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My boss is technically restricted shall we say.
As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.
Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.
It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.
Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.
He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.
4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.
He insists.
I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.
He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.
I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.
He insists.
I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.
He then says he wants the air.
I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.
He insists.
That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.
WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.
Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection
To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.23 -
Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.
I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".
So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.
Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.
WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.
The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.
I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).
Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.
I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.
Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.
I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.4 -
> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job
I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.
My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.
Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.
I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.
On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄
I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.
I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.
I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.
I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.
But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.
I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.
But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.
So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.
So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.7 -
Alright, I've already ranted about this but I feel like that was rather incomplete.. there's some other things that make me want to kill myself every time I enter <!DOCT- WHERE IS THAT FUCKING KNIFE?!!!
First one I've mentioned earlier is its <repetitiveness></repetitiveness>. What was wrong with {brackets}? If only HTML was more like CSS.
But there's some other ones as well.
- Frameworks! Ain't there nothing like a good dozen resources that every single one of your web pages wants to get JS from.
- Quantity over quality. Let's just publish early with tonnes of bugs, move fast and break things, amirite 🤪
- General noobness of apprentice web devs. Now I'm not talking about the real front-end devs here - AlexDeLarge was one of them.. forever holding a special place in my heart - that know how to properly use their tools. But there's a metric shitton of people who think that being able to write <html><body>Hello world!</body></html> makes them a dev.
- The general thought of "it's slow? Slap in more hardware." Now this is a general issue with software development, optimization costs valuable resources while leaving it in a shitty state but released quickly costs pretty much nothing. A friend of mine whose post I'll attach in the image section illustrates this pretty well. You can find it at https://facebook.com/10000171480431....
I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list, but those are the most important things that irritate me about web development in general.
On a side note, apparently 113 people visited my hiddenbio.html page.. I'm genuinely impressed! I had no idea that so many people on devRant would click through. On Facebook pages this has been an ongoing significant issue of getting people to leave the platform - it's huge but engagement on off-Facebook links is terrible. I guess that I'm dealing with an entirely different community here. And I'm pleasantly surprised actually!
11 -
Often I hear that one should block spam email based on content match rather than IP match. Sometimes even that blocking Chinese ranges in particular is prejudiced and racist. Allow me to debunk that after I've been looking at traffic on port 25 with tcpdump for several weeks now, and got rid of most of my incoming spam too.
There are these spamhausen that communicate with my mail server as much as every minute.
- biz-smtp.com
- mailing-expert.com
- smtp-shop.com
All of them are Chinese. They make up - rough guess - around 90% of the traffic that hits my edge nodes, if not more.
The network ranges I've blocked are apparently as follows:
- 193.106.175.0/24 (Russia)
- 49.64.0.0/11 (China)
- 181.39.88.172 (Ecuador)
- 188.130.160.216 (Russia)
- 106.75.144.0/20 (China)
- 183.227.0.0/16 (China)
- 106.75.32.0/19 (China)
.. apparently I blocked that one twice, heh
- 116.16.0.0/12 (China)
- 123.58.160.0/19 (China)
It's not all China but holy hell, a lot of spam sure comes from there, given how Golden Shield supposedly blocks internet access to the Chinese citizens. A friend of mine who lives in China (how he got past the firewall is beyond me, and he won't tell me either) told me that while incoming information is "regulated", they don't give half a shit about outgoing traffic to foreign countries. Hence all those shitty filter bag suppliers and whatnot. The Chinese government doesn't care.
So what is the alternative like, that would block based on content? Well there are a few solutions out there, namely SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Amavis among others. The problem is that they're all very memory intensive (especially compared to e.g. Postfix and Dovecot themselves) and that they must scan every email, and keep up with evasion techniques (such as putting the content in an image, or using characters from different character sets t̾h̾a̾t̾ ̾l̾o̾o̾k̾ ̾s̾i̾m̾i̾l̾a̾r̾).
But the thing is, all of that traffic comes from a certain few offending IP ranges, and an iptables rule that covers a whole range is very cheap. China (or any country for that matter) has too many IP ranges to block all of them. But the certain few offending IP ranges? I'll take a cheap IP-based filter over expensive content-based filters any day. And I don't want to be shamed for that.7 -
I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.
And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.
And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.
And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.
I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.
I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!2 -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture5 -
So, I got my very first gaming laptop on March 2015. Took a break from the almighty PC Master Race.
It's an Asus ROG G751JT. It was doing great, running my favourite games at 60FPS on high-ultra settings.
Few months after purchasing it, I've been getting a lot of BSODs with the same error (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)
As told by the guys at a local forum, I was told to try replacing the RAMs and I was stupid enough, I did. It has 4x 8GB HyperX Impact DDR3L.
The error still won't go away until I changed my SSDs. Which worked for a while until a week ago.
Getting the same BSOD countless times. This time I decided to directly talk to an expert, which is a friend of mine and guess what. It was the motherboard after all. Spent a lot of $$$$ to fix ONE BSOD.
Now I'm stuck with an Asus T100TF for about a month because I had to send it for warranty claim.
smh jfc anasmy y u so stupid for a year and a half. 10/10 worst experience (since it involved a lot of money)
What do you think of my stupidity? Comment below (10 marks).
8 -
On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"
"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.
Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!
How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.
The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.
Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.
In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.
Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.
If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.
I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.28 -
How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?
For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.
A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.
I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.
But still, nothing prepares you for it.
We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).
I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.
Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.
We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.
The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.
It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.
I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...
So my question is this:
- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?8 -
When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.2
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I guess the time has come finally. 🤔
I'm now thinking of how to trace a Facebook user's current location. At first I thought of touching Facebook.
But then I thought that I can just write a webpage which will trace the visitor IP. And send the url to the user.
Oh it's not for me. One of my friends who is also a partner and a client of mine is being harassed by his former business partner. He has sued him but the guy is in hiding but still posting bad news on his Facebook profile.
So my friend came to me for help. :311 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.7 -
FUCK YOU NODE JS AND FUCL YOU SYNOLOGY
Decided to give an old Synology DiskStation that sits at home slme new life besides just sharing files. Since Synology has SSH but not a full Linux OS, installed DebianChroot (so far so good). At one point I needed Node JS, so installed NVM and tried to install Node. Well guess what didn't work. Tried a few more things including directly downlosding node from the official node website. Trying different versions, the whole drill.
After about 5 hours of installing and errors, well really usfull errors like "There where 2 errors during installation" WELL HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING TELL ME WHAT THE ERROR IS YOU FUCKING FUCK!
I found a formum wkith a guy haveing similar problems. Able to install legacy 0.10.x versions but not 4.x.x. Or 6.x.x oder whatever. He found that you have to have at least an ARMv6 compatible processor, otherwise it won't run. Checked it and well, that old fuck of mine only has ARMv5. FUCK! But honestly. You detect it's an ARM architecture. You detect it's not one of the v6 or v7, you try to install the general arm version, BUT YOU DON'T GET THE FUCKING IDEA TO MENTION TO CHECK WAHAT VERSION YOU HAVE AND IF THAT IS SUPORTED BY FUCKING NODE!
One afternoon wasted, at least I got a little more wisdom. Fuck do I hate Node now. On the bright side, I've ordered a Raspberry Pi and two cases for Harddisks, I'll create my own diskstation with blackjack and hookers (I realy hope you get that reference)! Fuck you Synology and Node JS (yeah yeah, it's not Synologies fault, but I'm mad anyways!)4 -
I actually do have something to rant about!
The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.
The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.
So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.
The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?
Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).
He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.
So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.
What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...
I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.
Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.
Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!1 -
TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...
Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.
For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.
Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.
I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.
And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...
Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.
I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.
I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.
The end.2 -
grrrr
last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure
my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks
so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao
walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt
got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.
walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe
so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator
yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?
... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...
fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT
I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch2 -
rent / question (there is a question at the end and I'd appreciate your opinion)
8 months ago, I agreed to help a not too distant relative of mine to do his master thesis at the company where I work. He was supposed to build something really MVP, but useful for us and I'd help him get some scientific questions out of it, and provide him with (computing) resources to test his theories / implementations under simulated and much heavier load.
Since then, he didn't get done anything even remotely useful, always just stuck on very rudimentary issues, claimed things are almost ready, I wrote a quick smoke test to prove that the whole application blows up when you touch it, in short - a disaster and went over to radio silence.
In the meanwhile, we didn't need it anymore, so 1.5 months ago, I got in touch with him again, with an even more technical proposal, something, at least I'd think, that's even cooler to do. He asked me some question about hypothetical load, the system should be able to handle eventually, to come up with alternative implementations to compare them against each other. He said that his exam period is going to be over soon and he'll get back to me with some initial version.
2 weeks ago, I got back in touch with him, trying to urge him, to get finally started and get something done. If he'd actually sit down and do it during the holidays as a "full time job", he'd be probably done in 2 weeks. Last week, he came back to me and said he has an initial PR ready to review.
I was excited about it, but basically froze when I realized what he did. He deleted all his previous work - some infrastructure stuff which took us basically 3 months of back and forth to get running - and as far as I could see, all the new code were only auto generated clients based on a swagger specification. In short - I could do it in less then an hour. If you really have no idea what you're doing, it might take you half a day, but definitely nowhere near to a week.
His brother, which a good friend of mine, thinks I'm being too hard on him. His argument was, that it's too hard, and he has to do it in C#, but he only knows Java (I gave him access to some of our repositories to copy paste code together, he didn't need to invent anything. I also prefer C# but wrote my master thesis in Java) Personally, I'm just pissed because he promises stuff that he never does. I totally understand him - I was like that as a student as well, I guess karma is a ... but still, he's wasting my time.
Right now I'm thinking how to get out of this, without having even more time wasted. I doubt he'd ever deliver anything useful. He got plenty of input from me about what he could consider for his scientific question, how to measure performance, ... He can keep his credentials to access our test environment with the test data, but I won't give him access to any additional computing resources, to compare how his solutions might scale on our company's cost. (mainly it's not the money, but I'd have to provide that stuff, and probably help him set it up)
does it sound like a fair deal (saying, I'm done with you. You can finish your topic on your own, but don't expect any help from me)? or am I being a dick about it and too demanding?1 -
For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.
I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?
Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.
I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?
So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!
Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)3 -
Hey, been long time without ranting, but here I am.
So nowadays the schedule on my project is really tight, and nothing is ready on every party, including mine.
Worse is, since this week, I've had to contact another team that learned on what we were working on like a month ago, and they really have a bad habit to ask us to see them on Skype. Yeah, sure, Skype is no use if it's just to tell me something to use that actually won't work (they don't know about that I guess, but still, just for less than 5 minutes while I have things on short time....)
So today, I arrived, I have a bugfix to do, but short after I arrived, I got a new task of providing access to our work to another team, which implied some minors modifications, wouldn't take so much time.
But right when I was doing it, I had someone from that team that I mentionned earlier that asked me to see some specific code. I actually don't have that code since I am using remote call, so calling their code directly and not using some placeholder code. The guy told me "but that shouldn't work." Okay, but I've been entering in your application several times and giving you errors that I got from trying to entering it, so you KNOW that it works. And then, he asked me to go see them again. No way, I have plenties of things to do, use a fucking email.
Now that I released that rant from my mind, I'm gonna get a hot beverage, calm down and go back to those tasks.
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