wifi (even though every other site was running perfectly) and then they blamed AWS. It's clearly an issue with their system. It's ridiculous to not be honest with a room full of developers who know what's up.

WTF freelancer, just won a design contest and it’s so fucking hard to withdraw the money to my bank account.

“There is some invalid bank details in your withdraw request, please confirm with your bank”

I never withdraw money before so i have to wait 15 days for my first withdrawal for each withdrawal methods.

The first method (express withdrawal with no fees) was failed because the bank details issue, talk with the cs and they told me to confirm to my bank, confirmed and tried again (only 1 or 2 days waiting time) but still failed, been trying this 3 times.

Trying the second method a.k.a wire transfer, i have confirmed the bank about what details are required to receive money from overseas first so i can prevent some stupid errors.

Wait another 15 days and ...

STILL FAILED WITH SAME PROBLEM

FUCK

This is the first time i regret when i won something.

ＦＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵ

I just fixed my first code issue in my first IT job ever! Holy fucking shit I'm almost senior software engineer by now!

That magic joy of knowing that my instructions will run on someone else's computer is just mind-blowing.

Wow i must have been brain dead when i wrote this code. Needed to exclude certain elements from response for the the list of objects.

for (obj : objects) {
If (obj.skipFromResponse()) {
break
}
add obj to response
}

I used break instead of continue at the if condition which meant it would break out of the loop at the first instance of condition being met.

This went through qa and has been in production for 4 weeks so how did this not break before. Well little did i know the list of objects was sorted and all the test data, qa data and everything so far in production coincidentally only had the last element with matching condition. This meant it returned everything correctly so far.

Today was the first time there was a situation where this caused incorrect output. Luckily as soon as I heard the description of the issue I remembered to check the merged PR and hung my head in shame for making such trivial error. I must have written way more complicated code without any problem but this made me embarrassed to even admit. 🤦‍♂️

You know what irks me is whenever people ask me how to do something without Googling it first.

Like ffs whenever I Google the same issue because I don't know the answer either, it's literally the first fucking result. Like damn bruh.

I don't mind helping people at all, but please at least try to be an adult and Google the fucking question first.

So I started getting email notifications telling me about transactions made using my credit card. But I DON'T have a credit card in the first place.

Instead of trying to call customer care and pressing an endless array of buttons, I drive to the bank. I tell them the situation and they check every database they have but they couldn't find any trace of a card connected to my account. Turns out their database somehow had cross-links in their database.
How does the one of the biggest banks in the country possibly have such an issue. Worst part is that it's been a day and they still haven't fixed it -_-

Woke up this morning to a fucking giant snowstorm and my first reaction was 'fml' , poured some coffee , lit a smoke and started checking my work mail 'Issue xxxx response : Not solvable '...what the...I go through the files on my phone , look at what that issue was : lack of proper validation , filtering and encoding of input thus enabling xss . Not solvable my ass ...simply adding literally 3 more characters to that fucking retarded filter would stop all the bypasses . This issue is a showstopper for their project and that is what they answer ?
Sorry to indians out here but some of your colleagues are as stupid and unimaginative as they can possibly ever come .

Do these NPC devs even read the README of a project before spewing some dumbass stackoverflow like garbage in an issue thread?

Do your damn job. Being a good software engineer is not like TiKtOk or cHaTgPt where some "magical" answer or entertainment is spoon fed to you, do your absolute best to solve it yourself first, before causing more chaos out in the opensource world.

Man they're coming today. I got another one.

An issue filed over an issue tags color being "too bright" and "draws more attention than other tags"

It's the "good first issue" tag you think maybe I did that by design?

Holy fuck.

Yesterday was the first time i used recursion to solve an issue in our project..Never felt so good 😁

So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.

The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.

Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.

The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.

Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.

It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.

Working with client at different timezone (+3 hours difference). Client time: 5 P.M.

C: a blocker issue found
Step to reproduce:
Step 1: import the attached file
Step 2: blabla

Please get this fixed today.

Me: *where's the attached file?* Opens up ly*c, type his name and.... status offline.

Okay then, time to post my first rant. And get depressed until cob. 😔

First day of vacation after 5 months of overtime... aaaaand I'm stuck in bed with a back issue.
Can't even code all the things I had in mind. Nice holidays incoming yay...
At least I have devrant.

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

Tldr: I just FAILED AN EXAM because of my uni's SHITTIEST SERVERS EVER. YEAR AFTER YEAR THE EXACT SAME SHIT HAPPENS, THEIR SERVERS OR NETWORK FAIL HARD AND STUDENTS FAIL EXAMS BECAUSE OF IT, AND THEY NEVER FIX IT.
FUCK

In the middle of a 3h exam at uni, using Matlab through virtualdesktop, when suddenly it stops working entirely. Trying to restart it, no go. A few other people are having the same issue as well.
After 20 minutes of waiting, one IT tech shows up saying people in other labs are having the same issue, big problems.
Ended up wasting nearly an hour waiting for shit to work again - which it did, but only when the extra time they had given us ran out.
Desperately tried to salvage what I could of my exam, but I don't think I did enough to pass.

This is not the first time it happens. Exam after exam, shit like this keeps happening over and over again, and every time some students get fucked in the ass and have to take the exam again - the next semester.

This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the country, and top 20 engineering schools in the world.
FUCK THIS SHIT

Ok I completely lost it... Been in a prod issue all week and basically just said the root cause is bc this team is blind....

Use the forest and trees analogy first but they still didn't seem to see it so I sent them this.

And then the chat went silent....

What a silly end of the week. Have to continue developing at a project a student started at our company. Today I had a phone conference with the client. They told me there where missing several data. At first I thought it is only a frontend issue but now I know it is a database issue so I have to work through several database procedures which are all undocumented and the student who build those is not reachable. Business integration ftw

Fucking first rant here:

So we tried to teach Two new colleagues to typescript and git and testing and stuff and we have a SPOC “which claimed to be very technical”. The SPOC’s task is to keep an eye on the work, and today we have had a review...

After two weeks, the created multiple branches into our git, all with one commit of 400 LOC changed, no merge requestet, issue in Redmine set to “closed”.
Well, by the way they were supposed to write Unit tests for our app.
But I thought, ok, we’ll check their branches.

Their tests all passed (cz) but man, the app didn’t and on compilation there were errors, the app is broken. Damn.

Is it really so far off, that even of They wrote tests, that the app should still work?
AND I THOUGHT IT IS COMMON SENSE. Damn!
Guess how needs to fix it

Best Hardware support team.
I hope every one of you got such team.

My keyboard was not working properly.
programmer's most used special character ; is auto typing anywhere that is obviously keyboard issue so I called H/W support team.

me: *explained above problem.*
supporter : Ya we know that issue ,YOUR HARD DRIVE IS CORRUPTED. We have 2 option
1) either we can formate your system.
2) We have to change hard drive.
Me thinking : *devrant stuff found*
Me: that is really sad part. How many time you solved such problem?
S: This is my first time in this company ,previously I solved such issue more than 10 time.
Me: you really look smart.
S: thank you,any how I will resolved this issue today.
Me: today I am going earlier but yes we will meet on monday. thank you for quick response.

I have come across the most frustrating error i have ever dealt with.
Im trying to parse an XML doc and I keep getting UnauthorizedAccessException when trying to load the doc. I have full permissions to the directory and file, its not read only, i cant see anything immediately wrong as to why i wouldnt be able to access the file.
I searched around for hours yesterday trying a bunch of different solutions that helped other people, none of them working for me.
I post my issue on StackOverflow yesterday with some details, hoping for some help or a "youre an idiot, Its because of this" type of comment but NO.
No answers.
This is the first time Ive really needed help with something, and the first time i havent gotten any response to a post.
Do i keep trying to fix this before the deadline on Sunday? Do i say fuck it and rewrite the xml in C# to meet my needs? Is there another option that i dont even know about yet?
I need a dev duck of some sort :/

Hello everyone, first time ranter here! I have been studying Computer Science for 2 years starting September. The program introduced me to Java,HTML,CSS, JS and php. I feel like even though I am currently studying this I still do not "know" how to code. For example when I look at my classmates when they code it all seems so effortless and smooth, if they run into an issue they will usually solve it within the hour where as when I run into an issue I struggle to even see what the problem is. So the real point of this rant is, how do I improve? I am currently doing the #100daysofcode to get better but sometimes I feel so far away from calling myself a "developer" what is your road to the "developer" title? did you struggle as much as I am at the moment? or did you just sail into it like my classmates?

*Having issues with chrome using %20 of the CPU on linux, decides to google and see if anyone else is having the same issue*

Hmmm, this looks like it should be useful

*Opens link*

Oh look, all 40 replies are people complaining that the poster is using Chrome in the first place and telling them to just move to firefox, vivaldi, opera or any other browser... Thanks guys, real fucking helpful!

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

Client: THIS IS CRITICAL, SOME DATA HAS BEEN DELETED, WHAT ZE FUUK HAPPENED, UNDO THIS FAST
Us: so after carefully reviewing the code, related resources and the network traffic we conclude that was never sent in the first place.
*closes issue*

I'm glad we got such a meaningful bug report on the same day a production system started failing, one big deployment that that was like a boss with 3 phases, an unnecessary long meeting and an app developer that that wanted me to break HTTP standards.

Expectations VS. Reality : A new Software Project (After all designs and requirements are clear and fixed.)

EXPECTATIONS:
Day 1: Create workspace, Configure tools
Day 2: Implement high priority Feature
Day 3: Write UT and peer review
Day 4: Push first feature to Prod.

REALITY:
Day 1: Create workspace, Setup configurations
Day 2: Still setting up configurations
Week 1: Almost done setting up configurations
Week 2: New migrations issue, again reconfigure before coding starts
Week 3: Take a vacation
Month 2: Finally things are working but God knows what was the issue...

Kiss for fucks sake! What the fuck of an ORM is Sequelize? How the fuck do I have to write a 50 line query json to get a query for a single object going, which doesn't work then because that shit peace of software has a bug that breaks findOne and forces you to use findAll and use the first and only hit?!

Well yes, I looked in your garbage SEO docs for that issue, but whenever I look for something specific I just end up on your optimized as hell querying for noobs doc page. FUCK YOU!

Seriously, you guys working with Sequelize saved me many hours. But fuck your fuckups! And ajfjekidjjskrhbdkaowbdjdkwobdnfie

On the nth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

1 misconfigured autoscaling group
200 unnecessary servers
29 urgent emails
3 support teams that would have fixed the problem in an hour of anybody had bothered going to them first

Ugh. Idiots. Somehow the whole issue was caused by a single full hard disk, which caused database transactions to fail, which caused the group to scale out and spin up new instances, which didn't actually fix the problem so it kept scaling until it hit the limit and then continuously failed to create new instances for several hours straight, generating loads of notification emails and generally causing problems for everyone involved.

When I started my current job I fucked up my first deploy ever so slightly but In the end managed to get it going with a quick hack (unpacking our war file modifying some properties and a jsp page before restarting the tomcat server )

One of the senior developers was having a really bad day and decided I was who he was going to take it out on, calling me a cowboy (in the Uk that’s a bad thing) blah blah, being really nasty and condescending to me.

I was about ready to shout at him as it was his dodgy configuration that caused the issue in the first place, but instead I took a deep breath and firmly (but calmly) told him never to speak to me like that again or we would have a problem.

5 years later he’s never spoken to me like that again and is actually a pretty decent guy.

Moral of the story people have bad days but also don’t let people take the piss.

So, first a bit of background:

We've got a parent class, owned by another team, and two child classes, owned by my team. One of the children is unused. (Already sounds bullshit right.)

On to the story:
6 months ago, I had to modify one of the children (add new functionality).

I try to modify the base class to add it, the senior dev in charge says "no, just add it on the child". So I do, then merge it in.

Yesterday I wake up to a high priority bug. Turns out the senior guy wants to add another child class, and wants the functionality I put in my class on the base class.

Even commented on my PR from 6 months ago asking why I didn't do that.

The fucker opened up a high priority issue assigned to me, asking ME TO DO THE CHANGE I WANTED TO DO 6 MONTHS AGO THAT HE SAID NO TO.

Fuck this shit. I have a meeting with him and my boss in an hour. My boss is pissed, I hope he tells the other guy to go fuxk himself and do the change himself.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.

The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.

Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...

Issue or Error? Rant story time!

I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.

Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.

We all though “WTF?!”

To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.

Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”

Hey DevRant Fam ❤️ hope everyone is well as always! It’s Sunday here in dull weather Sydney!, i was thinking bout this for awhile now, now surely most of us time to time use Stack Overflow for help and it works!.

Though, thats not the issue :-), my first time using it as a newbie wasn’t so great so to say, I’ve noticed that the people over at S/O can be quite rude such as they would downVote my question and also not comment why they have downvoted it :-(.

I’d love to know what you guys think, funnily enough I’m using DevRant much more than FB itself 😅, anyways guys hope you’re all having a great one!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

Context: I (among other things) manage some servers for my students' club so I have first-hand information about anything network or server-related that happens. We basically run a big enterprise network and we allow devices to connect if a person has paid their membership and the device's MAC address (be it wireless or ethernet) is recognized by our switches/aruba controllers.

Story: So today a first complaint about "the wifi not working" came in because of Android 10 and its MAC randomization. We deal with MAC randomization on Windows laptops and PCs but I think it is disabled by default so we almost never get this type of complaint.
It took one of the other guys probably 5 minutes to figure out how to disable it... only to discover it is a per-network setting.

The actual question: If there are any network administrators here on devRant - how do you deal with this MAC filtering vs MAC randomization issue?

I am making an LDAP user manager and porting application for my workplace.

The thing is, i made the first version of it in PHP already. Shit works fine and it without an issue.

But

I had an itch to redesign it using another tech stack that would be speedier, more tested and using a more established platform.

Enter Clojure, a Lisp dialect for the JVM. In a single day I managed to get 80% of the application done. We have about 80k users inside of our ldap system(maybe more) and I tested it with 150 accounts, so far so good.

If this works I will be the first person to deploy a Clojure application, not only for my organization, but for the city as a whole while simultaneously being able to say that I got a Lisp app deployed and working :D

I am loving this. Really wanna have a Lisp app out there and add it to my resume.

The head of my department, an old timer and really ancient dev smiled heavily when I showed him the codebase. Not only is it minimal, it is concise and elegant :D

I love Clojure

And Texas

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

I hate the feeling you get when you do a lengthy, drooling task that once finished got you nowhere.

My day was mostly productive for a Sunday, woke up late as all Sundays, spent the afternoon writing a proposal and exercising when I saw a notification for a homework for tonight at 12.

A research paper about Dijkstra's philosopher problem, 8 pages minimum. To be honest I've seen the problem a long time ago while studying C++ and I had the theory down and that is my issue, it becomes inherently boring and useless in my head. Is in this situations that my mind gets lazy.

I wrote the first 3 pages in half an hour but I was done, I started revising the proposal and fixed a calculation error, checked Rust's take on the philosophers issue and decided to save it for winter break along with learning Rust (although got some basics down), made rough budget approximations for the next 3 months, lost myself a little bit on deep house music (notable tracks tadow from masego, nevermind - Dennis Lloyd and gold - Chet faker), etc...all in all it took me 3 hours more to finish the assignment, including breaks and dinner.

I am working on a lot of stuff lately and my main project's sprint ends this Tuesday and it pisses me off, after all that I learnt nothing new, got nowhere with my project and will probably get 80 because Google docs has no margin setting. Worse than being lazy for fun is inevitably being lazy for being compelled to do low priority tasks by your head's standards.

*My first internship*

Me: Hey, I'm unable to fix this issue with the interface.

Tech Lead: *Goes on giving me a lecture from the very basics* So, An Interface has the method declaration but not the.....

Me inside: I FUCKING KNOW WHAT AN INTERFACE IS JUST TELL ME HOW DO I FIX THIS FUCKING ISSUE.

Me outside: Right!

"The tool to push new releases to the data centre blocked us last night. Saying all the nodes are 'unhealthy', resolve the issue(s) first. But then the remote team said 'we have a way around that' so we managed to get it deployed in time. We need to document the process as there were many ... 'shady' processes and steps involved lol"

- Manager explaining how the first production release on our new team went last night

... he called it a success

Ok, so I REALLY HATE ChromeOS. MY story is this: I'm using Chrome, and I want to get a file from my computer to my phone. Simple enough, I just plug my phone in, and... oh, wait! First it has to open two new windows for my phone's two storage areas. Ok, fine. I close the windows, get my file prepared, and I click/drag it over to the folder I want. Except, the computer doesn't FUCKING see it as a device anymore. It knows it's attached, but it doesn't fucking communicate with it. Ok, maybe it's a cord problem. Nope! Same issue. Maybe I need to update? Nuh-uh! That doesn't work either, since my computer's not supported anymore! And, the cherry on the top of the fucking shitcake that this whole situation is, the Files app, the one that you use to view the stuff on your hard disk? OH, IT JUST GOES AND CRASHES. I can open it! Nothing shows up. No devices work. It's just stuck like that until I reboot my machine.

God... FUCKING damnit, chromeOS.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

When you point out a bug for the first time on a popular library and your issue has been reopened with apologies and given the bug tag.

Feel like a boss after struggling with the problem for 14 days haha

So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.

I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.

First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.

Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.

He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.

Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.

Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.

So the group announced a merge of several systems into my platform. Growing it from 5000 sites to 75000. Lead time of a year, time enough to build it properly, finish the split of the current monolith into microservices, make it fast.

Suddenly, they reduced the time to three months, no explanation given. Solution is to keep the current PHP shit pile, but "scale" it using magic hardware or something. Oh and add 258 features, including things like "intuitive navigation" and "progressive web app" which some junior PM wannabe got off wikipedia or something.

And my boss has bent over to these morons and basically said yes, instead of informing them that this is a fool's errand.

Fuck em. I've said that they're nuts, and if they force the issue, I will resign. And my team probably will too.

But first I will take an inconveniently timed holiday.

I'm freaking done trying to get Linux on my machine. I've tried every distro with many different versions of the kernel and I always run into the same problem on my desktop.

The computer super stutters for 2 seconds ish than freezes.

I've spent DAYS looking into this issue trying to find something. The worst part is that it can happen 5 minutes when I boot or 5 hours. At first I thought it was Compton. Then I thought I installed arch wrong. Maybe an update to the BIOS? How about downloading updated microcode? Maybe this obscure bug with AMD processors and setting power idle to typical? Nothing. I'm now behind on my school work because of the massive amount of time ive spent getting this fixed. It works just fine on my laptop, but it doesn't work on the machine I built to code with. I'm done. Give me Force Lightning, a red lightsaber, and call me a Sith baby because I'm joining the dark side. Here I come Windows.

For those who are wondering my setup:
Ryzen 7 1700
Rx 480
Asus x-370 prime
16 gb Corsair RAM

And no, Windows has never had this bug.

So, I am feeling low in life. I want to do so many things and not a single one is going as planned. On top of that Bitcoin has taken a plunge and my funds are stuck with a shitty exchange and I cannot withdraw till tomorrow.
Le a github issue appears and I am thinking what went wrong now. I had added a few new features to the app which would have broken the old configurations. So, I ask this guy to re-configure and test.
After about 2 hours I get a reply from the guy saying "Thanx for the great new features and for creating this great open source project!!!"
This made my day. And I am thinking Life's good. Life is so easy and we make it so difficult for us. The first thing I am doing after this review is write this rant. Now back to work.

I downloaded somebody's GitHub code to use for a project. It had a bug that broke functionality, so I fixed it and started running it to gather data. Then it stopped working for a different reason. I rechecked out the code fresh, same (second) issue occurred. It was a second bug, that once I fixed it, everything worked. But I didn't need to fix it the first time! There weren't any commits in the last two months! I blame ghosts.

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

I found this question on EmguCV's forum that matches my exact issue.

First answer: Never mind - all. I answered it myself.

Welp. Thanks for nothing. How fucking difficult can it be to post your solution to the issue?

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Nearly me this morning:

Hi, thanks for reaching out to me to see if we'd be interested in partnering on the attached R&D project. I'd love to read the proposal but first, can we talk about your personal website? I noticed the link in your email footer and it offends my eyes beyond belief. Will there scope in the project to address this issue?

Ok, I am actually losing my mind at this bad excuse of a work place.

This guy, that I had only briefly talked to in email twice before, never met or even had a video chat, opened a ticket like this:

"Hi Alt-Tab,

I hope you enjoyed the end of last week, the weekend, and the beginning of this one! All well here. I ventured to [random place in London] for the first time on Saturday – liked it."

Now. I already can't fucking stand when colleagues that are not at all close start emails with "how was your weekend?" shit because then I have to waste another minute addressing that. But this guy took it to such another level that I literally had to read his email 3 times to believe what I just witnessed.

And of course he then went on and described the issue as folows:

"Just a quick note about the issue I have - could you let me know why the calendars are not syncing?"

Maybe if you fucking spent half of the energy of you writing a polite bullshit "hello" and instead used that to actually describe the issue I could help.

Fuck off.

Kotlin and mother tongue

In my mother tongue (my first language which is Kikuyu) we do not have the letter L in our alphabet thus meaning L and R to us is similar thus pronounced the same.
Then Kotlin makes life hard for devs who got a mother influence in their speech from my tribe. Was having a talk with fellow dev who is my tribe mate and we had an issue agreeing between val and var hehe.
We had to write it down to tell which is which.

Thankyou Kotlin for making my day.

"This is ridiculous, why don't the docs explain this? This is absurd, it seems like thousands of people should be having this issue. Why do maintainers fucking not get it? Why write software if you don't intend for anyone else to use it?"

versus

"Hey, could you explain X to me? I'm having trouble understanding it."
"Sure, here: ..."
"Thanks - maybe we could add it to the docs, that's the first place I looked."
"Absolutely, good idea."
<closed in a8b7cb8d>

Which one was easier, folks? It's not this difficult. 100% going to help you if you ask - to me, at least, there's no such thing as a stupid question (seriously, I'll answer the most inane questions 100 times over if I need to). However, there's definitely a stupid comment, and unfortunately they seem to be the majority I receive on Github.

First month of project we suggest that we test that Entity Framework has made reasonable DB queries because the system will need to handle a lot of records. “Not a priority in this sprint because we need features.” Devs try to get it into every sprint. The last week of the project they want us to dump in a ton of records so they can test it. The N+1 SELECT query issue is on main queries. It is so bad and slow with more records that a simple query causes the container management to auto scale the application on a single query. They can have max 8 users in the system at a time and it will take 10 seconds to do a simple page refresh.

They get on our case and we dredge up all of the correspondence where they completely ignored our advice. Fix it now! We need another sprint. Fix it free! No.

Gah! Person in work has an issue I suggest a fix and even give them the bleeding code. For them just to say it won't work due to x y and z, I know it will work heck I use this 'fix'. Then later someone who has been there longer gives them the same fix and they are suddenly all appreciative. Ffs wouldn't be so annoyed if this was the first time this has happened.

Devrant is so full of people venting, I want to be an aisle of positivity, something you know you wanted for years on devrant!

First of all, remember that whatever your boss tells you, you should know what you can do and never let them intimidate you!

Whatever your mates tell you, the Issue probably isn't just you.

Remember to listen to many differentstyles of music. Keep Hydrated! Be nice to people, they'll be nice in return.

How about you come into the comments to have some nice talk? Remember: Only spread positivity 🌻🥀🌺

Ps: Havent ranted in such a long time. What's new?

Fucking hate Qt.

Spent all morning trying to figure out how their bullshit QThreadPool works with their bullshit QRunnable but after a bunch of bullshit asynchronous testing I figured that my thread object was being collected and deleted before I was done with it, for no reason. Now if the race condition was documented... This wouldn't be an issue. But every google search brought up nada. Eventually I resorted to turning off autoDelete on the runnable, but then I just have a memory leak, obviously.

I couldn't find a way to manually clean up a QRunnable in Python. What the fuck.

I just went back to good old fashioned QThreads... This is why I quit Qt in the first place.

I just wasted 4 hours debugging a wordpress plugin because the API was returning only the first element of a list. I posted it on support forums, downloaded the plugin's source code and tried to manually find the cause, and I was about to post an issue on the plugin's github page.

It turns out that I forgot I had '$[0]' in my insomnia json filter.... I should probably look for a different job.

Please delete your browser cache.

Wtf is up with this shit?
Maybe I'm just having a streak of bad luck, but in recent days, I ran into this particular issue time and time again.
First with one of our own products - the user appearently not always was shown the newest version due to stuff being cached in the browser.
Fair enough, we had our web-dev find a solution to that, which he did. Until this is rolled out, the only resolution is to clear the browser cache.

I also ran into this same issue on multiple other fronts. For example, there's a remote connection to one of our clients I had to establish via browser. The backend was a bit unresponsive, and somehow I ended up in a situation where my login was rejected. The only solution? Clear your browser cache.

Then we have confluence and jira in the company. Same issue. All of a sudden, I could no longer log in. Worked fine in another browser.
Delete your browser cache.

Is it just that most frontend developers out there are incompetent at what they do or is this stuff broken by design? I don't recall having to clear my browser cache very frequently - in fact, I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for years on one of my PCs at home. What changed?

Ah well, maybe it was just a streak of bad luck. But still ...
/Rant

My laptop died on Monday. 5 days after it's first full backup in 2 years. I'm almost disappointed it was a power connection issue and not a drive failure

Just had my first issue raised on my GitHub project!

Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing...

Project Manager logic (the best kind).

PM: Here are a list of the tickets we need to address next.

Architect: Hang on, didn't X raise a number of critical bugs yesterday? They were serious, we need to fix the critical bugs first.

PM: ... but he marked them all as critical

(so that means they aren't an issue? cool, i've been doing this wrong all my life)

Lately my sister's sound wasn't working. So i came over to see, whats wrong. Her boyfriend was also there, who claims to be a programmer himself, so i asked myself why he hasn't already solved the issue. But instead of asking, i just got on her computer and looked around.

First, i checked the audio jack, which was plugged in normally. There's a little wheel on the table, controlling the volume. There was a little light on it, shining. I assumed, it had to be a software problem and got into Windows' Audio Manager. Everything was okay. I spent the next 10 minutes checking EVERYTHING, even tried a restart (obviously changed nothing, but you never know ;D ). Drivers, Audio Settings, everything was okay.

Desperately I leant back in the chair and shot some looks around. Turns out, the plug wasn't plugged in. *facepalm*

The little light, shining on the wheel, seems to get its power through the audio jack.

It's always the simplest thing.

Today,
I tried setting up XAMPP for running my friends code.. it took 5hrs and faced atleast one issue in every step from installation to running.

First
1) XAMPP Did not download itself, found that internet was down.

2) downloaded finally, installation phase went till 98% fatal error, windows collecting info for diagnosis

5)after 3 tries , suddenly it installed successfully

6)Apache force shut, every time I started it

7)1.5 hours later found VM had occupied the port 80, making it shut.
Changed the port

8)PHPmyadmin was recent ,that SQL 5.1 support was not There.

9)Now after setting up new instance of MySql 5.6 , created conflict.
Project referred one instance and PHPmyadmin referred other

10) Changed port numbers and added service entry in windows to make it work

At last the struggle ended up with happy ending.

My installation story precisely

Iam new to PHP development and XAMPP.

Wohoooo got my s9 on the mail today aaaaaw yii

This thing sure is puuuuurty. Working like a charm as well.

Didnt really wanted to part with my s7 edge since the phone is working just as fine as when I first got it. Never had an issue with the phone but....well....I am spoiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

Started a new job as junior developer. One of my first task was to sent a simple notification on an event in out product. Write the code, test that it works, push to devops.

Code compiles, tests pass, it’s deployed to internal test env. Check that my notification works in the test env. No problem.

It’s deployed to the customers test environment. It works and customer accepts it for prod.

We release to prod and of course it fails. Seems to be a simple string.Format that fails for god knows why. After 3h of debugging on prod without success we decide to roll it back.

Today we decided to try it on a backup of the prod db since one of the strings was taken from the db. Still working. No matter what data I input when trying it locally it still wont reproduce the issue we saw on prod.

Fuck this

!rant

Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)

Glad I decided to go and try it out.

Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.

So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.

Did my first meaningful work in angular in many moons at work today - also apparently the first time I've touched it in 4 major version releases lol.

I typically find myself specializing in API and service architecture lately, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I got back into the swing of things with the front end in general. Granted the app itself has been very neatly organised and written which goes a very long way to helping one find their way quickly.

That said, I really can't admit to having any desire to stay working in angular for very long. Yes, I think it speaks well to the framework itself that I can pick up immediately going from version 8 to 12 without any issue, but also, I think angular kinda sucks ass*.

* Opinion should be taken with a grain of salt coming from a .NET dev. This does not reflect the views of .NET or other devs in general. User results may vary.

I'm doomed.

My first production worker script is making multiple active attribute of a user. My script should be able to deactive the old attributes if there is new one.

Months ago, this issue occured. My teammate from team A take over the script to investigate since I am busy working with team B.

Yesterday, I found out that I, myself, overwrite the fix my teammate made for that because of a new feature.

I have to clean up the affected records on production on Monday..and i have to explain to my manager. T.T

LPT: ALWAYS PULL REPO before developing new feature...

After building some automated regression tests to verify parts of the company website were working, it was discovered that a test case was missing.
Instead of a constructive meeting about fixing the issue and adding a test, I was reamed and my manager was reamed that we "missed this case".
Nevermind that the automation caught several issues before release in nearly every other aspect of coverage.
Nevermind that the missing test case was a useless feature added after the automation was completed.
Nevermind that automation was meant to be the last stop in the gate, not the first...

I was so livid after that meeting I nearly resigned on the spot. My manager was so livid over being told to write me up he was ready to resign.

Another fun thing. This morning one of the first mails i read was a issue about a bug in our software.

This was a bug i mentioned months ago but there was nog evidence where i searched like mails chats or tickets.

If people would just listen to me this bug was solved months ago but back then i got a reaction like: "works over here" while i tested it on two different instances with buggy results each time.

- assignment is to display a paragraph fit within a rectangle
- takes maybe 10 minutes to write
- 1 error preventing Xamarin Forms solution from building
- googles error and seems to be a version issue with a single package
- upgrade that single package
- 43 errors preventing solution from building
- reverts back to previous package version
- 76 errors preventing solution from building
- angrily turns off laptop and packs away things into laptop case
- talks shit about xamarin and all the annoying nuisances ive dealt with for this stupid mobile app class
- takes laptop back out because deadline is tomorrow and i have to make the solution build even though i want nothing to do with it
- laptop takes 2 hours and 14 minutes to load up Windows (no update or anything. Just me signing in like every other normal day)
- code builds first try without errors
- wait what the fuck
- concludes that i need only verbally intimidate electronics into submission from now on

Thank God it's Friday and my brain is toasted from this specific email to IT department which I had to call to get more details. Here are the parties involved.
1) Original sender (OS), 2) Sender to IT (SIT), 3) IT (Me)

SIT: Can someone from IT print this for OS? She's having issue printing.

Me: It's just an image file in the email. What issues is she having when trying to print?

SIT: Idk. She said she's having issues printing.

Me: Yeah, but what issue? She can't connect to printer, the file won't open or what? Can you ask her what the issue is?

SIT: *hold on...comes back... She just said that again..issue printing..

Me: Well, we need to know what issues it is so we can fix it. In that case she can print and not keep sending documents or files to someone else to print. Btw, did you try printing the image file?

SIT:Since she said she's having issue printing I figured to send to IT to fix the issue and print. I didn't print it.

Me: 😕😂🤔🤨😒..what? First of I still don't know whatever issue she is having. Second, you should try printing it and if you also have issues, let me know.

SIT: Ok how?

Me: *shows her how to get

SIT: Thanks it printed. Now I'm also wondering what issue she was having because this was easy to print..

Me: Can you transfer me to her phone?

Now pay attention here. She is SIT's boss.

Me: Hi OS, what issue are you having when trying to print the image file in your email? I'd like to fix it so you don't encounter that issue from now on..

OS: No issues. I was too busy to do it so I asked my secretary to do it.

Me: So you can print image files with no issues, correct?

OS: Yes.. actually I just printed my a picture my daughter sent me.

Me: Ok, have a nice..

*I call SIT back

Me: She's all set

SIT: Thank you so much fo fixing her issue.

Me: She didn't have any issue. She can print fine..

SIT: WTF!?!

Me: Have a good day, SIT..

😂😂😂😂 I was WOWED!!!

assume no one updates README

spend an entire day fighting a config issue

OR

first check README

I don't understand some developer's thought processes when they fix a bug/issue.

Let's say the error is -> "Cannot read property id of undefined".

My first thought is to add a check for undefined and null and figure out if further code should be executed if a null or undefined is encountered, depending on what the code is supposed to do.

But some devs are like, "Yesterday the sunrise was at 5:30 AM, Earth's rotational axis is titled at 15 degrees to the left, My aunt asked me about how I am doing today, so therefore the bug fix is required at line 65,456 of this particular kernel file".

And they implement it, and it WORKS.

Weird.

Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?

---

Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?

Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.

Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?

Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine

Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.

Dev2:
Where is that logic called?

Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000

This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.

Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.

Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.

Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change

Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.

Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:

Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine

Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.

Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.

Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.

Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.

Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.

Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.

Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.

Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.

Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:

Oh boy!

Aren't we off to a fucking great start, first turn on my Xbox and it keeps overheating...

Ok I'll leave it for a bit and just jump on my PC and do some work but nooooooooo. Boot it up and it fucking hangs on an A2 boot code (Drive issue), unplugged every drive and look at that, still on fucking A2...

I do not need this right now. Can't afford a new fucking PC if this one is going to be fucking up like this -,-

The most crazy issue I've fixed was caused by a TCP behavior which I didn't know, called the "half-closed connection".
There was a third-party application installed on a production server which called a LDAP server for retrieving users information. During the day we had several users using the application and all worked fine. During the night, when the application was not accessed, something happened and the first call to the application in the morning was stuck for about 5 minutes before returning a response. I tried to reproduce the issue in a testing environment without success. Then I discovered that the application and the LDAP server were located on two different networks, with a firewall between them. And firewalls sometimes drop old connections. For this reason network applications usually implement a keep-alive mechanism. Well, the default LDAP Java libraries don't set the keep-alive on their connections. So, I found a library called "libdontdie", which force the keep-alive on the connections. I installed the library on the server, loaded it at the startup and the weird stuck behavior in the morning disappeared.

Hi everyone, I'm a now second year computer science student. I have read through posts on Dev Rant for a while now and have loved every minute of it. I really wanted to start contributing to this awesome community and thought a question might be a good start. There seems to be a ton of inconsistencies among certain terms. The biggest that really grinds my gears is how people refer to "()", "[]", and "{}". I personally refer to the first set as parenthesis, the second as brackets, and the third as braces. Throughout my time at this college and around the internet I have read some people say curly braces, curly brackets, squigly brackets, round brackets, square braces, and my personal favorite "those curvy round things". Other students do this which is understandable, but it seemed strange that even my professors use them interchangeably. So is there a naming convention anywhere that might help with this issue or somewhere I can get some clarification?

Friday 13th. Superstition.

0655, got WFH laptop going. 0700, VPN'ed in. Bluescreen, first in ages. Yes, Windows, the hatred is mutual. Rebooted. Windows claimed memory fault, offered check, 40 minutes. Noped out. Started machine. VPN'ed in. Some strange script error that I'd never seen before. Rebooted. Script error again. Shut down machine, then rebooted, same problem. 0715, fuck, still wearing sweaters, my e-scooter not charged, and an important Teams call at 0800.

Got dressed, stuffed laptop into backpack, hurried up by foot. Took the bus. Fuck, the next connection on the change station just had gone off. Took a taxi to make it. Arrived at the company, plugged in the laptop, started with no issues. Had the important call.

Took the laptop to IT. Tested it with external network connection and VPN. Worked with no script error. Had it checked for RAM issues. No issue. WTF had happened in the morning?!

Keyboard in my laptop died, mobo issue. Work gave me an ex-lease Dell E6430s. First thing I did was dual boot with Ubuntu 16.10 - can't believe how smooth it was. When I put Debian on my Lenovo G570 I had a ton of issues. I love Linux.

Fuck Java because java is one of the worst first languages you could pick. In the following I’ll highlight two main issues. One issue, the complexity of Java, will make life more difficult for you immediately, and the other, the danger of developing myopia regarding programming languages and their capabilities, has the potential to hurt you for many years to come and possibly your entire career

Debugging ♡

Taking first steps in Express.js. It's in general the first web framework i've learned so the struggle was greater.

While I was creating a web app, i've noticed that suddenly all of the routes were redirecting to the 404 error page. I was looking for the cause of this issue for an hour just to find this:

route.get ('/ ', ...);

So it seems that just one space sign wasted 1 hour of my day.

Btw, it's my first rant there so 👋 to everyone :)

!rant && Android

I thought I found something on devrant app turn out it is an Android thing. Not sure if a bug or not.

I use Android 7.1.2 default keyboard . And Google place a small G logo at the top left corner of keyboard. Clicking that show the gif, emoji, language setting etc menu.

On devrant and a few apps I have tried, that G icon remains on the screen in a transparent and almost not visible state but at the same position after hiding the keyboard. Like a watermark.

At first I thought devrant app background has that mark. Even took a screenshot to share here. Turn out it doesn't show up on screenshot. Because when I zoomed in on the image, the icon remained at same position on screen. So it is showing on Google photo app as well.

Any of you guys have that issue?

Question and Update.
First of all, I would like to thank @ScriptCoded for an idea in the previous post, so then I have beautiful terrain now, and the complete world map generated like plots, and each of them consists of 5x5 different plots defined by neighbors :) Hired a digital artist who is working on much nicer plots as well.

The new issue is regarding the zoom.
The map is saved as JSON with the pixel-perfect location of each generated plot so I am detecting the collision with the mouse based on their location. After I zoom in, the script is still comparing the pixel location of the element, but the real screen is scaled already so the pointer is off (image2). The problem is described in image3 as well. How can I still get the canvas relative value of the mouse instead of the x,y coordinate on the current zoomed screen?

Sysadmin and an ex-employee couldn't fix an issue with an application for many months even with vendor's instructions.
Today the job is passed to me and I follow instructions exactly and resolve the issue.
The other two guys must have thought 'we don't need someone else's documentation, we can fix it ourselves'

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I guess some things just need a fresh perspective.

I once had a user email the help desk, explaining in a rather twisted and confusing way his issue. He signed the end of it with "shibboleet" (xkcd reference). I called him, because there was no way I'd be able to go over it through email, and for nearly an hour we totally nerded out over it together, working through it. At the end of our conversation, he said he couldn't believe the shibboleet thing was real! I confessed that I was first level and he'd happened to have asked about a thing that was of personal interest and hobby of mine... and catching the reference was the icing, that I wanted to play along.

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

"Sweet, I fixed story 1 and can commit! ...but issue 2 is pretty small, let me just work on that first so there's 1 pull request".

4 hours later, issue 2 not done yet, and I can't push push story 1 to QA until I finish it. I really need to stop doing that.

Tester has found an issue: controller input stops working when performing certain steps.

Creates a report and provides an attachment.

The attachment depicts some menu where, at first, the cursor moves around various options, then simply stops moving.

The problem:

Since this is a simple in-game recording, there is neither an overlay of the controller w/ a visual representation of the input actually being provided but not working, nor there is a camera recording available where I can see the tester pressing buttons on a controller.

For all I know, the tester put down the controller / stopped pressing buttons.

...I've also seen reports of animations not working... w/ fucking screenshots attached.

How the fuck can you see something not being animated in a fucking static picture?

Finally made my node production server stable enough that I could focus on writing tests*. I start by setting up docker, mocking cognito, preparing the database and everything. Reading up on Node test suites and following a short tut to set up my first unit test. Didn't go smoothly, but it's local and there are no deadlines so who cares. 4 days later, first assert.equal(1+1, 2) passes and I'm happy.

I start writing all sorts of tests, installing everything required into "devDependancies," and getting the joy of having some tests pass on first try with all asserts set up, feels good!

I decide to make a small update to production, so I add a test, run and see it fail, implement the feature, re-run and, it passes!

I push the feature to develop, test it, and it works as intended. Merge that to master and subsequently to one of my ec2 production servers**, and lo and behold, production server is on a bootloop claiming it "Cannot find module `graphql`". But how? I didn't change any production dependencies, and my package lock json is committed so wth?

I google the issue, but can't find anything relevant. The only thing that I could guess was that some dependencies (including graphql) were referenced*** in both, prod and dev, and were omitted when installed on a prod NODE_ENV, but googling that specific issue yielded no results, and I would have thought npm would be clever enough to see that and would always install those dependencies (spoiler: it didn't for me).

With reduced production capacity (having one server down) I decided to npm uninstall all dev dependencies anyway and see what happens. Aaaaand it works.....

So now I have a working production server, but broken local tests, and I'm not sure why npm is behaving like this...

* Yes I see the irony.
** No staging because $$$, also this is a personal project.
*** I am not directly referencing the same thing twice, it's probably a subdependency somewhere.

Submitted my first pull request for an OS project
They labelled it as a good first issue and i had to spend 3 hours to stupidly search for index.html and realised they used something called apidoc.

Still a great experience tho

I have a nightmare project that I will probably be ranting about quite a lot in the coming weeks, but I don't want SEO to pick up the specifics on the off chance my peers Google the issues we're facing and my profile comes up.

Let me set up the scene by describing the predicament, and then I'll get to the most outrageous thing I've heard while working at this job. It gives you a CLEAR idea of why we're in this situation in the first place.

Anyways, the nightmare project only runs in IE with compatibility mode set to version 6. So it only runs in IE 6 at the latest.

And it is massive. I'm talking real, real enormous.

The most recent roadblock I ran into while Chrome-ifying it is the extensive use of a browser API that was removed 8 years ago.

It involves synchronous data input and I know for a relatively certain fact there's no way to fix it without combing through every single reference to this API and converting the ones that need sync data (not all of them do) to callbacks. How big of an issue is that?

Well, just one of that 15-ish modules has over 900 references to it. Even just creating a spreadsheet of "commented out / doesn't need a fix / needs fix" for each reference in 1/15th of this project would take days of manual labor.

Here's the rant.

So after discussing this issue in the meeting (we ended on "they don't believe me that we can't just replace it with jQuery") I brought up the next issue. One of our 3rd party libraries is so old it doesn't work anymore and we can't modify that code (it's compiled).

They said that even if it was backwards compatible (no fucking way. This version is like, at least 10 years old, I guarantee it) they can't simply replace it because we don't have a subscription to this product anymore (suggesting we find an alternative).

And I fucking kid you not, this is what happened next.

They then began discussing how this is why you shouldn't use 3rd party code. Because it becomes obsolete and you can't even fix it yourself because it's not yours to edit.

Yes. They said this DIRECTLY after we discussed our 900+ references to a browser API >>REMOVED<< 8 years ago. Yes, they said this about a 3rd party library that receives regular support but is totally FUCKED because we NEVER updated it after adding it and we never even renewed the LICENSE.

What the FUCK

No, making me fix mistakes you are too lazy to look at is not a "good first issue"

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

"Write the failing test first."

Oh, I know. This is probably simple, but when you're stuck on support tickets - there's no faster way than to write a test for whatever the issue is and run it.

You wind up having a quick way to verify your bug fix and you now have a test going forward to ensure the bug never happens again.

First thing Wednesday morning, fired up the macbook, opened vs code, ran the same unit tests that were passing last night, 1 failure! FML.

For some reason an Angular form that was valid with the same data last night isn't this morning. Probably some crappy date issue in the mock data

My boss' solution to whatever problem comes from a plugin:

spam emails to the plugin creator until they dont desperately give up and either block you or they solve your problem, 2 emails a day should do for first day, then increment every day.

I mean, if I ever get to make a good plugin and my boss will ever download it and can't make it work, I much rather remove the plugin from Earth than solve the issue of a spammer

Why can't my team including my boss learn to stop making assumptions... And mixing seperate issues into one...

If there's a fucking production issue, first step is to reproduce it... AKA ask what the user did and what he expects....

Not...
User: hey we call this url and get an error
Dev: ok rollback

When...
- you start the day with good intentions.
- you want to fix some long-due issue
- you think: I'll google it and I'll solve it. What can it be? I just want to track correctly my subdomains with all-mighty Google Analytics

and the first answer you find is:
"Unfortunately, Google Analytics has a few hoops to jump ...blablabla More unfortunately, the Google Analytics documentation is unclear ...blabla"
and 20 more pages of blog.

Fuck.
Let's skip to the next good intention before the day turns bad

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

So i work in support (do dev stuff in my own time). Spent 3 months seconded to another team supporting in project clients.

First issue i had in that team was a client with serious data issues which took about 30 hours +/- to diagnose and write some scripts to resolve.

After they went live and got handed over to support they had the same issue again but instead of support picking it up they sat on it till i came back on Monday.

Ive spent about another 10 hours or so picking through audit logs. I get all the shit no one else can either be bothered or capable of doing and to top it off i didnt get the promotion i was going for because i hadnt closed enough tickets, because they keep giving me all the shit to fix for everybody else

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

So it's 2018, I thought let's start working with Android Studio on Ubuntu. [Due to some guy who posted his CPU usage on a very heated rant of same issue]
I realized it's fucking mess(/shit) and you dare not keep any browser open in back/fore-ground. Now, my entire system is stuck.
Ruined the first day man.

So, we are having a SaaS service for people where they can build X stuff. It is all fine as long as you are using basic things there, no complex cases and so on. Even on some complex - it does work just fine.

Here's the rant itself:
The production server throws us errors every 5-10 minutes that something broke and fails to do job X. At first we were all hands on deck fixing it ASAP to make it stable to later realise that most of these cases were users doing stupid shit. Then we began to fix the core issues rather than chasing every single issue there is (costs are important you know) - funny enough, we get few support requests a week and our 1h response time + 24h fix time usually buys us that customer and allows t o leave a great impression.

So all in all, bugles production is good but great support - is way better. Users can deal with issues especially if they are experimenting there but when they need answers - you'd better give it to them.

Fucking unreal bro!!! I’m working on an issue and I pushed, then there was a bug, i fixed it again, another issue for the UI change, another fixed for sorting column. All that fixed I created separate branch. My boss called me and told me im stupid for creating a separate branch everytime on a simple fix, he told me that Git isnt used that way. He told me that his been doing this 30years already. So I asked isnt it the best practice to create a separate branch on every issue or if the branch has been merged? His answer is no. Fuck this guy and his 30years experience

I should’ve responded:
First of all, if we have a test suite then I would have notice that error but we dont. You dont even want to upgrade ruby and rails. We’re stuck at version 4 on rails. Second why are you merging my MR and reviewing it on IST? Why didnt you do that locally so you can address the issue before you merged? Third fuck you and your 30years

My actual response is:
Ahh yes sir, im sorry wont happen again, my bad, sorry for that mistake.

Fuck bro im mad!!!!

Manager does nothing but give me more work. Can't code. doesn't even get git issues. Last in first out yet I'm first in last out. At end of meeting he says, "great job but one comment, you should say 'We' not 'I', cuz this is a team effort"

Are you fucking kidding me dude? Add it as another issue.... Oh wait

So as expected, due to the rush of the submission on Friday, the app was rejected.
I'm fairly certain they never got past the first screen or two.

We have some things to fix, and some things to tackle properly now, which is quite nice, however the current main issue numero uno is that an Apple developer account can take up to 10 days to be created, and Go Live is next Monday.

I wonder who will get the blame for not taking on the "Investigate the iTunes release process" ticket that was in Jira, assigned to someone for ~4 months.

After having dealt with the 9'999th issue with Samba, I decided to use a Rasperry Pi as a CUPS server and have everyone at home print their stuff over the Pi. Instead of having a Samba connection to my Dads PC where the printers were shared to.
BEST!
DECISION!
EVER!
Took me only 2h to set up and nearly everything worked after the first try.
I just have to deal with the cable mess now :(

I just got my third 128GB MicroSD card off Amazon, this time SanDisk. Yet again, trying to do anything not involving the OEM full-disk exFAT partition staying intact (which, fuck that, all that uses that is Windows and Linux, i'm looking for splitting this thicc bih up) shifts EVERYTHING, including MBR+PT/GPT down the disk by 16MB exactly inserting data from... the atmosphere? whatever's using it? ...do SD cards have that secure key/DRM store space thing still?

(EDIT: I do verify that they ARE genuinely the right size after purchasing before reformatting or repartitioning, by the way.)

First it was a Silicon Power card, then a Samsung card, now a SanDisk.

(Also, why all S?)

Luckily, this time it wasn't a pain in the ass to get it to read as anything but "Bad Card" or a 0-byte/empty/non-existent device in Windows/Linux (respectively) so I was able to see that it was indeed the same issue without taking 3 days to jump through device hoops to finally get it to do it again but in such a way that it shifts out and back in all zeroes.