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First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:
So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.
Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.
Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.
For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.
Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.
Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.
I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?13 -
long rant = this;
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.
First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!
Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.
Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.
Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??
Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.
Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.
Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?
Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.
Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.
Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?
I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.
I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.22 -
I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress. I hate Wordpress.
Wordpress can take a big shit on itself and crawl into a deep dark hole far away from all that is good.
Who even uses Wordpress? Bloggers? Come on, let’s be honest, they’re using more intuitive sites like weebly, wix, and square space. So WHAT is Wordpress for? I’ll tell you, it’s just to FUCKING TORTURE PEOPLE.
So, being the “techy guy” of the family, a relative contacts me asking for some help with their website because they need to install an SSL certificate but they don’t know how to. I tell them I’d gladly do it because, sure, they’re family and how long can it possibly take to install a certificate? I’ve done it before!
Well, I get to work and log into the sluggish Wordpress dashboard and try to use a plugin that would issue a LetsEncrypt certificate because they are free and just as good as any other SSL. But one plugin after the next I keep getting errors about how my hosting wouldn’t allow it.
So I contact GoDaddy (don’t get me fucking started) and ask them about the issue. The guy tells me it’s “policy” to only be able to use GoDaddy’s certificates. How much do they cost? Oh, how about $100 a year?! Fuck you.
I figured out the only way to escape this hell was to ask them to open an economy Linux hosting account with cPanel on GoDaddy (the site was formerly hosted on a “Managed Wordpress” account which is just bullshit for not wanting to give you any control over your own goddamn content). So now I have to deal with migrating the site.
GoDaddy representative tells me that it should only take 20 minutes for me to do this (I’ve already spent way too much time on this but whatever) so I go forward with the new account. I decide I should migrate the site by exporting a backup and manually placing everything on the new server. Doesn’t it end up taking an entire hour to back up a 200MB site because GoDaddy throttled the processing speed?!
So, it’s another hour later and I’ve installed all the databases and carried over all the files. At this point, I’m really at the end of my rope and can’t wait to install the certificate and be done with this fuckery.
I install the certificate and finally get ready to be on my way, but then I see it. A warning. A warning from my browser telling me the site is only partially secure. It turns out the certificate was properly installed but whoever initially made the site HARDCODED ALL THE LINKS to images, websites, and style sheets to be http instead of https.
I’m gonna explode.
I swear, I’m gonna fucking explode.
After a total of 5 hours of work, I finally get the site secure by using search and replace on every fucking file.
Wordpress can go suck a big one. Actually, Wordpress can go suck the largest fuckin one in existence and choke on it.
TL;DR I agree to install an SSL certificate but end up with much more work than I bargained.38 -
Just because I know how to program doesn't mean I know how to fix your goddamn computer. We have an IT support team. Call them!
Don't come to my desk asking about a computer problem, then stand there with a vacant stare when I say I can't help you. I've given you the support team's contact info several times already. I assure you, they specifically get paid to configure your emails, install printers, setup your VPN, etc. Now where the hell was I at...1 -
Time for a rant about shitstaind, suspend/hibernate, and if there's room for it at the end probably swappiness, and Windows' way of dealing with this.
So yesterday I wanted to suspend my laptop like usual, to get those goddamn fans to shut up when I'm sleeping. Shitstaind.. pinnacle of init systems.. nope, couldn't do it. Hibernation on the other hand, no problem mate! So I hibernated the laptop and resumed it just now. I'm baffled by this.
I'll oversimplify a bit here (but feel free to comment how there's more to it regardless) but basically with suspend you keep your memory active as well as some blinkenlights, and everything else goes down. Simple enough.. except ACPI and I will not get into that here, curse those foul lands of ACPI.
With hibernation you do exactly the same, but on top of that, you also resume the system after suspending it, and freeze it. While frozen, you send all the memory contents to the designated swap file/partition. Regarding the size of the swap file, it only needs to be big enough to fit the memory that's currently in use. So in a 16GB RAM system with 8GB swap, as long as your used memory is under 8GB, no problem! It will fit. After you've moved all the memory into swap, you can shut down the entire system.
Now here's the problem with how shitstaind handled this... It's blatantly obvious that hibernation is an extension of suspend (sometimes called S3, see e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/...) and that therefore the hibernation shouldn't have been possible either. The pinnacle of init systems.. can't even suspend a system, yet it can hibernate it. Shitstaind sure works in mysterious ways!
On Windows people would say it's a hardware issue though, so let's talk a bit about that clusterfuck too. And I'll even give you a life hack that saves 30GB of storage on your Windows system!
Now I use Windows 7 only, next to my Linux systems. Reason for it is it's the least fucked up version of Windows in my opinion, and while it's falling apart in terms of web browsing (not that you should on an EOL system), it's good enough for le games. With that out of the way... So when you install Windows, you'll find that out of the box it uses around 40GB of storage. Fairly substantial, and only ~12GB of it is actually system data. The other 30-ish GB are used by a hibernation file (size of your RAM, in C:\hiberfil.sys) and the page file (C:\pagefile.sys, and a little less than your total RAM.. don't ask me why). Disable both of those and on a 16GB RAM system, you'll save around 30GB storage. You can thank me later.
What I find strange though is that aside from this obscene amount of consumed storage, is that the pagefile and hibernation file are handled differently. In Linux both of those are handled by the swap, and it's easy to see why. Both are enabled by the concept of virtual memory. When hibernating, the "real" memory locations are simply being changed to those within swap. And what is the pagefile? Yep.. virtual memory. It's one thing to take an obscene amount of storage, but only Windows would go the extra mile and do it twice. Must be a hardware issue as well.
Oh, and swappiness. This is a concept that many Linux users seem to misunderstand. Intuitively you'd think that the swappiness determines what percentage of memory it takes for the kernel to start swapping, but this is not true. Instead, it's a ratio of sorts that the kernel uses when determining how important the memory and swap are. Each bit of memory has a chance to be put into either depending on the likelihood of it being used soon after, and with the swappiness you're tuning this likelihood to be either in favor of memory or swap. This is why a swappiness of 60 is default most of the time, because both are roughly equally important, and swap being on disk is already taken into account. When your system is swapping only and exactly the memory that's unlikely to be used again, you know you've succeeded. And even on large memory systems, having some swap is usually not a bad idea. Although I'd definitely recommend putting it on SSD in a partition, so that there's no filesystem overhead and so that it's still sufficiently fast, even when several GB of memory are being dumped in.6 -
Trying to install Fedora to use some Linux stuff
- have to try booting up 3 times to boot into the live env successfully
- keyboard doesn't work, try booting up again
- installer crashes
Yeah fuck this back to Windows it is.10 -
Shitty goddamn "Agencies" and the piece of shit WordPress install garbage that comes along with them
150+ fucking plugins
Cause this is 2018 and more plugins = better wordpress site right?
CSS is easy enough > just edit the stylesheet right? I mean theres already CSS in there so this should work.
Fucking Noooope because the default custom style sheet doesn't get loaded through the garbage theme anymore.
Sure that makes alot of fucking sense sense, idiots added another fucking plugin for Custom CSS ontop of the "Live CSS Editor" ontop of the "Click and Place Builder"
WHAT IN THE FUCK
Can someone explain to me why these "Agencies" need to add 50 plugins just to edit fucking visuals? And when they decide they don't want to use that plugin anymore > add a new one, but we won't keep everything clean and in one place > lets just fucking leave it installed and fragmented for the next poor fucker that comes alone -
Trying to make a nodejs backend is pure hell. It doesn't contain much builtin functionality in the first place and so you are forced to get a sea of smaller packages to make something that should be already baked in to happen. Momentjs and dayjs has thought nodejs devs nothing about the fact node runtime must not be as restrained as a browser js runtime. Now we are getting temporal api in browser js runtime and hopefully we can finally handle timezone hell without going insane. But this highlights the issue with node. Why wait for it to be included in js standard to finally be a thing. develop it beforehand. why are you beholden to Ecma standard. They write standards for web browser not node backend for god sake.
Also, authentication shouldn't be that complicated. I shouldn't be forced to create my own auth. In laravel scaffolding is already there and is asking you to get it going. In nodejs you have to get jwt working. I understand that you can get such scaffolding online with git clone but why? why express doesn't provide buildtin functions for authentication? Why for gods sake, you "npm install bcrypt"? I have to hash my own password before hand. I mean, realistically speaking nodejs is builtin with cryptography libraries. Hashmap literally uses hashing. Why can't it be builtin. I supposed any API needed auth. Instead I have to sign and verfiy my token and create middlewares for the job of making sure routes are protected.
I like the concept of bidirectional communication of node and the ugly thing, it's not impressive. any goddamn programming language used for web dev should realistically sustain two-way communication. It just a question of scaling, but if you have a backend that leverages usockets you can never go wrong. Because it's written in c. Just keep server running and sending data packets and responding to them, and don't finalize request and clean up after you serve it just keep waiting for new event.
Anyway, I hope out of this confused mess we call nodejs backend comes clean solutions just like Laravel came to clean the mess that was PHP backend back then.
Express is overrated by the way, and mongodb feels like a really ludicrous idea. we now need graphql in goddamn backend because of mongodb and it's cousins of nosql databases.7
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