Good news: Today my app reached 1 million daily users. 😃😃😃💰

Bad news: It started out as a side project and my shitty code is not scaling well at all. 🙃

First world problems...

I've been working at this startup as a tech lead for a little over a year, and we've grown from 3 to over 150 employees, and a bit over a million end users.

I've spent tens of thousands on high end displays and chairs for your lazy butts, on external consultants to help and train you, even those fucking dirty recruiters have leeched their shares of the pie. I built an amazing luxury kitchen with a fridge, beer cooler, induction plates and a blender for all your crossfitting bodybuilder meals, but forgot to think of my own needs.

NOW I JUST WANT TO BUY A GOOD COFFEEMAKER AND ALL THESE FUCKING TEASLURPING FAKE DEV-BROS SUDDENLY START SCREAMING ABOUT BUDGETS AND HOW COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARY IF YOU MEDITATE. FUCK YOU, WE'RE LIKE THE ONLY STARTUP IN THE COUNTRY RUNNING A FAT PROFIT. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID MINDFULNESS IOS APP. GIVE ME MY FUCKING ESPRESSO OR I'LL BLEND YOUR BALLS INTO A PROTEIN SHAKE.

"Is it just me or is Youtube down?"
YES
IT'S JUST YOU
THEY PICKED YOU OUT OF A BILLION USERS
AND TOOK IT DOWN
Sorry, good night.

Client : Can you make some adblock?
Me : Why? There is a lot of good things already...
C : I mean... Listen carefully.
M : ok
C: i have some google ads and user blocks with adblock
M : yeah, that is normal
C : so i implemented adblock blocker which blocks adblock so that i can show the webpage plus ads when the user disables adblock.
M : i bet users hate that.
C : yeah, so users found out a way to disable adblock blocker which disables adblock blocker which i implemented to show the ads! So i cant earn revenue..
M : so what?
C : Can you make ad block block block block?
M : Sure. How much will you give me ?
C : 20 to 30 dollars
M : great ( the most generous client ever seen)

*couple of years later*

Client : can you make ad block block block block block block block block block block?
Me : i cant understand
C : count the number of block
If there is odd number of block i means to block ads.
If there is even number of block ads, it means to show ads making user to disable ads.
M : so just tldr your request this time
C : even number
M : ok how much will you pay
C : 20 to 30 dollars

*next day*
C : can you..
M : offline

Who in the fucking world made ads, made adblock and made adblock block?

words from a hurt dev 😢

stupid users don't review when all's good 😤

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

Biggest hurdle: torn between having boobs and missing an arm. I swear some people are under the assumption the brain is in the arm.

I am fully capable of building your network, resolving your outage due to your faulty code, can even tell you how many users your database can support at once. I don't need arms for that. Nor do my boobs distract me that badly.

"but men are going to make your life so hard" yup. And that's true no matter where i go

"all that typing with one arm can't be good for your back" welp. Find me a job that doesn't require a computer. Or manual labor. If you think typing will fuck me up, that's DEFINITELY out of the equation

"you're too pretty, there's no way this can make sense" dafuq you just say?!?!

"why don't you just stay home on disability, I'm sure you qualify, you wouldn't need to work" I'd rather be a fucking trophy wife if I'm staying at home. Fuck that.

And many more.

Sometimes they're fun. Give me more dumb arguments to counter? ;)

No matter how good your security is, you'll still have users...

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

Hey everyone - I just wanted to update our Android users on the push notification crash that has been occurring.

The good news is the issue should be fixed in the update I just pushed out (should be available in the Google Play Store within a few hours). We apologize for the crashes and thank everyone for their patience.

I'm still looking in to what actually happened here. Our GCM library hasn't been updated in a while and all of a sudden a specific case started failing. I'll continue to look in to how that seemingly happened with no changes in the app. Some other users of the library started experiencing the same issue.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

How do I un-idiot my users when it comes to clicking on dodgy email-links??

Got a forwarded email just there from a user who said;

Good afternoon,
Is the below ok to open?
I just tried but got a popup saying I've been blocked from opening it.
I'm not sure who it is coming from and I am not waiting on anything but as it says its from dropbox and is important, i know it's okay.
Can you unblock the link ASAP please?
This is really impeding my work-day as I need to know what it is and act accordingly.
Regards... user.

The Original email came from a random jumble of letters with a subject line of 'important dropbox program' - not only does it look dodgy but its english is horrible! It said;

"Hi tu my freind,

You tu still read a pending verrry important document sent by one of your own contact to be vieweddd.

Install "Highly Confidential english.pdf" by clickinggg here

*insert link leading to something called 'viral-update-trojan.exe'*"

I mean, seriously... help!!! 😢
We have sent emails explaining how to hover over links and to not to click them if it looks wrong.
No one does it.
We hired a company to send fake phishing emails to train users in what to do.
It made no difference!
We now make people 'verify' their email addresses when opening any sort of link to try get them to actually look at what they're opening.
We also strip emails of original attachments and create 'safe' html copies as we can't trust them to look at what they're opening.
Everyone complains about it but Jesus Christ, this is why!!!

Its so exhausting!! What is wrong with people!!! Argh!!! 😤

Okay okay here's another one

Client:pls put a pop up that asks the users weather they are sure about leaving the page.
Me: I think that would be redundant
Since he clicked the close button to close the page.
Client: what if he is unsure of leaving the page now he will stay.
Me: :/
Client:And another one when his login fails.
Me: pop ups can be disabled it's not good to use them especially for login screen.
Client (now slightly annoyed): Well,put a pop up warning them not to, isn't it obvious.God!!! I thought you were the smart one.
Me:;/

Got some good news today, Australia's PM (Malcolm Turnbull) doesn't want a backdoor in encryption! All he just wants is "support" from companies to "access" their users encrypted data.

See the difference?

I don't 😒

*Me working on the security system of the notes app thingy*

"hmm, should check if a users' ip is valid, let's look for some online services..."

*can't find a good one without rate limits*

😞

*hold on, I wrote one myself 🤣*

I am so fucking retarded sometimes.

Ok, so I have a SAAS website where users pay a daily fee to use my platform as there fundraiser landing page.

A new client comes, asks for a discount, and got a 50% off because his brother was a previous client.

Him: Can you please add a list of the days of the year so a donor can donate a day?

Me: Sure, sounds like a good idea, and will probably take me about a week to implement with testing etc. And so I want $$ (hourly rate * one week) for the work.

Him: Don't bluff me I understand a bit in programming, it shouldn't take you more than an hour, and I am paying you, so you should do it for free.

Me: Ok, here is a fair deal, since you understand in programming, build it for me, I give you two weeks and I will pay you double what I am asking for.

Him: I don't understand enough to do it myself, I just estimated how much work it is.

Me: Forget about it, if you want me to build you this feature, you pay. If not you can go to my competition happily.

Who needs bad clients at all?
Why do they think they know everything?
And why don't they understand that time is money?

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

That akward moment when your App finally takes down Pokemon Go down from the first place to second in AppStore but you can not be Happy about it 😑. Katwarn warned the users about the incidents of munich #prayformunich. Good to know people still care about the important things. 🙁

With the wake of some rants shouting at Linuxers who express their opinion in a considered to be very not good way, I decided to make such a rant. Not to be annoying but because, although I get that fanboyism in that way isn't even good in MY opinion, I do think that one should be able to express their opinion.

But, If you'd like to express your opinion, I think you at least should do that with some good arguments. Not everyone might agree with those arguments but hey, that's the point of opinions sometimes :)

I don't hate windows/mac for being windows or mac. Nope.

I hate the systems for not giving the user freedom to do what they wish with the system but more importantly, for integrating their users in worlds biggest mass surveillance program AND on top of fucking that, not giving peoples the option to look at the source code aka at what's ACTUALLY going on in the system. Next to that, Windows 10's data collection is officially not legal in the netherlands so don't even try justifying their fucking data slurping.

Of course there's a chance that they don't contain any bad stuffs but since the Snowden revelations I don't trust those commercial companies anymore on their 'blue' eyes.

Yeah, I've ranted about this before, I know, felt like doing it again in combination with my reason above. I also know that I will probs receive hate for this but oh well, i'm used to that by now.

So yeah, windows and osx: go fuck yourself.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

So you build a beautiful site; you spend good time on UX, refactoring, server optimisation, getting good page load speeds, SQL all optimised - life is good.
Commercial team comes in and slaps clickbait, generic advertising, tracking scrips over the lot.
Page loads go from a second to 30 seconds and even though you made sure all those crappy ad scripts are asynchronous pages still hang most times. PingdomTools lists your page scripts as going from 40 files to over 900... now users are ringing me up giving me grief about how slow this new company website is...

Everyone generally agrees code reviews are a good idea right? And some form of testing is kinda a requirement before releasing.

Nope not my boss at the moment. None of my work has been checked in any way but is going out to thousands of users.

If I take the heat for bugs I'm gonna hit back so hard

***Interviewing potential sys admins so us devs don't have to build everything and run everything***

Coworker: Do you know how to use cron and cron jobs?

Candidate: Yes I'm familiar with setting up users and permissions.

Me: 😳

Coworker: 😳

Boss: We will give you a call have a good day.

If you had just admitted you didn't know but we thought you could learn we might have been open to teaching you but brazenly acting like you know something when you don't is dangerous if you're running a multi thousand user production system.

Designer: Can you hide scrollbar and still make web scrollable?
I: Sure.
Designer: Ok fine, i'll do that in next design.
I: Wait, how users will know the web has more content?
Designer: I'll put the mouse icon on the bottom.
I: It is not good idea. People can overlook it.
Designer: It will be fine.
I: I strongly recommend to you not to do it.
Designer: Why?
I: Confusion besides other reasons.
Designer: If you can do it, do it.
I: Ok than.

$request->getIP() == 'his_ip' ? 'hide-scrollbar';

A programmer once explained Nietzsche like this:
A long time ago, god created the world, but forgot to leave a developer documentation, thus the whole world was like legacy code...
And humans are like the end user of this world, and some among them spent time studying it, using the Moral API, hoping to get a result of "http 200 ok" from our world for the peace of mind. But the true operation of this world is still yet unknown...
As time passes, humans begin to find that in Moral API, good and evil are two base classes, and all the other moral properties (like ethic, justice and stuff) are just other classes based on those two classes through multiple inheritance.
One day, when programmer Nietzsche was observing the world's runtime behavior, he came up with a question:
"Did god really use good and evil as base classes? Could it be that they are actually derived classes?"
Most of the world is currently in the favor of mankind, and god must've wrote individual user cases for it's end users, he thought.
This made Nietzsche thinking: if end users are considered into two cases: the strong and the weak, how would the world be designed base on its user story?
Let's think about the strong, they can bully the weak as they please, and there's nothing the weak can do to stop them. In this case whether the Moral API exists or not doesn't fulfill the need of the strong.
But when it comes to the weak, Nietzsche thinks that because the weak cannot fight the strong, they need to belittle bullying and praise the strong for being nice. When the weak does this, it covers their powerless state to some extent, making them look somehow equal to the strong by being capable of commenting.
God might have coded the Moral API to fit the weak's requirement, also adding some public methods for the weak to comment on the strong. If the strong takes care of the weak, they call him nice and good, if the strong bullies people, they call him bad and evil.
That's when Nietzsche realized, that good and evil are both derived classes from the weak, and the base class should be the strong and the weak.
Then he started a series of studies about the Moral API, and got some thesis that persuaded lots of other end users...

I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.

I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.

I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.

The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.

An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.

What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.

That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?

You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.

And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.

I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?

Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.

Hey devRanters! A tiny update regarding the privacy tips etc site.

So as ewpratten doesn't have much time right now, I'm doing frontend as well for now.

Since some people also offered to contribute content, which I did not expect, I am also writing an invite/registration (based on invites) as we speak. So, this way, I can invite anyone (based on email address) into the CMS so that they can contribute content as well!

Regarding frontend, I'm introducing a system with icons. Icons? Yes, icons, let me explain:

Every application/service will get a couple of default filtering thingies. (not like clicking something and it'll filter anything out, yet) It'll enable users to see what an application does or does not. What the FUCK do you mean? Alright, so, as example, lets say open source. next to each application (read application/service) listed, there will be an open source icon. If the application is open source, this icon will be green, otherwise it will be red.

This will allow for a quick way of filtering stuff out.

For example, if you're only looking for open source stuff, you can quickly filter stuff out where the open source icon is red!

This will apply to things as open sourceness, metadata saving, usage of good crypto technology and so on. So you'll be able to quickly filter out the stuff you want to use (by eyes) through those filters!

Please let me know what you think and if you have ideas, I'll be glad to hear them!

*PM on drugs*

PM: The destination list on our Infinity Rider app is not updating even after the user changes their pickup location.

Me: ???

PM: Infinity App not updating after pick up point change.

Me: Not really sure what you mean... Can I get a screen record?

PM: {{sends screen record}}

PM: You see it's showing results of old search. Not good!!!

Me: {{Watch media half way through and saw the obvious}}

Me: Results on available destination are relative to the user's current location and not the pickup address.

PM: Why would that be? Not good enough!

Me: You actually requested that implementation after I had previously made the destination recommendation list relative to selected pickup address.

PM: Please revert immediately!!!

Me: Hmmm... You told me the reason why that implementation was needed was to prevent users from selecting interstate addresses because they could.

PM: Ooh true. You can leave as is.

PM: {{proceeds to delete all older messages but last}}

Me: (⊙_⊙)

{{ 4 hours later }}

PM: I think we need to look into this implementation a second time.

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.

ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!

Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!

1. Try to stay sane in startup chaos
2. Use more vacation days
3. Separate work and free time a bit more
4. Get out into nature more
5. Hire 50+ good developers & get company to 15M active end users while doing all of the above

Long story short, I'm unofficially the hacker at our office... Story time!

So I was hired three months ago to work for my current company, and after the three weeks of training I got assigned a project with an architect (who only works on the project very occasionally). I was tasked with revamping and implementing new features for an existing API, some of the code dated back to 2013. (important, keep this in mind)

So at one point I was testing the existing endpoints, because part of the project was automating tests using postman, and I saw something sketchy. So very sketchy. The method I was looking at took a POJO as an argument, extracted the ID of the user from it, looked the user up, and then updated the info of the looked up user with the POJO. So I tried sending a JSON with the info of my user, but the ID of another user. And voila, I overwrote his data.

Once I reported this (which took a while to be taken seriously because I was so new) I found out that this might be useful for sysadmins to have, so it wasn't completely horrible. However, the endpoint required no Auth to use. An anonymous curl request could overwrite any users data.

As this mess unfolded and we notified the higher ups, another architect jumped in to fix the mess and we found that you could also fetch the data of any user by knowing his ID, and overwrite his credit/debit cards. And well, the ID of the users were alphanumerical strings, which I thought would make it harder to abuse, but then realized all the IDs were sequentially generated... Again, these endpoints required no authentication.

So anyways. Panic ensued, systems people at HQ had to work that weekend, two hot fixes had to be delivered, and now they think I'm a hacker... I did go on to discover some other vulnerabilities, but nothing major.

It still amsues me they think I'm a hacker 😂😂 when I know about as much about hacking as the next guy at the office, but anyways, makes for a good story and I laugh every time I hear them call me a hacker. The whole thing was pretty amusing, they supposedly have security audits and QA, but for five years, these massive security holes went undetected... And our client is a massive company in my country... So, let's hope no one found it before I did.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

QA: When I open the app I get this strange error message that includes "No data connection could be established" near the start of it.

Me: I'll clean up how thats displayed, but the error means your phone doesn't have internet connection.

QA: No that can't be it, I do.

Me: You screenshot shows no WiFi or 3g / 4g symbols.

QA: No those are never there, please investigate.

Me: I have investigated and found that every other one of your screenshots had a WiFi or a 3g symbol. Example: <link>. Please check your connection and try again, i'll clean up the error display.

PM: Oh i've had an issue something like this before. We really need to show users an error screen. We can't just leave them on this screen with no error message at all.

Me: ... we have an error, thats what QA is complaining about, its not loading the text and displaying the error object.

Anyone else want to not pay attention and complain about something else that doesn't make sense? ... no? ... ok good, back to work then

So there's a recent rant, about making a website work for IE.

I get it, you don't want to make it work for IE because you don't use IE.

But get this: you're not doing the site FOR YOU. You're doing it for the intended user, which is a lot of users that use all kinds of shit. If you don't want to do that, get the fuck out of web development, or from development overall. It's not for you.

I remember when I started my career, I had to make a web app that was intended to be used by, say, 100 people. As a developer I had the best tools for that - cool new 19" monitors, good GPU able to spit out a humongous resolution, and I designed that portal to look great. You know what my superior did then? He took away my 19" monitor and gave me a 14" monitor instead, saying that I became a spoiled brat that totally ignored the customer. I was angry at that, but immediately realized that he was completely right.

It doesn't matter! that it works on your machine. Who the fuck cares about your machine?

Does the software work for the intended user? If not, then you're a shitty developer.

What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.

What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.

Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.

We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.

I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.

This was my rant.

* login tutorial *

Alright, everything looks good and secure and all

"and now to keep the user logged in..."

Aww ye, this is just what I needed

"we set logged in to \"true\" in a cookie and add another cookie with the users name"

So this guy rated my app 1 star saying that "application is pretty good. I can do almost all of my task using this app. It would be better if you have added this* features."

*The features he mentions is nothing but the substraction of 2 variables.

Why some of the app users behave like this? This is the biggest turn off to motivate me to keep developing if your application is free of cost.

Why can't we delete those review from stores?

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

6 months ago:

Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner

Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?

Boss: Explore it

Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?

Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again

Yesterday:

Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly

Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago

Boss: ......... oh, really?

Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else

Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?

Me: nope

Boss: ... what do you mean?

Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this

Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm

Me: *sits with resting bitch face*

Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?

Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?

Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...

Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be

Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure

Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it

Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...

Me: Its that or we cut feature X

Boss: ... well we need that

Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets

Boss: ... ok

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

Finally thought I had a good project idea.

It's already been done and is a large site. 200k users.

WHY CAN'T I JUST COME UP WITH SOMETHING UNIQUE FOR ONCE?

Every single fucking time:

Developers: Maybe we'll do something nice for the users, like signing in with Facebook account?
Business: Nah, nobody is gonna pay for that and it sounds useless. We're good with current solutions. Just do your job!

half a year later:

Business: Hey, I just came up with the idea that we could have logging in with Facebook.
Also business: Wow, great idea!
Management: Here's your bonus for a great idea!
Developers: ...

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

The worst part about being a web developer is when clients ruin a perfectly good website by asking for dumb things, even though you told them it's either:
a) near impossible
b) not useful/helpful to users
c) deprecated/no longer used code/techniques
e) will harm performance and SEO
d) just plain stupid

Saw a guy using his thinkpad in George Street Hungry Jack's(Sydney), decided to take a look on his laptop screen, he was running i3wm, wonder if he is on devrant. Feels good to see linux users around.

Ram for Google Chrome users. Still not good enough?

*plays game for 10h consecutive*
.. yeah yeah I know what you're thinking. This guy doesn't have a life. And you're probably right.

*gets hungry*
… I could really use a hamburger right now 🤔
… But the fast food tent is ~30 minutes walking distance away, and this game automatically logs you out after 30 mins inactivity...

What if I could program in some delayed input?

*jazz hand routine engages*
Hmm.. so if I do something like:
PS C:\Users\Condor> $wshell.AppActivate('BlueStacks'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('abusing this chat~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('for upkeep of 10h play~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('while I get myself a hamburger~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('sorry~');
that should work, no?

Le output:
abusing this chat
sorry

Well, even for PowerShit.. good enough, right? It gets the message across 🙃

Hmm.. let's just put an afk message instead, as I'm using the guild chat and don't want any of the members to think that I'm a freak

PS C:\Users\Condor> Sleep 1; $wshell.AppActivate('BlueStacks'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('afk~');

.. which seems to work like a charm.. alright, perhaps I can entrust PowerShell to do that again after a 900 second delay, which should give me enough time to get that hamburger.

*comes back home*

"Logged out due to 30 minutes of inactivity."

MICROSOFT POWERSHIT, YOU'VE HAD BUT ONE FUCKING JOB!!!!

Well, guess I'll do that no-life 10+h gaming session somewhere next year again then. Thanks Powercunt!

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Congratulations? For fucking what. So you built a wix website. Now youre a web developer and the whole world knows it, my services aren't needed anymore.

Congratulations you bypassed half a decade in 50 hours a week of coding, then you have the bone and fucking marrow of emailing me because your like buttons are causing users to create a new instagran account. Good one kid.

"It's just a tiny change in one function. What can go wrong? I don't need to test, I'm not that stupid to mess this up". Apparently I am. Pushed the changes, and the [Firefox] extension basically stopped working. Lost about 1.5k users in 2 days. Good times ;)

There's so many posts on here that say fuck apple or Microsoft only real programmers or computer users run Linux. Maybe step back and reflect why these companies got big. Maybe the programmers in their development teams are actually good. Maybe variety and competition and different focuses is good for us and consumers.

You know what is at least equally hard as naming variables?

Finding fitting icons to button actions!

With some icons you rather confuse your users compared to using no icon at all.
Others may fit the button text but not the context in your use case.

And there are so many icon sets out there that you need to search for something and hope that you stumble upon a good one.

Bind's top {number} dev tools to make your 2018 easier!

//note 0: feel free to add your own
//note 1: no ides, only stuff thats useful for everyone

0) vscode, it got significantly better after the latest updates and is very versatile
1) gitkraken, now i use sourcetree because of the jira integration but kraken is available for linux too so
2) scaleway, they provide really cheap servers for whatever you want, easy to install images (docker too)
3) protonmail, an encrypted mail service that works a lot better than gmail (tutanota is a close 2nd but has a weeb name)
4) telegram, if you can, tell your team to ditch slack, because telegram is a lot more lightweight and even if you dont, just the channels make it worth giving it a shot
5) steemit, a blockchain based website where the users write the articles, you can find some good reads there (and photography if you like that stuff)
6) a dildo because it wouldnt be a bindview content without out of context penile objects

Story of a penguin fledgling, one of my end users whom I migrated from Win 7 to Linux Mint. She had been on Windows since Win 98 and still uses Windows at work.

Three months before. Me, Linux might not be as good, but Win 10 is even worse. User, mh.
Migration. User, looks different, but not bad.
One month later. User, it's nice, I like it.
Three months later. User, why does Windows reboot doing lengthy stuff?
Six months later. User, I hate Windows. Why is everyone using this crap?
One year later. Malware issues at work. User to IT staff, that wouldn't have happened with Linux. Me, that's the spirit!

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

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.

Email: "We just launched our new web interface! It's so much easier to use, and should make life a lot easier for our users."

Me: Oh good this thing has been unusable since I've been working here. How do I get on the new version? Better read on...

"Download this PDF for more information!"

Erm... ok.

In the (20 page) PDF: "Email this address@example.com to get the URL!"

ffs ok

email: "Thank you for emailing us, you username is benoliver999, your password is 'passow0rd' and the url is in this attached PDF

god help me

(50 page) PDF: "Remember to disable pop up blocker, ad-block and to install Flash"

Today I have started building my own version of this product so we can stop using these idiots.

As an aside, the username 'admin' also had a password of 'passow0rd'...

An adult cam website I worked on as freelancer had/has this code everywhere:
$user = $_POST['usr'];
$pass = $_POST['pwd'];
$row = $db->query ("SELECT * FROM users where username='".$user."' AND password='".$pass."' COUNT 1);

I was hired to add new features and was touch any other parts of the code. When my job was done, I tried to fix those as a good samaritan but the client thought I was messing with the system or should be thing of new features to add. So I got fired.

5 years later, I check out of curiosity and they are still there. I ask him again if I can work on them for a little less pay(I'm broke) and he doesn't reply. What a douche. I hope his site receives a shot of SQLi from a customer.

85% of users on Chrome, only 6 users total on ie. Fuck yes

Having pets is a good way to prepare yourself for working in a brown-field environment.

When your cat or dog shits on the floor, you get the same feeling as when you need to dive into a legacy code base.

You know you can't just leave it there, and yet you still want to find anything else to do except for touch the pile of shit in the middle of the room.

Meanwhile you know your users are going to end up trampling over it and mashing it into your carpet.

What kind of person doesn’t install Windows 10 for a free pre-installation of Candy Crush Soda Saga thrown into the mix? I really enjoy it when my Operating System comes preloaded with bullshit. It’s almost as if I’m losing rights to choose what I want installed on my operating system. It’s really enjoyable when Candy Crush Soda Saga appears in the background in task manager despite never opening this “””game”””. I find it amazing that after building such a powerful computer I can know that my fast 16gb ram is being used to keep bloatware running in the background. Every night I dream of the people who buy new computers with a fresh copy of Windows 10 pre-installed on it to find it has a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga already waiting to be played! The joy and tears that must come to such a persons eye to know that Bill Gates was kind enough to bless the world with every middle-aged persons favourite game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, to be the first app that appears on their start menu. The thoughts running through every developers mind at Microsoft as they pre-load a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto every copy of Windows 10. They must really feel alive and definitely would not consider doing anything else for a living but copying the files of Candy Crush Soda Saga across onto Official Windows 10 Installations. The rush of blood into their mind as they know that thousands, if not millions, of users from around the world open their brand new computer for the first time to see that King managed to bribe Microsoft with more money that you’ll ever get your hands onto into making them add a free copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto their computer. As thousands of those users move their mouse over this work of art, right click it and press uninstall without a second of doubt in their mind, rendering Kings investment to be a waste of time, money and effort. This is a story we will tell for generations and generations in the future of how the worlds most popular Operating System was not preloaded with a free copy of McAfee, but instead a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga for the entire world to rejoice. Good day to you all.

My manager is instructing my team to add a feature that can only be enabled for users by running an update script in the database.

When I argued that it's not really "complete" if it can't be turned on without someone going into the production database, I was told that not only is it complete, but they plan to have our non-technical customer service enable it for customers if the customer requests it...

Apparently giving everyone and their brother write access to prod is a good idea, but implementing a checkbox is a "waste of time and would cost too much money".

Probably going to float my resume... :-p

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

So this was going to be a comment but damn!!!!

Windows is seriously about making life harder for power users now, every fucking update lately is moving more easy to change things and fucking hiding them inside hidden menus or stupid links that don’t make sense. I mean fuck I just want to turn on dual screen with my laptop (because for some bizarre reason, just showing the desktop on the plugged in monitor is so hard to do automatically, especially since I just plugged a hdmi cable in) and the fucker was gone with nothing but a “detect screens” button before it would use an external screen.

Fuck I’m so close to pulling the plug on windows, but Linux just doesn’t sell me for daily use (yet... it’s getting there though)

The fucking forced updates (yes I consider a random bsod due to a system interrupt, then as it reboots magically has updates awaiting... a forced update) are starting to get to me, the fucking thing half crashing and not responding due to a network transfer of files (the fucker was 5GB)

If it wasn’t for my gaming needs and someone can show me a very good alternative to MS Visio (I haven’t really found one yet) then I would swap over and just adjust to the not so great (imo) desktop environments.

Interesting fact: Dogecoin is popular because of a Reddit bot that stole everyone's money.

DogeTipBot, a Reddit bot that was designed as a 3rd party resource for tipping Reddit users for good content was a bot that used Dogecoin as a micro-tipping service, giving many users their first crypto experience and popularizing the coin.

The creator of DogeTipBot went bankrupt, sold all of his coins, AND all of the coins of his users, and shut down the bot.

A currency born as a joke, made intentionally as backwards as possible, and popularized by a scam, is now worth $50 billion USD... now that's a meme.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

Heyyy Fellow devRant users, wanted to know has anyone else been in this situation before? it happens to me quite a bit now and usually always makes me laugh :-D, i'll set the scenario for you here.

*Me talking to stranger on the bus*
Me - "How are you doing today mate"
Stranger - "very well thank you, off to work, how about yourself?"
Me - "Very good thanks mate, I'm off to Uni for the day :D"
Stranger - "Thats great, what do you study mate?"
Me - "Well I'm doing a course in Software Development!, i very much enjoy what I'm studying!"
Stranger - "Wow, you must be very good at fixing printers and stuff hey"

well... it sorta ends there but hopefully you get the picture :D, this is usually how my conversations with strangers ends up. As you may notice i tend to 'talk too much' :D,
hope you're having a great night or day where ever you may be :D. - Milo

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Linux is hard to learn and master. That's fine with me. Windows is intuitive, but not user-friendly. Linux has a steep learning curve, but then is far more user-friendly than any other operating system. To me, that steep learning curve was far more than worth it, as I now have a desktop that does whatever I want, and behaves exactly as I want.

People come to Linux hoping that it will be easy to pick up, and then get angry when it isn't. Then they claim that the community is toxic, because Linux users are happy with something they think is broken.

Linux is hard to learn, and that's fine. That's valuable, to me. That's part of the appeal to me(and millions of others). Linux is unforgiving when you lack the knowledge gained in that steep learning curve. That's fine with me too. As its userbase grows, so too does the number of knowledgeable people who work to make it better and invent more amazing things for it.

If Linux was easy to learn, it wouldn't be as good as it is, and to me, that's reason enough to love it.

Well, the impossible needs to become possible again.

"you will shit out a full website for this customer in two days! Fully responsive, 16 pages, and it better be good!"

Yeah. Ok. Fuck you. My attitude stinks, but your expectations and temperament kind of forge my attitude. Now tell me how in fucks name i am supposed to just stop administering over 3000 users and god only knows the ever growing amount of servers, stop all my server side development, so that I can make a site for a customer paying the company the equivalent of $100 for it (because sales people here are retarded) and get zero fucking commission or even a thank you for it.

Nah. Fuck this.

Tired of complaining, and I'm sure you guys are just as tired of it.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

It’s a pretty good feeling when you’ve been sweating deadlines, stay in late, worrying about users, testing, maintaining a list of projects as long as your arm but your boss comes to you and low key asks you to be CTO of the company. It’s a small company so we don’t officially have that title but that’s the role I’ll be filling!

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

A morbid realization (I am just wasting your time keep scrolling)

Unless someone takes a stand for the user, and their comfort and requirements, unless someone looks a client straight in the eye and says "no, I will not do that, and neither will my team" and denies them their request, nothing will change, good devs will keep losing their spark to save themselves frustration, good people will walk away and the tyranny that we face daily grows... unless someone stands up, someone who cannot be knocked down, or reprimanded and told they're wrong for fighting for what's right.. unless someone stands up for what is right and fair... nothing changes... and nothing ever will... poor programs, bad games and content, lower standards, frustrated users, annoyance that you don't matter as a user or a dev will never go away... unless someone says enough. But no one will, money is the boss, morality a liability, and people an abundant resource. This world is backwards, devs are carrying the blame and no one who is able, cares enough to say "that's enough!".

So today i got a call log from some users saying that they have "lost" the print page button when we made them switch from IE to Chrome, and I need to put the functionality back for chrome, after checking to see what print button they were talking about, because our system didint have the function to begin with, i realised they were talking about the print button on the IE toolbar that did not appear in chrome :/. The dev team had a good laugh afterwords.

I feel like I've ranted this before. many times. but here we go again because Australia.

why do people think you can just ban math? like really?! that's what crypto laws do. they require companies to use shitty math. and what prevents me from using the good math? nothing! oh I mean... I won't use it? scouts honor.

you can't ban math.
literally billions of internet users don't fall in your jurisdiction.
no single jurisdiction can cover more than a subset of the internet.
I will use whatever maths I damn well please.
fuck off. please stop making us less safe.
/discussion

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, to @dfox, @trogus: Thanks for creating a social media Web site which is actually tolerable, possibly even good. To the other users of this Web site: Thanks for not fucking up this actually-tolerable social media Web site.
Keep up the good work.

On a different note, _Deus Ex_ is by far my favourite video game. However, OpenBSD, which is my favourite operating system, does not support playing _Deus Ex_; as such, I was forced to improvise.
I own a few servers which run Ubuntu Linux, which can run VirtualBox, which can run Microsoft Windows XP, which can play _Deus Ex_. As such, I relocated my copy of Windows XP and spun up a new virtual machine, installing the operating system and the video game. After some minor hiccups, _Deus Ex_ was played without any difficulties, aside from the lack of audio, which resulted from having used VNC to access the virtual machine.
This set-up is janky, for I access the game by connecting via VNC to an Ubuntu installation which runs a virtual installation of Microsoft Windows... which runs _Deus Ex_ in windowed mode; however, I find that using this janky set-up is preferable to not being able to play _Deus Ex_.

On an even _more_ different note, future rants may be written in the third person; possibly as a result of having written briefings and whatnot in the third person for nearly two (2) decades and disliking pronouns, I dislike writing in the first person. I shall still be the author of the rants which are posted to this account.

Users.

For once they used their brains.

For once they thought about repercussions of clicking on inconspicuous links in emails.

And naturally it happened when I sent out a legitimate email to stop their shopping sprees.

But then again, I would rather have paranoid users than clicky-go-lucky.

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Stakeholder: Users are connecting invalid memberships to their web accounts. They shouldn’t be able to do that.

Me: Their memberships were valid when they set up the account. Your team’s record de-duping project is the issue here. You decided to mark those memberships as invalid.

I’m real tired of this stakeholder acting like this is a website issue or user error. Plus, this chaos could have been avoided if they and other involved stakeholders had just cc’d me on this de-duping project. I would have said their approach was not a good idea. But they didn’t because they want to do what’s convenient for them. If they want to be a reliable source of truth for our data, then they need to be responsible with how they’re handling that data.

My most successful project was simple yet useful WAP service, which today could be called a „social network”. I’ve made it in 2001, when we had „boom” for GPRS in Poland and some operators offered almost unlimited access over it for some very little money. Main pillars of my WAP service were chatrooms and SMS gateways. In next few years I’ve got hundreds or even thousands of users. Lots of them met IRL, fell in love and maked families. We travelled across Poland and met with others - great young people, living in pre-FB era... That was really good time, which will, sadly, never return...

!dev but rant

Samsung
Samsung...

Samsung!! What the fuck is wrong with you?
Some longer time ago you earned forst red red flag called knox. What the fuck you mean there is physical diode in phone that will burn out when I do whatever I want with phone? Its my phone. My. I live in europe and european law is with me. Its **MY** stuff and Im allowed to be super user so fuvk off with knox bullshit.

Okay, now, more and more phone are missing critical feature to save few cents a phone. You were last bastion. You were **that** company who was loyal to audio jacks. And why the fuck you plan to remove it? You know what? That one thing brought your phones from one of best (becouse retained audio jacks and didnt do much of notch fuckupery) to literally worst one thanks to knox.

And before anyone tells me bullshit apple tried to say "thats space saving", no its not true to point where one of their very own Iphones had internally space and traces for audio jacks. Its to save pennies on phone for profit margins and to force us to use bluetooth stuff, that I dislike. I stick to my K518 few years now and I am super happy user of it. Why y'all want to take away good stuff?

Oneplus, your turn. Why the luving fuck your big bulletpoint of marketing was "yes, we will keep loyal to audio jacks" and later down the line you shown one big fat middle finger to all users.

Goos job, guys, well fucked up.

So any good modern alternatives for my OnePlus 5 when it becomes obstole in few years? Nope. Fuck nope.

OP7 pro is awesome but no audio jacks absolutely kills off this phone in my eyes to level of not existance and inability to be considered.

I was told that buying users was a good idea, that's all I have to say

In a forum far far away...
<user> I need help understanding something about this library.
<various users> This is how it works. This is something to consider. Here is a good way to learn all of this. etc Really helpful people.
<user> I would say more about what I want to do, but I don't want to receive any more "mouthful of unsolicited advises ".

Really? You fucking ask a question on a forum about what you want to learn. Everyone there takes it seriously and provides some really golden shit on how to learn the topic. Then you shit on them for daring to provide ways to learn the topic?

I don't know if this is a language barrier, or if they are using Google translate. I have no idea. But they come across as an asshole.

you wanna know what the most hilarious shit is? hackernews users AKA the 6 figure startup bros that "rule the world" in terms of code and software...

trying to argue the best way to build a website 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

here's some select quotes:

"I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php"

^ this guy must not know its 2023 now

"Unless you are a web developer I don't see the point of a CSS framework, it's much easier to roll your own."

^ this guy must not know the pain and suffering that is 'rolling your own' in CSS

"Sadly, I just don't have the time to generate the content I wanted to do, so the site sits."

^ this guy just... wait, what?

but you know what? these guys clearly know WAY more than me in terms of software, it's good they get infinite salad bar and prime rib every day at silicon valley's best and brightest!

please fucking kill me i want it to end

tl : "hey dotenv, we have a presentation with VP tomorrow, do you want to present any of your achievements in product?"

me: "umm, what achievements ?"

tl : "you know, something that you added in app which made a good impact to various metrics like DAU, MAU, less bad reviews etc"

me: "umm... i coded the tasks and features created by you folks. they got shipped at some point of your liking, and are now being tracked by you for its success failure. So i am not sure what to take credit for"

TL: "no, no.. i mean like any bugs or issues that you fixed outside of your daily jira tasks which you tracked to be a sucess"

me: "well as far as tracking is concerned, then neither i know how to track them nor i did. but yea, i identified a bug where an outdated payload was generating bad request and giving a silent failure instead of success which recently got shipped. maybe its helping users get actual response instead of "we will get back to you in some time" , so this might get considered?

TL : "oh that? that we have already added as one of the team's achievements (=PM+TL's achievement) and have tracked it to be a succes"

me : "what th- okay. then how about that api failure which was identified by AVP as "something is not right" in which the api was intermittently taking a long time to respond. he tagged me and i set up logs to identify which type of users got that issue and the actual cause of that api failure. that was definitely a good fox for app as we ended up with good reviews on playstore for our new release?"

TL : "oh that? how can you take credit for that fix? it was identified by AVP, you just added similar logs that we were using for tracking errors and implemented a fix when it came to you as a sprint task? its a team achievement"

me : "but you guys didn't identified the cause through your logs!? my log was more granular. and even if that's the case, we aren't allowed to pick any task just as is, without getting it added to sprint , right?"

TL : "nah, that was a team win"

*6 months later, during appraisal time"
TL : "Hey dotenv, you haven't displayed any leadership skills and haven't gone put of the box to improve the product. Here's your peanut appraisal 🗑️"

me : 🥲🔫🤯🪦

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

fuck this stupid neaurocrst structure. i hate being a selfish prick than a team player, but either give credits as well as punishment to the team or gove credits as well as punishment to the single person. but wtf is thos culture of giving reward to team and punishment to individual? fckin communists

------

Why are vegans & mac users so fucking annoying.
Eat what you like.
Use what you like.

Why tf you have to tell me what you eat & what you use is the only good thing in the world. Stop going 'how can you eat that?' & 'how can you use that?' Keep it to yourself 🔫😠

Person:"you're a dev, you must reeeaaaly get frustrated with semi colons 😏"
Me: "at times but it's not such a big problem with the compilers being better now.😊"
Person: "so innovative!😁"
Me: "nothing is innovative!! All new idea app ideas suck and there are not too many clicks!!! The icons are perfect!! Purple and orange buttons are not a good idea!!! What do you mean you want 3 buttons on the one screen that do the same damn thing!! Do you even think!! Oh of course the users are stupid, takes one to know one!!! Doesn't look like much?!!! Sure the backend is a mother fucking kraken the size of Michigan that runs smoother than a babies bottom but hey, let's bitch cause it's too plain on the eye!!! EVERYTHING IS A LIE LIKE THE EXISTANCE OF YOUR BRAAAAIIIN!! - pants neoriticly-😳
Person: "new client? Or friend with an idea? 😒"

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Currently using Matomo instead of Google Analytics.
Definitely a good alternative!

Especially if you don't want a big company to track YOUR users.

Make. Fucking. Backups...

I had to find a MailChimp sync plugin for a webshop and thought I found a good one that synced one way (webshop to MailChimp).

I figured, meh, what could go wrong? So I installed it, ran it...and somehow lost around 4000 mailinglist receipients because they were not in the webshop.

Turns out it adds the registered users in the webshop, but also removes entries that are not! Needless to say, I had some explaining to do and was only able to recover about 3000 addresses from a previously sent campaign.

Customer was not happy, neither was my boss, very important lesson learned...

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Saturday 9.00 AM. I was sleeping, my colleague (on holiday) sent me a text: "We got a problem on our system, probably we ran out of space". I checked the log and found out that several cron jobs failed due to not enough space on the disk. I started deleting some unnecessary logs (we're paranoid) and ended up to squeeze the vm like a lemon to save some space. Sent an email to the sysadmin, "We got to add more space ASAP, users are getting 500 errror for almost everything". Silence. I thought to myself: "Until monday we're safe..". I did a df (96%) and sent a screen to the sysadmin, just to be sure that we understood each other. Finally monday comes, nobody worries about the issue. At noon I literally takled the guy of IT dept. "Yeah, we read your email. I think the sysadmin didn't take you seriously". "Why? Which part of 'we're running out of space' isn't serious?!!!". "He just told me that we have unlimited space on that vm". Unlimited space...sure.... "Right.....the disk is at 96%, buuuuut if he said so No news to worry. Don't call me if everything burns. Have a good day!!!"

So, in my company we where initially about 20 programmers doing two big projects.

The client (who also is the owner of the company) keep asking more and more and more things. Each 3 months we update the site but the client doesn't start the marketing or anything else, so the app don't have any users.

After two years of development, 26 micro services, one big web platform in Python (web2py, bad decision) and a hybrid mobile app the client decide to shut down the project because it was "a little bit illegal".

The second project have the same problems, but this project does have marketing, the shitty part is after two year and a lot of development now the project isn't viable because the market is gone.

The boss calls, says he have some problems and he will fire 18 persons and reduce the payment of the rest, he ask us to "hold" for the good times.

The great idea he had for earn money is rewriting a WordPress app that have 4 years in production to angular (because he, who knows why, thinks angular is the best shit out there)

I want to quit but even with the reduced payment I know he pays way more than the market average, plus I'm still student.

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

This new trend of platforms spamming with content discovery fucking suck. Nobody wants to follow multiple profiles with the exact same fucking content, especially when most of them are just people jumping on the bandwagon with more generic content and nothing to make it distinguishable. Also if 10 million people saw something on your platform, the it's pretty fucking sure already been posted and shared on every single platform out there, why the fuck would you still keep recommending it weeks or even months later?

I know spamming users with random (statistically more engaging) content leads to improved customer engagement as people sooner or later click these thing out of curiosity or boredom, but eventually they get tired of it altogether and leave for good. What happened to Netflix will also happen to YouTube, Instagram, and all other platforms unless they significantly improve the balance between content discovery and content continuity (i.e. the content each user follows and is coming back for).

Not only did my boss insist on setting up roles and permissions for our app how he designed them, even after I spent 4 or 5 hours trying to convince him to let me do it differently, but he has now fucked our entire system.

Under this model of roles and permissions you cannot enforce them on the backend by any means, and now we have a service dealing with users including resetting passwords and changing details that does not use authentication. That's right, aurhe tocation and not even talking about authorization now. Good job.

I honestly wish companies like this would get hacked and fucked over as soon as they did it wrong because I can't believe how retarded some people are.

Damn, after almost a year back to devRant 😊. Linuxxx still goin' with his ++'s, tons of new users.. Aww, good ol' devRant, I missed ya :)

If linux is used and maintained by professional power users mostly, why on earth does it never gets good support for basic things Windows does?

Screen dims while playing video, configuring lock screen to work with DM sucks as hell, you even have to define most keyboard shortcuts manually, Optimus GPU setup always buggy, you have to spend some time just configuring power management to work just fine.

We really need to fix this. I mean I am a Linux addict but time is money too.

Markdown. It is now used by MDN Web Docs and supported by Google Docs. End users will slowly pick up. Then even more (proprietary) flavors of markdown and their accompanying JS-frameworks will follow. All with good intentions, but it can only to end in a big mess and confusion like USB or USB 3.2 Gen 1.

Http/2 server push is really cool. Like, really fucking cool. Those researchers at google really got this right. I hate how they handle their users but I have to say they really make good use of the money they get by selling us for kettle.

was devrant way more visited during those good ol' covid days? i can't help but feel like i see a maximum of 100 people around now... feels weird to me, probably feels normal to those who have been here longer

curious what happened, maybe just the insane users remaining scared off all the plebs

Rant Mode: ON

Do you know what really grinds my gears? Those dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors. It's like a digital black hole, sucking your users into a vortex of frustration.

And don't get me started on inconsistent coding standards. It's like trying to decipher hieroglyphics written by different ancient civilizations. Why can't we all just follow the same conventions?

Oh, and software updates that break everything! You spend hours perfecting your code, only for a new update to come along and wreak havoc. It's like the universe is conspiring against developers.

But hey, despite the rants, we developers are a resilient bunch. We thrive on solving problems, no matter how infuriating they can be. So, here's to the endless debugging, the endless coffee, and the endless love-hate relationship with coding. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Rant Mode: OFF

Phew, that felt good. Thanks for letting me vent!

I'm buried in projects that I never get time to work on. My boss took the week off, and I'm getting emails from users asking about adding more projects to the board. I'm a single dev at my company. Normally, I have enough patience to get through the day, but today my CIO decided it would be a good time tell my coworker to let me know that the company dumped a third party we used for tons of report automation, and that I need to get these reports hand rolled in house asap. When I sent him a message asking for any kind of details on what this would involve, I found out he left early for the day.

I'm already stressed and putting in extra hours (salaried, so no extra pay) and am having trouble meeting deadlines for projects as it is because I'm constantly pulled away from my dev work to do non-dev work.

I just landed this dev position six months ago and haven't had a chance to build my resume. I'm getting "OK" money considering this is my first full-time dev job. Should I be looking to get out? Suck it up and get the experience? I know we all have crazy expectations on us and frustrating PMs, but after chats with other devs, I get the feeling that my situation is beyond fucked.

Another member of the team updated the production JSON configuration of the project with a missing comma, this broke a system that's not yet live and where there aren't any real users (only used for demos/testing).

Instead of having a good laugh about how silly this was, the CTO/CEO removed their write access to production..

Windows users can't meme.

>tfw osx is more versatile than windows because of Unix structure
>tfw you don't have admin permissions
>tfw your doing important work but you get a forced update because you can't handle your own system

I am a Linux user myself but OSX is a lot more powerful, I don't understand windows fan boyism? The only thing good about windows is their application and game support and a lot of that can be fixed with wine on OSX and Linux

What the fuck?
Are vegans that special to need a fucking own dating site??!
Are normal dating sites not good enough for them?

Funny part is that he says there have been some other vegan dating sites before. None of them did it. Of course his will! Because his sites will do ads. And ads means thousands of users!

Does your team also tend to get stuck in the MVP Trap?

You ship a barebones version of a feature. Zero polish. That’ll be done later if it’s successful.

When the stats roll in it seems the feature got a lukewarm reception. A few users liked it, but it wasn’t a hit.

Next sprint starts and everyone asks if we should spend more time on it

The PM argues ”Why would we spend time polishing something no one uses?”

The designer argues ”Well of course no one used it, it looks like shit, we gotta spend some time polishing it!”

It becomes a chicken or the egg scenario.

Your product ends up with a bunch of half assed features. not bad enough to remove, not good enough to spend more time on.

So you heard from that awesome tool that apparantly everybody uses.

Go to the web page:
One single continuous page in 90ies style with random blahblah targetting expert users and various edge cases without context. Some lines about arcane build commands in an unfamiliar language.

Not even a single, comprehensive line, what it does, what it is good for, no minimal example or hint even how to run it.

So you write thousands of lines of dense code, but are not able to drop some first lines of plain, understandable english for people just visiting the first time? How hard could it be? Fuck you, srsly.

Point out that removing a "include charger" option from the new iPhone package is not appealing to users with conservative spending habits (me) and users who plan to transition from android to IOS.

"AhaHah you must be poor, poor ppl can't afford to consoom new products every year, I don't care about no chargers AhaAha"

"It'S JuST $30 jUst Buy One @ the StOre"

This is why apple users get a bad rep, apparently not tossing a perfectly functioning phone into a landfill every year makes you poor. My phone doesn't use the new chargers because I actually made a good purchase that has lasted for around 4 years and the only other apple product I own is a macbook, people like these (ain't a few), make me ashamed to be an "apple user" whatever the fuck that means.

I'm currently working on a feature that no one likes. Everyone knows that it will be removed soon because the users won't understand it, but it still has to be implemented due to client-side Management madness.

Good thing: the contract with this client expires in 3 weeks :)

Android Studio has been the bane of my life for at least the last decade. I hate it beyond description and have given up hope that it will ever improve.

I suffer more than most with it because I am cursed to use C++ on a daily basis, and it has long been obvious that the Google people absolutely do not give a fuck about C++ users.

I get that C++ is niche, a drop in the ocean of Java/Kotlin-centric users, but for the love of god could you Google people at least stop making it worse?

Code navigation is insanely slow. Entire minutes for it to find the right header file to open. "Find usages..." oh my god oh my god oh my god just fucking kill me now. There is no excuse for software ever being this slow.

And thats just doing basic source editing. The build system - cmake and ndkbuild - also defy adequate description. The gradle plugins are constantly going out of date and are often incompatible with whatever gradle version you have. You get no help at all when editing a gradle build file and good luck finding the right documentation.

It's all a giant stinking mess and I wish the whole damn thing would be dragged outside and shot.

Backend devs (and yes, even full-stack folks) who naively dismiss the nuance of a frontend dev role have clearly never tried to do a really good job at it. Or, don't realize the fullness of the responsibilities, more like.

Frontend devs have to reconcile all the requirements (and sometimes whims) of the following people:
- End Users, obviously
- Desires of Business stakeholders
- Visual Designers
- UX (Yes, it's a different discipline from vis design)
- Fellow frontend devs
- Performance budgets
- Accessibility specialists
- Content Authors (if using a CMS)

And rarely are they ever ALL aligned. Some days, it feels less like development and more like brokering deals and compromises.

Realtek fucking sucks on Linux. I wasted two days trying to get their shitty USB WiFi dongle to work, only to find out it doesn't support AP mode with the Linux driver. It works fine on Windows, but not on Linux. Realtek doesn't support their modern USB WiFi chipsets with in-kernel drivers. This is true even though we saw in-kernel support for some Realtek WiFi 5 chipsets in 2023—however, that support was added by a Linux community developer, not Realtek.

Realtek does make non-compliant Linux drivers for many USB chipsets, but they don't publicly release them or accept problem reports. A few vendors post Realtek USB WiFi drivers at irregular intervals, but they’re only available in source code format and must be compiled. These drivers don't keep up with changes in new kernels, so it falls on people like me in the community to maintain them.

Am I a fan of how Realtek supports Linux? Absolutely not.

Users of Realtek’s out-of-kernel drivers often ask why these drivers aren't included in the Linux kernel. The answer is simple: the drivers are not Linux standards-compliant, Realtek doesn’t provide documentation, and creating new drivers would be easier, though it’s a huge task.

While there are Realtek out-of-kernel drivers available, they are not recommended for general Linux users. These drivers are meant for skilled programmers working on embedded systems, not for casual users. Those using desktop distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, Raspberry Pi OS, or others will find adapters with in-kernel drivers to be more stable, reliable, and feature-rich.

My testing over the past couple of years has shown good results for WPA3 with in-kernel drivers. I’ve tested USB WiFi adapters ranging from N150 to AXE3000, and adapters using Mediatek/Ralink and Atheros chipsets with in-kernel drivers work well with WPA3. Keep in mind that your Linux distro must support WPA3 for it to function properly. As of mid-2022, all distros I use, including Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later, work well with WPA3.

Most modern out-of-kernel drivers (like Realtek) now support WPA3-SAE, but not all. Realtek has stopped working on most of its WiFi 5 out-of-kernel drivers as of mid-2023, so be careful when purchasing, or you could end up with a dead-end product.

So.. how does being in a company makes you a better engineer?

For eg, this year my team shipped these 2 interesting features (among other things) that were never part of our product.
these were crazy ideas, that got liked by our users, and might have impacted the finances of company positively.

However the engineers (not me, i worked on them even less) that worked on it, did they got their knowledge growth? they just analysed the old codebase, its shitty architecture and drawbacks, and added the feature around it in a similar manner. so basically it was building debris over the debris

but is this growth? if that engg was me, would my experience in dealing with debris and building debris over it (that somehow works) be helpful for any other organisation?

And number (2) : is my organisation even a good one if its allowing to build debris over debris and not leaving a space for discussion or cleaning the mess or thinking about better architectures, data structures for scalability and robustness?

An engineer's growth should be made by giving them a chance to explore new and best solutions and not the best hacks i guess

- a split keyboard with a touchpad in the middle that will let you control all gestures on a computer

- a set of desk/monitors that adjusts perfectly for ergo for anyone

- a vertical laptop dock that is modular so you can add extra memory/video processing power and only using your laptop as a CPU/secondary graphics card

- a set of kitchenware and plates that would be so easy to clean and would never get stained

-an insect home alarm system that tells you where the fucking insect is so it doesn't take you by surprise/you can call someone to remove it

- a clothing brand that has a buy one gift one operation mechanic, where you buy a shirt and an article is donated to a local charity

- a restaurant

- a simple, yet robust database option that walks users through creating good databases that is super user friendly

- an app that takes tattoo designs in any format, converts them, allows for editing, and then can hook up to a special printer that gives you the transfer you will use on the client

I've just realized that a game with over 1 million downloads (the ranking list is over 2 million people) has its solutions saved in the preference's file. So anyone with a rooted phone can access this file. This make me so fucking crazy: you make a stupid shitty game and get over 2 million users and don't even bother to make it good.
Now I have to decide whether to write to the developer to inform him that this is a stupid way to store the solutions or to make an app to let everyone know the solutions.

Me during a presentation of a website for university project. It's a simple project for our university where there is internships offer for our field, stack : php, js, css (bootstrap), and the presentation was on my computer, so on localhost.
In that projet i have implemented a back office to manage all the offers, basic CRUD functionality, and as lazy as I am, for delete confirmation i used a simple javascript alert for that.
Me during the presentation :"so here is the back-office to manage users and internships offer, and for deleting one offer you just have to click on this trash icon *click*".
Ze professor : "hold on hold on, why it's showing 'localhost' "
Me : "it's javascript alert"
Prof : "but why 'localhost' "
Me : "oh, because i'm running the website on my computer as a server"
Prof : "but why localhost, it's not professional"
Me : *god please "it's javascript alert rendered by the browser, we can't do anything about it, and for a simple application it's sufficient"
Prof : "but why it's bigger than the message, and if we host that, do we steal have that localhost"
Me to end that : "I'm sorry i made a mistake on that".
Fortunately i had a good mark on that project.
It's my first story here, and sorry for ze bad English ^^

At one point, my laptop's hard drive went down. Turns out, windows had written some garbage data to the mft, and fucked up the file structure. Luckily i was able to restore a big chunk of the data using recuva. I cleaned the disk after saving the most important files, cleaned the disk, reinstalled windows. All good so far. I put the laptop's drive and my recovery disk into my desktop to put back the files. During the install in forced me to make an account, which I wanted to delete. So I ran "rmdir /users /s" and went to grab a cup of coffee. Turns out, cmd was pointed at my recovery disk instead of my laptop disk. My whole backup wiped.

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

Todays story: conversation between me and my brain about a app that i have planned for a long while.

The application is just a huge, specyfic json editor/manager for a game that i like. The game uses json files to determine unit charactetistics. So in order to make modding easier i want to make a tool for that that is fancier and easier to use than a notepad.

Brain> Lets make a app that allows you to mod the game easier!
Me> Good idea. How would you want to make it?
Brain> Lets use C# cause you main that lang currently and you have experience with json parser lib.
Me> That is true. So what do you wanna implement first?
Brain> Oh. I have thought about it before! I want to implement: (10 000 features) and maybe few more later!
Me> It sounds like a infinity project, shouldnt you implement like 1 or 2 features at first and then jump to other ones?
Brain> Yes... but i dont wanna refactor those features latter so let just implement them all at once!
Me> Dammit brain! Let just implement just one feature now! Like a simple json editor. You can use inhieritance to reuse the code later.
Brain> Ok...
* Starts with that one feature but one day later starts coding 6 more *
* Cant publish the app yet, the code looks like shit, gui is unfinished because brain wanted only to test those 6 unfinished features without propely implementing them *
Me> Brain WTF! You said that you are going to focus on one feature at the time!
Brain> I got carried a bit...
Me> ...
Me> Ok. I understand. Let just refactor the code and clean the project out of those unfinished features.
Brain> No. I have a depression now...
Me> FUCK.

* 2 month passes by without any progress on ANY of my projects*

current day

Brain> I still have depression...
Me> Ok i dont care about that anymore! Tell me something that i dont know!
Brain> Oh I have good news as well!
Me> ???
Brain> What about the home server that is going to store all mods made by the users so they can share it? It would be a good practice with networking!
Me> * Gives up *

A message to designers and developers:

please please please stop being so touchy about your designs/software. The final work is meant to be used/enjoyed by end users, customers, clients, young people, old people, disabled people, short attention span people, irrational people, patient people etc. So if they say it's not good enough accept it go back and make it simpler (not necessarily better but simpler) and move on!!

Stop going into defence mode and start throwing your toys out the pram or giving people the silent treatment.

Sorry just been on the receiving end and boy is childish.

I'm writing a devrant like site, so a kind of forum that supports live chat under every article. Login will be just username and password to stay anonymous. Email is optional for password reset. Also it won't have password requirements. Who cares if user uses insecure password. I do like the devrant avatar thing. I will use the ducky generator instead. So everyone on the site is a custom duck. K-SASS prolly never expected his generator to be used anywhere. The requirement of this site is that it scales very well. I have db calls of 0.006s, this is for persistent data only and will be used by all site instances. I expect that it can handle many clients concurrent as long I do not return more than 30 rows or so. Events get handled by a self written pubsub server.

All sounds great and development goes fine. But why is this a rant? Because the same thing as always is biting me, I can't design a site at all. I know how but I don't have any feeling for design at all making me almost incapable of building an attractive site. The only thing I can 'design' is an application in bootstrap or smth. I spend so much time one design while I don't like to do it ironically. But looks of site is almost as important as an good working site. Good working site doesn't get used if looks bad in many casee. This is since the start of my career an issue and it sucks that I appearantly can't deliver a whole site on my own meeting my standards.

My backend work is top notch tho. Btw, this application is not to be an alternative for devrant. I do not think I can attract more users than it already has and I've seen two communities disappearing once because someone decided to make a new one, took half of community with him and both communities died after short while.

End product of this project is a working project, not a live site hosted somewhere. It's pure about mixing mostly self written tech to get the best performance. Reinventing wheel on many levels. I wanted maybe to do the site in C but decided that it's way to much work for the value. I change the site so rapid since I don't have decent plan that python aiohttp is the best choice in amount of writing it yourself and fast. It's very lightweight.

More a story than a rant, sorry

! Rant
So this project manager from a start up contacted me about a few Jobs are they are looking to get done for their app. They asked for cost and I gave them a ballpark range depending upon the type of work. Anyway, after getting a tour of their over engineered app with 128 menu items for a users to go through to get something done, I gave them the hourly rate on the "higher" side of the ballpark which was $5/hr more than lower. Guess what, next I get an email with 4 huge paragraphs, explaining how I am trying to charge them so much extra and is way over the quote. I passed myself laughing and wished him good luck with their start up...

snapd and flatpak, are more harm than use. popularizing bloatware junk in a fairly clean ecosystem like linux, is neither good for devs nor users. linux distributions are already a mess for desktop use, let's not make it worse.

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

Many years ago, I wrote an app for a company to provision users in AD and Exchange. It disabled 10k users and no one could work. Good times.

Hey Guys
A few Questions I have to decide soon, for tools I never used:

1- How do you guys keep information about several accounts and stuff? Must have some protection to not be easily accessible (started using Google Notepad and Evernote until I find better... don't really like them)

2- Firefox: Is there a way to store groups of open tabs?
Like I have one windows with 6 or 7 tabs for movies (youtube and such), other for general stuff with 5 or 6 tabs, other with Arduino shit, and I'm going to pick Vue soon and another language to build native apps and that will be a lot more tabs, It would be nice to close them all and open them all at will or something.

3 - What Is your favorite browser? I'm using Firefox, but there are so many new good ones... Like Brave browser with Tor incorporated, or Puffin for Android (which uses a VPN with their own server by default)

4 - For windows users, do you have any tools to help with workflow installed? which ones you use and why?

5 - What I'm using: Google Notepad + Evernote to save stuff, Windows 10 and Firefox, (Linux Mint in VM) and I just keep my shortcuts in folders... I don't use the Windows taskbar for a long while since its so full of shit.

6 - How do you do your backups? Right now I'm just putting my code and important stuff in Dropbox.

I'm an old school programmer... Stuck in 1990's Ideas and there is so muchhhh shit these days that I would prefer your opinions then just googling.
Guess that's enough for this post. Thank you guys

Nope!
Korea still uses ActiveX for payments so will take another decade.

Good try though 🤣🤣

(And you should probably know ActiveX only works in IE, rip Apple users)