Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Fuck XML. Fuck it right up it's X with it's M, all the way to L.

Fuck XML.

Just... Fuck it, i'm fucking done.

So I tried to start learning Spring 5

How the fuck do you guys do it? Holy shit.

30 seconds in:

"Spring really isn't hard, you start with this request handler interacting with a view parser..."

Alright, sounds good

2 minutes in:

"So in order to use SpringResponseDriverActionHandlerServiceRequesterService you'll need to import com.org.java.spring.util.driver.comagain.request.response.request.drivers and include this 37 level deep nested XML property and finally extend this abstract class and implement it over an iterable list with this specific annotation aaaaaaand.... Done"

> Hello, world!

"See, spring is easy!"

Fuck the way comments work in xml. I want to write a 2 word comment but before that I apparently have to make an ascii art mona lisa. Infront of and after the comment.

So this API i'm integrating with wants me to post XML. Yet it's response comes back in JSON!

What the actual fuck?

"Your XML is malformed by these strange tags CDATA. I've cleaned it up ;)"

Fuckity Fuck my boy, now the whole website is down. All hail the magic push to prod button.

(there were snippets of user provided HTML that was passed over XML by a microservice)

!rant

One day Boss was doing code review of my work
Boss to me: What the fuck dev1!?!? All efforts I spent to quit smoking and your XML routine gave me cancer anyway!

Another day, a colleague needed to make change to a program that hasn't been changed in looong time and sees a commit from our Boss done 15yrs ago!!!

Dev2 to Boss: Boss this signal catching routine sucks dicks! How did you become a our Boss?
Me to dev2: He sucked as many dicks as his routine did
Boss to us: Oh look! Performance appraisal is due this week. Bye-bye 7.5%

Here 7.5% referring to pay raise that is average pay raise

Why the fuck would you use xml to store data

Why the fuck would you use xmdsaasd to build your site

Mysql and php exist for a fucking reason

Aye so i got a new job, and its android. I thought "yeah sure, ive been a java dev my whole life, it will be easy".

And it is easy.

But its like a fleshed out java, with a trillion built in classes and xml (seroiusly, fuck xml), and also the studio eats away my ram.

Fuck me in the ass, but do it harder then this api just so I can feel some love 😖

it's one of those days where you have to migrate from soap to rest, only the rest api doesn't have the same structure or search parameters as the soap api, so there's this entire fucking application sending requests at a brick wall, and expecting a purple throbbing 12 inch cock of xml to be pushed into an multi dimensional array and pushed through to the views to derange the mess, only you have to create that fucking 12 inch cock from several 2 inch dipsticks that have a different hierarchy, different field names, and merge the shit together with a glue gun...

good thing it's only an unexpected prod problem... right? 🤷‍♂️

Ah, the woes of a Monday on the legacy app adventures.

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

Your data is formatted according to some ISO? Nice. You say it's easy to use and well documented? Great!

IT'S FUCKING FORMATTED WITH IRREGULAR SPACING??

What the fuck is this formatting?

Date <tab> Word <3 spaces> Some conjugated version <ONE space> Type <FIVE spaces> gender

WHAT
WHY
WHY ISNT IT XML
WHY ISNT IT JSON
WHY THE TABULATOR AND IRREGULAR SPACES
WHY DOES THE ORDER CHANGE PER LINE
WHY IS THIS IN A SINGLE 1MIL LINE FILE

help the university of oslo makes me dysphoric in their dictionaries i really dont want to parse this

Working as a part time student on an app and until now I thought I was the king of software development.
Well, fuck me and my high horse.

Today the stuff we send from the client to the server didn't arrive, so I asked the backend guy if he could take a look at the packages arriving. He did and told me the data was messed up.
I did only design stuff the last week or so, so I was very confused. After reverting back to one old commit after the other it struck me.
I still don't know how such a dumb mistake could have happened to me, the king of Android apps, but apparently I replaced all occurrences of a specific keyword in just the strings and comments of the whole project. Key became KeyList, so instead of <Keys> my XML contained <KeyList> which made no goddamn sense whatsoever.
Did I mention that we have an important deadline tomorrow? Yeah...

So now I leaned my lesson. Never trust XML.

JK I'm dumb. That's the lesson here.

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 :/

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

Fuck my life! I have been given a task to extract text (with proper formatting) from Docx files.
They look good on the outside but it is absolute hell parsing these files, add to these shitty XML human error and you get a dev's worst nightmare.
I wrote a simple function to extract text written in 'heading(0-9)' paragraph style and got all sorts of shit.
One guy used a table with borders colored white to write text so that he didn't have to use tabs. It is absolute bullshit.

IPAY88 is the worst payment integration. They parse html data and encoded it into xml for return the data, it is not even singlet or server to server communication , tey called it the ADVANCED BACKEND SYSTEM (My arse!) For security, they ENCODE THE STRING into BASE64 and called it ENCRYPTION ! WHAT THE FUCK?
Encoding is not encryption! I qas expecting they used diffie hellman or AES or RSA etc. THEY TOLD BE ENCODING IS ENCRYPTION? WHAT THE FUCK?

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

I hate react so much. I hate it with the fiery rage of an old testament god. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it.

Unfortunately I picked up Angular (2). I'm now used to a framework that has you covered for most things. That has logical methods of laying out your app. A router that's actually built in and makes sense.

I'm used to writing HTML in the templates, not some horrible abomination of XML that's pretending to be HTML and just waiting to pull off its mask and smack you across the face with its penis while telling you what an idiot you are.

React apps all seem to be cobbled together in a different way. You have to go hunting for the logical stuff you expect to be there.

Let's not even get started on the tome of dependencies it needs to get itself off the ground, all written by vastly different developers from different planets with completely different life goals.

I hate it. The more I learn about it the more I find myself yelling "WTF!" while shaking a fist at the wall, hot tears of rage steaming down my pudgy cheeks until my wife comes running into the room and consoles me with my head on her bosom.

...and I just started a project that will have to be seen through to the end, using.. react.

Seriously, fuck you react, I hope you die of herpes.

I fucking told them that yes, i can do frontend but im in no way expert, so dont expect much.

"Yeah, cool, use angular"

I was full of questions and tried to reason with them that angular is literally just an unnecessary load and would slow the development down (its a really simple site).

"No, use angular"

Ok fine whatever. So i built the site, it was ugly as fuck, half the functionality was hacked in with jquery because i have no idea how these fucked up frameworks work (or apparently dont work) when i realized that i get jackshit from the backend.

Turns out most of the json responses were totally disregarding the json standard, like {1: tag0},{2: tag1}, where a json arrat should have been used. The other half was xml. Yeah. Also of course they used spring so the backend took like 3 months where it could have been done in like 2 weeks.

I left class early today

I understand me and this kid are both students and both of us are still learning. But when he asks me to help him solve an issue I fucking expect him to listen then try what I’m saying unless he knows for certain that my idea won’t work

I don’t expect him to start ignoring the person HE asked for help to try things on his own and end up DELETING THE FUCKING GRADLE FOLDER because the 1.5.1 version of Android studio my teacher makes us use told him gradle was corrupt

I also didn’t expect him to tell the professor I didn’t tell him not to And them end up with the professor fucking assigning me to help him fix everything even though the kid won’t listen to me anyway refusing to just copy he java and XML to a new project so I grabbed my stuff and left Fuck that bullshit

I understand we’re both students and in the grand scheme of things we’re both idiots. But when I’m asked for help I expect the person to at least listen and not do something absolutely stupid like delete something we don’t understand how to fix

Now I’m making common sense a requirement to ask me for help I don’t need any extra stress I’ll deal with the consequences of walking out tomorrow But I can’t say I regret it

FUCKING HELL.

It's already enough that this FUCKING API I have to work with is a mess of JSON and XML responses mixed together.
With mixed german and english keys and attributes all sprinkled over it.
And API access locked to Austria only for some reason.

And then they even manage to fuck up the little bit of JSON they use.

It's just a fucking array of strings (where one could easily use integers).

They can stick this fucking steaming pile of shit that they call API up their PHP infested assholes.

I hate web development sometimes.

Was curious about if there are any true benefits to using XML and ended up on this page. What the actual fuck? I might be missing something here, but what's "more secure" about XML? xD

FUCK

I really wanna love Rust. I really, really do. But no inheritance is just such a stupid decision. But inheritence bad REEEE. No. Just no. Composition only works fine for some things because it just isn't powerful enough to properly (without performance penalty or boilerplate, that is) emulate inheritance. Some things are just better with inheritance: Games, UI, html or xml libs, etc. Now I have to use stupid fucking workarounds because oh no we cannot implement inheritance because that's scary and might give the programmers to much power. I can decide when I want to use inheritance or composition for myself, dickheads

Being able to learn the basics of many languages so that I can do things the fastest way.
Because the Dutch national railway uses fucking XML for their api

FUCK UPS. Fucking dickheads killed our XML api a month ahead of schedule, and now I'm having to quickly implement stuff for their new api, and their docs are fucking dogshit. Seriously, the united parcel service can burn to death in a god damn fire.

That moment when you have to exchange data with another system using XML-Files serval hundred MBs in size instead of a proper REST API (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Was recently in a motorcycle accident and haven't been cleared to go back to work yet so I'm trying to build my first Android app.

I don't know Java, XML, kotlin, Android studio, or what the fuck a Gradle is; but I figured I'd take my app idea and download Android studio then try winging everything from there.

Needless to say, I'm having a damn hard time lol. I have been watching firebase tutorials on YouTube to try and figure out how to add authentication to my app. I kinda got it working in the AVD. But my personal Google account has 2FA enabled so I can't seem to get the app to sign me out, or sign me back in. (I was able to authenticate once successfully.)

I have no idea if having 2FA enabled is even the problem. I tried turning on debugging and can't seem to figure out how to actually get the app to debug or get a debug console open.

I seriously feel like the world's biggest n00b right now. Going to go YouTube/Google how to get the debugging working. Then I'm off for a round of learning how to read a debug report!

Hahahaha... Kill me now -_-'

Well been working on my game engines CLI data tools for a while now, got sprite packing working but completely forgot I had to work out a packing method for JSON, XML and a few other files into 1 package... Fuck...

At least the easy part is done, just need to work out a proper and efficient way to store everything...

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

Working with dildos-for-brain people! I asked how to achieve something and if I got an answer it stated: never saw something like that implemented before (It really means that people here just copy/paste shit and use iterative development method until they nab the solution)!!!

Really? I just asked to have nested XML structure, it's been around since early 90'!

I have new weekend project - polish my CV and get the fuck out of here. When it feels like you are smartest in the room and for every question for help people just throw you random answers not related to question at all it is not worth staying there.

Also using outdated XML server CMS that ceased its support, documentation is shoddy and internet never heard of it - only relevant google search leads to the CMS website. Good luck! Good fucking luck!

This shit went overboard so many times and I decided that this is the last time. I have 2 more fucks to give and those are for me!

Fuck you Android ! Why the fuck does making my fucking status bar transparent has to be more difficult than launching a mars mission with a team of chimpanzees. I have been trying everything from xml styles to fucking java code but the status bar won't take the tint. Been at this fucking shit for 2 days

The Amazon MWS API is so utterly shite! Offers error messages sometimes then others tells you to upload your file to their file checker. Their file checker doesn’t accept XML so why say that?

Who on earth develops and documents their shit APIs?

Fuck you Amazon

Everytime I have to work on some old Asp.Net shit. WebForms/WinForms etc.

Everything with that bullshitass designer. You wanna open a file you've just created? Sorry, error. Restart IDE and maybe...

Restarted website? Sorry. Old instance still hangs somewhere in IIS, so the port is taken...

Seeing code light up red when cleaning the project. Compiler being like "What the fuck is 'void'?"

Or - I know you didnt make any changes, but Im gonna build AppCode folder anyway... Its only gonna take a minute or two, no worries.

Or - You have XML template file to this class (codebehind)? You wanna open the XML? Would be shame if it was opened in the designer view and your entire IDE crashed 'cuz of some unsuported third party UI element.

Or - just unexpected debug session crashes.

And dont make me start on Xamarin...

This is really a rant:
The company i work for uses the wso2 enterprise integrator for message transformation and so on.
I am in charge to get this thing to work.
And i am so annyoid about this fuc**** crap software, there price it as lightweight, fast and easy to use?
EASY TO USE?????
Who the fuck there had the IDEA to use XML as configuration files.
They have kinda no documentation, even searching the web makes no sense because you only can find there crap documentation, once i searched after another problem and found my own Stackowerflow question, which had a totally different term!!
And i guess they are making no testing, i mean if i want to edit a api and i set one bracket false or so, than if i click on save, i am doomed, BECAUSE IT DELETES THE CHANGES WITHOUT WARNING ME, i mean srsly are you kidding me wso2???

It seems to be fucking impossible to just read a part of an XML file with c#'s XmlSerialisation and deserialize it into objects of a single class and add other objects to the same XML without loosing other nodes.
Go fuck yourself Microsoft

Level of fuckity fuck mood.

After changing dozens of build plans in Bamboo, the build system of poo...

How to verify that nothing has gone wrong?

Poking the database, you'll be surprised that Bamboo stores the buildplan definition as XML.

Another surprise: Some of the keys / values have typos.

Yeah. You read that right. There are typos inside the XML...

Now together with Postgres, we can use XPATH and have some fun.

UNNEST(COALESCE(XPATH('/configuration/buildTasks/taskDefinition[userDescription[contains(text(),"Bleep")]]', build_definition.xml_definition_data::xml)::varchar[], ARRAY['']))

Lovely wrapping via coalesce for some null safety.

Now we get da task definitions for fields having user description text containing bleep.

Wrapping it in two REGEXP_REPLACE to strip out stupid identifiers....

REGEXP_REPLACE(REGEXP_REPLACE(...., '<id>\d+</id>', ''), '<oid>\d+</oid>', ''))

Then wrap that in MD5.

Boom. Lots of MD5 sums to help you identify if the configs are identical for a task or not.

Now wrapping that in another select to group by the MD5 and filter out the non identical ones.

I hate it how sometimes one has to seemingly do a full 2 hour dance for something as stupid as validation.

I'm pretty glad though for XML and XPATH.

Cause otherwise that would have been a whole can of worms I don't wanna think about....

I had to contact technical support for an API. I’m pretty sure I was emailing with a bot because I was getting all sorts of stupid replies.

Me: I’m using your SDK for language X. It’s returned null for some properties. In the user portal, I can see there are values for those properties for the transaction. I don’t know why I’m not receiving them on my end.

Tech Support: Hi! I see the following was sent in the API response. [Sends api response to me.] You can also go the the portal to see those values.

Me: Yeah, I know. You just repeated everything I wrote to you. I don’t want to go to the portal. I told you I want to figure out why your SDK doesn’t seem to map those properties correctly when I receive the api response.

TS: Let me look at the docs. I think you need to send the properties you want in your request in order to get them back in the reply from the api. Such as <property>value<property> in the xml message.

🤨 The docs do not say that. They don’t even imply that.

Me: What the fuck?! That makes absolutely no sense. We have already established that the api **is** returning values for those properties. I want to troubleshoot why your SDK is mapping them as NULL.

Manager put me working on the crm, it was made using opentabs 1.4 which was made using ofbiz, fuck coding in xml

I'm not sure how efficient this is...but fuck you XML, it works...

I guess I'll just die.

Using unity for a commission project:
Have a CCG-like setup, the cards inherit from Scriptable object, need to serialize a card inventory for the sake of persistence.
Attempt 1: XML serialization: get fucked, can't serialize dictionaries (what the hell)
Attempt 2: using data representation of the dictionary contents: get fucked, can't serialize Scriptable objects because they have to be handled by the engine...
Well okay, what if I use a Scriptable object to keep a persistent dictionary?
Attempt 3: Scriptable object with dictionary: get fucked, the dictionary didn't persist
Well now I'm starting to lose it, I've tried so many things, XML, Binary and JSon serialization, Scriptable objects, data representations, I'm really running out of ideas. I can only think of one more option: throw the Card objects into a Resources folder, an build a set of comma delimited strings to serialize. This is stupid.

Fuck Unity. Shit like this is why I'm making my own engine. Every week I find some new peeve, some new way that unity is full of redundancy and poor design, architectural flaws and workflow deficiencies. I don't know how much more of this I can take.