A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.

The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.

We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.

Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.

Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.

Years ago we had a visit from a startup company developing a firewall and I got the chance to talk with one of their devs.

He explained the subtleties of security holes in websites and after I said something about our site being secure thanks to being behind a firewall he gently asked what would happen if he entered a specially crafted test into one of the text fields ... and he gave an example ...

I got a chill, went back to my seat and traced what it would do ...

That was when I learned about sql injection and his example would have killed the DB :/

Before going home I designed a way to secure the input which I then refined over a few days.

We still use that today after 17 years.

That one single sentence really showed to never be to proud of our security and I realized how vulnerable our site was.

Coolest project: I once worked for a customer who hosted an exhibition for a few thousand visitors in a big event arena in Stockholm.

They didn't want to use the existing ticket reading system on the arena so I had to build my own application compatible with barcode scanners (they said this about one week before the event).

It wasn't a complicated application to dev but with the tight deadline and no time to actually stress test it, it was the coolest thing to see hundreds of people streaming through the ticket station flawlessly.

Day 2 of the event I built a simple web application so I could see the flow rate of read tickets while I sat in the arena pub with a beer.

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

!dev
Nearly had a crash today driving home and almost had a heart attack. Apparently my car had the heart attack for me and started doing. A speaker test.

So I'm contemplating what just happened and my car's speakers start going BEEEEP BEEEP BOOOOOOOOOOOOP (Subwoofer).

Then the radio came on and switched to a Spanish station.

I looked it up, apparently I had entered diagnostic mode on the infotainment system when I was fiddling with the wheel buttons as a stress relief.

Long story short, the diagnostic mode informed me that my car runs Windows ME!
I would like a new car please, kthxbye.

Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID

Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?

Designer: yes, use it in all other apps

Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?

Designer: nope no error

Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?

Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?

Designer: Yes, to test edge cases

Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that

Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode

Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings

*Deep breath*

Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time

Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this

Me: ... tough luck then, not happening

Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first

Hey guys, first rant,

At the moment I'm developing a very big and complex app. We are almost done and decided to deliver a test version to our customer. After he received our test he called us and said there is a problem with a function, he just said it's not working and wasn't very specific.

So I decided to check his problem, because an colleague couldn't figure it out.
I started the app via android studio and had a similar problem, there was a huge delay at the automatic recording function of Bluetooth messages, I thought yeah this is his problem.
I showed it my colleague and he said that he doesn't have this problem, we have different Bluetooth simulators so we thought that there must be a problem with the Bluetooth communication or the simulators are broken.
I checked if there is some kind of timing or buffer problem and logged the shit out of the simulator and found nothing, 3 hours were lost🏁.

My colleague checked his last changes because he had changed a lot at the App Api do to new conditions and those customer wishes💀 he couldn't found anything. So we thought maybe it's my device and the device of the customer. We switched the devices and tada no problem with my devices if the app is builded at the pc of my colleague.

I thought ok maybe it's because I turned some ndk features off. Turned it back on, nothing happened. So we exchanged our Android Studio Settings but no difference. So I said yeah whatever my mashine is just fucked. I restarted my mashine for the third time and started android fucking studio. Some little popup showed up "new updates"... the solution came to my mind ... Do to an update of android studio I excidently turned on Instant Run.....🌋 . I checked it, it was activated, these fucking instant run, great idea but not working... Turned it off, everything worked.
I called the customer because he can't have a problem and he said, this time not angry, oh yeah it was just a notification if I want to turn on my Bluetooth and I decided no and the Bluetooth recording is not recording, this is a problem... -😠NO FUCKING COMMENT😤-

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

Me: Hi Guys, theres no docs on our custom push notification / deeplinking implementation. I've tried to work backwards from a QA testing doc to add new links. Can someone tell me if this is all ok? It seems to behave a little weird.

Dev: Looks ok, but we've moved to the braze platform for sending notifications. You'll need to trigger braze notifications now. Test that it works ok with that <confluence-link>

*hour later*

Me: I've tried the debugging tool, both with my payload and one of the samples from the link. It displays on the phone, but tapping it doesn't trigger the deeplinking.

Dev: No it works, try one of these <screenshot of samples I used>

*hour later*

Me: Tried it again on the real device to make sure, as well as on develop and master. Not working with those samples or mine.

Dev: No it does. It comes in here in this library <github link to line of code>

Me: ... Nope, debugged it, it doesn't get passed the next 'if' check on the next line as its missing a key/value. The whole function does nothing.

Dev: Oh do you want to send a braze notification?

Me: ..... you told me I had too .... yes I guess.

Dev: ok for a braze notification it works different, send this <entirely different sample no where on the link>

Me: ...... but ..... this is only for braze notifications ..... why .... all the samples have deeplink url's .... but they don't ....... are you ..... FFS!!!!! !@#?!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┻━┻ ︵ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

┌П┐(ಠ_ಠ)

So my ethernet randomly stopped working on Arch.

At first I thought it had to do with a conflict between it and my tethered phone, so I tried removing all my connections. Still wasn't working.

Next I tried to test the driver itself and make sure it loaded on boot. It loaded, but was disconnected.

Next I decided "fuck it, I know I was just using the internet on Windows, but I'll check the ethernet cable is still plugged in anyway". It was, and it was returning the right MAC address, but still no connection.

So I try debugging the driver further. Everything seemed fine, except it would time out trying to establish a dhcp connection.

Finally I figured, maybe Microsoft tried to troll me and lock out the ethernet waking on boot. So I restart my computer, load into windows and check my ethernet driver, it seems fine. I go to disable the shutdown of the card on OS shutdown. Turns out this driver no longer has that capability.

Wait a minute!? Windows is also having connection issues!?

I look to my left.

Fuck my life...

My router was off... I must of kicked the powerboard under my desk..........

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.

As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.

So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.

Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...

The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.

My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.

Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.

They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.

The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.

He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.

Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.

When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)

Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.

Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.

The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.

So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!

My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"

So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.

I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.

All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.

Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.

After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.

Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.

Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.

i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

Why the fuck cant people keep their hands to them selves???
I had a fucking moron come up to my desk, say "cool toy!", grab it and play with it.
For him that was fine....

I on the other hand wanted to stub that mother fucker to death and feed his organs to his kids.

That mother fucker grubbed my probe holder, shorted out an 8k$ evb and failed my 12 hours hardware test.

The other day, I had a talk with my dad and he asked me about why YouTube is recommending him videos that he saw in the past or that type of ads. He is a non-techie btw.
I told him about personalized ads and so on.
Told him the "advantages" and the disadvantages of it. I even explained the advantages like if they would be so good that they are on the same level as holy things that happened to humanity. That was just to test him though.
And guess what?
He was completely against it. He said that it just brings disadvantages and no advantages at all. He was pissed that YouTube was recording his search history and so on to make a profile of him. He cares for his privacy. And I'm proud to have such a dad. :)

Before I took on my current position (internal transfer), I stated that for what my boss asked for I would need a small team.
He agreed to that and promised I would get 2-3 developers.
6 months after (with countless reminders) he told me I could train some people at one of our providers.
Turns out those guys were Java developers, even though I asked for C# (since our codebase is .net)
After a few training sessions, where concepts as source control were a big topic ("why not just copy the code to a new folder with _good_ naming?"), I gave them a test assignment.
After reviewing their code I just gave up. They cannot program. They don't understand concepts like scoping of variables. Concepts of separation of responsibility.

I told my boss this but I had to make it work with them.

I went to my bosses boss (Head of IT) with my resignation in hand, since I felt my boss didn't want to support me actually getting a team. After a few talks I was asked to "keep it cool" and wait until he presented his new organization.

Now my boss asked me for which skills new developers should have. To which I could just laugh at him and forward countless mails from the last 6-8 months asking for developers.

<Irony>I love my boss</Irony>

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

I just had a rather stressful morning. I should've known something was up by the sounds of thunder as I walked into the office.

I sat down and checked my emails. There was an email from the boss who was away on a business trip. The subject read, "CRITICAL BUG" and my name was mentioned. "Great...No time for coffee", was my first thought.

I began searching commits to see when and how the bug came to be. "SHIT! It was my fault", I said aloud.

(A bit of backstory, I am Irish, working in Germany with a B2 level of the German language.)

I now had to communicate the problem quickly with a senior developer who is Russian. He can't speak English well and I would not expect him to speak it. We are in Germany after all. I tried my best to communicate the issue, but I found it so difficult to understand his German in a Russian accent. Normally, in the office I speak German except when it is urgent and I must explain a problem in greater detail through English. I got past that obstacle, however, the real challenge of fixing the bug awaited.

After 2 hours of coding, I had a solution and committed it to the master branch. All the while, I had been replying to the bosses emails with updates, probably with many grammer mistakes.

We have no dedicated testers here and the code is written in a way which makes it very difficult to test (i.e. it was written many years ago). When I had initially written the code, I tested rigorously and found no issues.

Just needed to rant. I need a coffee break now...

#LongRant

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!

Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.

The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)

2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)

3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)

5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!

Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.

PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.

Not a rant but it's Friday and thought people could use a laugh.

When I was a teen we used AOL and for those who don't know, it was a test of patience to log on. It had to dial in, actually connect, and then you hoped it wouldn't disconnect for whatever reason. Just getting it to connect would take 30 min or more some days. After you were logged in you would get an audio of *Ding Ding*, followed by "Welcome!" and if you had email, "You've got mail!"

So, I decided to play a prank on my dad by swapping the Welcome sound file with the Goodbye sound file. He was waiting for a long time to connect, getting so frustrated. Then it finally does and he hears:

*Ding Ding*
"Goodbye!"

And loses it. Then he notices he is still online and calms down, confused.

I told him about it later but my brother and I got a good laugh out of it.

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

The names in the story have been changed to protect not the innocent but the very very stupid. So I set up test accounts for each team member in the new test environment for our project building the new web interface for our SaaS product. Each username had an underscore in it like john_smith. I told everyone the news in the morning scrum and got 2 requests for help an hour later from people saying they could not log in with their username johnunderscoresmith.

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

For my school project that was due awhile back my group ran into the problem of a certain feature not working on a site we made. I had a test version of the site and it was working perfectly. Both the test version and the project site had the exact same code. We couldn't figure out why it wasn't working and so we just turned it in and took the point hit.

Today I was thinking about it because I was still annoyed/upset that the site feature didn't work. I started talking it through with a friend and in the middle of it stopped-I figured out why it didn't work. My teammate didn't actually update the database, he just downloaded the code to the database and was using an outdated version of it. I suddenly stood up and screamed, "F***!" At the top of my lungs.

I startled my friend so bad that she spilt beer all over herself.

Making an Android app for a group project. Of course, no one besides me in the team knows anything about Java, or Android, or life, apparently.

A guy "worked" on some small feature for 90 minutes last night before calling me for help. He can't comprehend git so he sends me a message containing his spaghetti code. I proceed to bang it out quickly the right way with him on a Skype call watching my screen but he isn't asking any questions or contributing at all. We have an approaching deadline so I am beyond coaching this guy.

We go to test it out and I had forgotten a line. Simple fix, but it prevents the feature from working as intended. Rather than being remotely helpful the guy gets an attitude about how I write buggy code and that the feature should be robust. I fix it and he slinks back to silence.

Cool. Thanks for the help bro. Glad you could contribute.

I did a job interview recently for a company and the test was something like this.

In ruby, write a web server that will serve a specific line number from a text file.

I thought up a simple solution and a more advanced solution, but I opted to go with the simple solution and submit my work quickly. I made a nice web server with tests and everything and it used the sed command to get the line number from the file.

Now, they had various instructions, like it had to perform. They asked how it'd perform with 10G, 100G files. I thought "Eh... it'll be alright."

The solution they were looking for was the "advanced" solution that I thought up, which involved storing a binary file of 32/64 bit integers that reference the byte-offset of the line they're looking for. Basically a binary index file.

This violates all of my sensibilities, because I would never build a database indexer like this using ruby, of all things.

I thought it was a stupid test, and how do these companies honestly expect me to spend hours coding and then tell me I didn't go far enough? It's unethical.

I actually followed-up with the "advanced" solution a couple hours after hearing I was out, just to show them that their process is flawed.

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

On the first day of Christmas, the bossman gave to me: The fact that my new computer purchase order needs to be OKed by the CEO and I need to continue working on a 2014 Mac Mini (i5-4260U, 8 Gig RAM, GPU shot by an ESD on the case long ago) for the next year.
On the second day of Christmas, my family gave to me... a good reason to get shitfaced
On the third day of Christmas, getting shitfaced gave to me: A hangover and some urgent plastic welding job that had to be done with a soldering iron. FML, I've had a headache before breathing in pure hydro-cyano-whatthefuckyougetwhenyoumeltplastics
On the fourth day of Christmas, my team gave to me: A legacy, age-old Rails 2 project that was written by an intern and never reviewed, went to prod in 2014 and can't be changed anymore, but needs to be changed after the fact that it has zero test coverage and needs 100 % now to prevent issues and costly manual testing.
On the fifth day of Christmas, devrant gave to me: The Idea that making fun of Christmas songs to get over the sheer amount of dicks that working over the twelve days of Christmas sucks.

To be continued...

Several rants ago I promised to drop a bombshell about Android. What took me so long was my research.

I wanted to measure the extent of Google’s background data mining. I put Android at a significant disadvantage — it was Redmi 6, a device with a 5-year-old half-dead battery that was heavily used by my partner. The only change was me installing Lineage OS + microG — a private, degoogled combo that has no quality of life ramifications. Google Play Store opens, apps download. MicroG emulates Google Play Services — maps, banking and other Play Services-dependent apps work flawlessly. This made a huge difference.

Before degoogling, this phone lasted one day tops on standby. Now, with Wi-Fi connection enabled, apps auto-update working (one game I had installed auto-updated during the test), and no battery saver engaged, I was able to pull ELEVEN DAYS on full charge. Battery saver promised even more uptime, but I considered that cheating.

Modern phones have modern screens that drain battery quickly. Yet, they also have 4000+ mAh batteries. If your Android smartphone performs worse than mine in a test like this that doesn't use screen, kiss your privacy goodbye.

Apple iPhone testing without being on the app store is so annoying, I had to sign up some people to test the app I've been working on and had issues on my end, it really is this whole security bullshit, really it isn't needed.

I couldn't get the team provisional certificate thing to show up because when I clicked the account the team certificate settings would disappear, only after right clicking and hitting help then clicking the team while it was selected could I go to the right window.

I don't see why it's so damn hard to do this crap.

Yet with Android, it's so easy.

I really have issues with the testing for this iPhone app, I went through so many different ways to try and get it to work.

Anyways all done, crashlytics is an awesome testing tool if you can get around that small issue I had.

So I have that custom-made wifi router I've built. And it uses a USB wifi adapter with AC (wifi5) capability - the fastest one I could find in AliExpress.

I set it up a while ago - the internet access works fine, although speeds are somewhat sluggish. But hey, what to expect from a cheapo on Ali! Not to mention it's USB, not a PCIe...

A few days ago I ran a few speedtest.net tests with my actual AC router and the one I've built. Results were so different I wanted to cry :( some pathetic 23Mbps with my custom router :(

This evening I had some time on my hands and finally decided to have an umpteenth look.

nmcli d wifi
this is what caught my eye first. The RATE column listed my custom router as 54Mbps, whereas the actual router had 195Mbps.

I have reviewed the hostapd configuration sooo many times - this time nothing caught my eye as well.

Googling did not give anything obvious as well.

What do we do next? Yes, that's right - enable debug and read the logs.

> VHT (IEEE 802.11ac) with WPA/WPA2 requires CCMP/GCMP to be enabled, disabling VHT capabilities

This is one of the lines at the top of the log. Waaaaiiitttt.. VHT is something I definitely want with ac -- why does it disable that??? Sounds like a configuration fuckup rather than the HW limitation! And config fuckups CAN be fixed!

Turns out, an innocently looking
`wpa_pairwise=TKIP`
change into
`wpa_pairwise=TKIP CCMP`

made a world of a difference!

:wq
!hostapd
connect to the hostapd hotspot and run that iperf3 test again, and... Oh my. Oh boi! My pants fell off -- the speed increased >3x times!

A quick speedtest.net test deems my custom router's download speeds hardly any worse than the speeds obtained using my LInksys!!

The moral of the story: no matter how innocent some configurations look, they might make a huge difference. And RTFL [read the fucking logs]

In the pic -- left - my actual router, right - my custom-built router with a USB wifi adapter. Not too shabby!

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

Had a 1:1 with my boss last night and together we figured out a tricky bug related to my PR. However, either my PR or that bug patch broke a tangentially-related test. Queue my usual exhaustion, and I gave up trying to fix it.

This morning, I'm looking at it and nothing makes sense. My change should not have broken the test. So I reran the controller's tests, and... they all pass?

What is logic.

Good thing, though; that test leads to a few rabbit holes I haven't even begun exploring yet.

Oh, never mind. It broke again.
Ergh, here we go. 😔

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

Reminder to look after yourselves.

Today I found out I've had hypertension and possibly an unruptured aneurysm. Resulting from stress at work and home, overworking and bad diet from having to keep my engery up for work. (over the last around 2-3 years).

Luckly I've moved away from stressful situations now so I'm feeling like I've dodged a rather large bullet!

Look after yourselves guys, take breaks, check your caffeine, sugar and cholesterol intakes and keep active! I reckon the 6 days a week football training saved my life!

hypertension is a silent killer and can cause fatal damage to your organs such as kidneys, lungs, eyes, brain and heart.

Luckly it spotted it early with a blood test and optician visit. I had a hemorrhage in one of my eyes but wasn't until 6 months later GP noticed signs of kidney damage from my blood test it was found!

I should be fine but look after yourselves! You're more important than that deadline!

a little confession: i've rarely used test suites in my projects (due to laziness and lack of time).

i've started a new project and now i HAD to write tests in order to make my PM happy.

Then i had to refactor a lot of code.

IT WAS SO EASY WITH TESTS.
I WAS A FOOL.
STUPID PAST ME, STUPID!

So I've decided to go about converting a Java project that I've been working on to Kotlin a little bit at a time. I started out with basic entity classes converting them to simple `data class`es in Kotlin.

Eventually, I got to my first beast of a class to refactor. This class had over 40 service classes depending on it, so even a little hiccup would throw everything into chaos.

I finish all of the changes on all of the dependent classes, update the tests, and the configurations (as necessary), and I was finally ready to spin up the app to test for any breaking changes I may have introduced...

Well - I broke everything! But I was sure I couldn't have! So what the hell happened?

Turns out that as I was building my project with a Gradle watch, at one point something failed to compile, which threw an unhandled exception in the gradle daemon that was never reported.

So when I tried to run my app, gradle would continually re-throw the error in the app I asked it to run...

After turning the daemon off and on again, the app worked like a charm.

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

I had security reopen our test-user last week. I could run the tests once, then they started failing with "blocked user due to too many attempts at logging in". Huh, that's weird. I go through everything, every script, every scheduled task, every nook and cranny of every drive on every machine I could reach, and make sure the password is updated everywhere. Reopen account. Same shit.

I email around to some people, they don't use it, one guy asks if I checked x, y and z, I did. Then he's sure we don't use it anywhere else.

It's one of our fucking contractors that took one of our scripts (that they're supposed to have duplicate copies of) and forgot to change to their own credentials. That's literally the agreement, take our scripts and change the user and run them on your machines.

Afhfjdkdhdjdbd stop locking me out of everything with your incompetence. I email them, some cunt gets back to me asking for the new password. NO. USE. YOUR. OWN. CREDENTIALS. I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM, THEY'RE HERE IN THE LIST AND BEING USED IN ALL OTHER SCRIPTS AAAAAAAAAHHH

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

In my first year of college right now, and on the first test we had to write some C# ConsoleApplications. We got instructions of what we have to taken as input, what we had to do with it and output it to the console.

I've tested them all and they all work correctly, which was the main objective. I have used the correct data structures, but I didn't get top mark. Instead, I got lower because "I didn't do it her way".

WELL F*CK YOU TOO!!! I hope this is not how every test/exam goes

take a walk!
take a naps!

The ONE thing that has had the biggest impact in my career is likely walks and naps.

Some years ago out frustration I decided to pause a project and took a walk (or a nap, I don't remember) and 30 mins later I had a clearer idea of what to test next, a possible solution or something...

Nowadays I don't wait at all to be frustrated, way before that, when I feel myself spinning my wheels, slightly stuck, or just a little slower than what I usually am, I just stop right there and take either a walk or a nap. I can't count all the times in which I've come up with solutions/alternatives/approaches/etc. to problems/tasks/etc.

So now walking and napping IS part of my work. I'll get familiar with the problem, or spent some time understanding the goal and then I'll go for a walk or take a nap. And my career keeps progressing, I'm less likely to snap, haven't been anywhere near burnout for years, raises, and other great stuff, and a huge part of it I attribute it to taking walks and naps!

Give it a try!

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

When I started my current job 6 years ago I was given a desk phone with a 100mb port. Speed didn't matter at the time as everyone was given laptops for our desks. I changed positions in the company where I'm going to be provisioning servers and whatnot over the network. Started using a desktop that didn't have a Wi-Fi adapter. I requested a new phone with a Gig switch port, if possible, so doing file transfers on the network wouldn't be limited. IT had a couple of questions...

IT-Have you noticed slowness when downloading/uploading?
Me-No, but its a 100mb port...so.
IT-Well I just did a speed test and we're getting 60up/5down. Your phone is over that.
(Working from home? Our fiber was way faster than that I thought.)
Me-That's fine, but this will be for internal network transfers. Not going out to the internet. We have gigabit switches on campus correct?
It-Yes but you shouldn't notice a speed difference.
Me, now lost-If you can't change out the phone that's fine. I'll figure our something.
IT-Now now, lets troubleshoot your issue. Can you plug your phone in?
Me-Yes I have it, but I'm remote today. There is no way for it to reach the call manager.
IT-Let's give it a try.

40 min of provisioning later he gave up and said maybe it is broke. Got a "working" one the next week.

PS first post, and writing on phone. Yay insomnia!

My first post here, be merciful please.

So, I participate in game jams now and then. About two years ago, I was participating in one, and we where near the deadline. Our game was pretty much done, so we where posted a "alpha" version waiting for feedback.

Just half an hour before the deadline, we got a comment on our alpha alerting us of a rather important typo: The instruction screen said "Press X to shoot" while X did nothing and Z was the correct key. "Good thing we caught that in time, thankfully a easy fix" I thought.

This project was written in python, and built using py2exe. If you know py2exe, the least error-prone method outputs a folder containing the .exe, plus ginormous amounts of dll's, pyc files, and various other crap. We would put the entire folder together with graphics and other resources into a .zip and tell the judges to look for the .exe.

Anyway, on this occasion I committed to source control ran the build, it seemed to work on my quick test. I uploaded the zip, right before the deadline and sat back waiting for the results.

I had forgotten one final step.

I had not copied my updated files to the zip, which still contained the old version.

Anyway, I ended up losing a lot of points in "user friendliness" since the judges had trouble figuring out how to shoot. After I figured out why and how it happened, I had a embarrassing story to tell my teammates.

Built a software portal that tied in with our schools user management systems (fuck that shit btw, was written in Java that tied back to a JS backend) and I couldnt get password verification working probably so put a test in that just let you put the username in and whatever password and as long as the user wasn't currently in use you login correctly (only used it to track download limits and display the student's name)

Planned on fixing it the following week when my contract was supposed to renew, but they never renewed it and every time they have had me come back I haven't had the chance to fix it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

Had a panic attack during a coding assignment and now every time I think about that problem I just start spacing. Noice.

Also dear companies: if you wanna ask your interviewees about trying to deduce a theorem out of nowhere, maybe do it in the first test and not in the last one. Cause that’s a shot in the dark to someone who’s not a mathematician and id feel waaay less frustrated if I didn’t give you 6 hours of my life just to end up with an arbitrary task like this.

I once worked with an obsessive tester who was bent on ‘testing’ the README file of a Software Distribution.

The README text file was in the distribution zip, so she had to unzip the thing before reading the file, however she insisted that her test result was a failure because there was no README that shows her how to unzip the distro to read the README!

I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious and escalated the ‘issue’ to the manager! I was furious, almost resigned from the project

In the end I had to suck it up and tolerated more weeks of her mindless obsession!

I just wrote this stub function for my test and thought it was a bit ridiculous and had to share.

A function that returns a function that returns an object with just one function

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

Did a code test at an interview, had to aggregate data from a db. They stored cities with population count and users referenced cities.. 6 cities had a higher user count than population 🤔

They were a little taken back and suggested the population data must be outdated 😉.. it got a bit awkward

So today, again, I discovered the importance of unitests.
I was solving this performance issue, in which we had a few update actions for multiple entities in mongo, but it took FOREVER to complete, even when I unified it into one bulkWrite command.
Since the unified write did improve performance slightly, and we wanted to move on, we decided to let this bug go.
So there I was committing my changes when I got a rejection from the pre-commit hook since I didn't have enough unitests coverage.
Ok, let's start writing some unitests.
Some unitests also needed to test the bulk write. So there I was comparing expected with actual result, and suddenly I got a huge facepalm.
Apparently some rogue for loop iterated all entities again for each entity that needed update. So instead of getting one update per entity, I got N identical update commands per each of the N entities 🤦‍♂️
Needless to say, fixing this fixed the performance bug entirely.
Thank you unitests and pre-commit hooks!

Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒

It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.

That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.

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 😅

Ooh yeeaah. It was 2020 and I was in a final exam. Algebra and Analytical Geometry; 1st year of Engineering class, if you care.

I had a camera pointing at me, my desk and my computer.
The submission was through Google Drive.
So I use my phone to scan my test into a PDF, upload it, and when I tried to submit it...

My recent documents were full of nudes of Belle Delphine.
I had forgotten a friend sent that while we were on Discord having some laughs earlier and I clicked it to check.

I selected my exam, submitted it, and went on with it.
I don't know if anyone noticed, but I think it was kind of obvious, even if it was a screen in a camera... the previews were kinda big on my big screen.

This was some time ago. A Legendary bug appeared. It worked in the dev environment, but not in the test and production environment.

It had been a week since I was working on the issue. I couldn't pinpoint the problem. We CANNOT change the code that was already there, so we needed to override the code that was written. As I was going at it, something happened.

---
Manager: "Hey, it's working now. What did you do?"
Me: *Very confused because I know I was nowhere close to finding the real source of the problem* Oh, it is? Let me check.
Also me: *Goes and check on the test and prod environment and indeed, it's already working*
Also me to the power of three: *Contemplates on life, the meaning of it, of why I am here, who's going to throw out the trash later, asking myself whether my buddies and I will be drinking tonight, only to realize that I am still on the phone with my manager*
Me again: "Oh wow, it's working."
Manager: "Great job. What were the changes in the code?"
Me: "All I did was put console logs and pushed the changes to test and prod if they were producing the same log results."
Manager: "So there were no changes whatsoever, is that what you mean?"
Me: "Yep. I've no idea why it just suddenly worked."
Manager: "Well, as long as it's working! Just remove those logs and deploy them again to the test and prod environment and add 'Test and prod fix' to the commit comment."
Me: "But what if the problem comes up again? I mean technically we haven't resolved the issue. The only change I made were like 20 lines of console logs! "
Manager: "It's working, isn't it? If it becomes a problem, we'll work it out later."
---

I did as I was told, and Lo and Behold, the problem never occurred again.

Was the system playing a joke on me? The system probably felt sorry for me and thought, "Look at this poor fucker, having such a hard time on a problem he can't even comprehend. That idiotic programmer had so many sleepless nights and yet still couldn't find the solution. Guess I gotta do my job and fix it for him. I'm the only one doing the work around here. Pathetic Homo sapiens!"

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's over but..

What the fuck happened?

So my company was building a software to allow users to use a screen without the screen being touch itself.
It was made using a camera above the screen and then with openCV detect where the hand was.

Anyway I had to test it on the place.

And the place was a factory where they did produce pipes.
It's the biggest company in my city, and yet I was there, in the break room, coding a raspberry in winter in a factory.
The only source of heat was the fire used to melt the metal

That was literally awesome

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

So, my last post was about dual booting to Linux. I haven't had problems with Windows. However, after an apart partial update to the Creaters version, I can't open anything without an error that says "ceip.exe was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142)." I can't even run command prompt.

I have nothing on my PC that I can't replace (everything is backed up in at least two places) other than the programs I need for work. I can get them on Monday. But I'm on call the rest of today and tomorrow. And i need them because they help me test system health.

Trying to run the update again to see if I can repair it that way, otherwise, any suggestions for a temporary fix? Thinking my switch to Linux is sooner than I thought, but I have to be able to work.

When I arrived at my new job last year they were working on developing a large site using a live server with all the devs ftp-ing every change in the build process to test it. 😵

It was not uncommon to hear 'is anybody in the style sheet?' being shouted across the office!

Needless to say, I had to fix many bugs multiple times when my fixes were overwritten!

Anyone else had an interviewer just blatantly waste your time and lie to you?

I was recently interviewing for a job, the first couple of rounds went really well, and they gave out a fairly standard tech test. It was a basic tic-tac-toe game, with a few extra twists and a 120 minute time limit. They then wanted me to host what I had be able to code somewhere so they could test it out before the second technical interview.
The interview interview date came round, the interviewer never actually showed up, but 20 minutes late he sent me an email saying they wouldn't be going ahead because the code wasn't good enough, and cited a bunch of things that were well outside of the brief they gave for the test. and when I checked the access logs for the hosted 'live' version, it showed they hadn't bothered to actually look at it; they hadn't even checked out the code from the repo.
I've had similar things happen in the past occasionally, but is it just my bad luck, or is stuff like this becoming more common recently?

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I'm so tired.
Got enough sleep but tired nevertheless every day.

Situation in the company isn't helping, would really like to get a review as I'm really close to a 'final' version for productive use, none given.
Didn't think far enough and didn't include various OO-things when starting to program this application, so I had to rewrite lots of it. It certainly got better by the time but as it's a grown structure I'd feel happier if someone other than me had seen and cursed the code.
Coworker that has most experience in C# only once implemented something with multiple threads, couldn't help me there.
Could not test the code yet because the hardware was inaccessible and is now potentially broken.
I really like working independently, nevertheless I feel a little bit lost at sea - I can deal with that, but it's exhausting.
Also, trying to get an answer from the colleague who should act as my supervisor whether or not I can work remotely during a CS related course in the semester break for > 2 weeks now. Course admission is the mid of January so I'd like to have an answer this year so I can repeat the basics I'll need if necessary.
Also, Midterm is coming.

It's a lot of little things piling up right now I wouldn't mind if there were only 1-2 of them.
I'm just so damn tired.
I'll go to sleep now.

(In happy news: my internet connection is working pretty decent now, technician that fucked it up apologized and said that he probably needs glasses, he misread the connection number. :D)

Ever dealt with people who don’t understand a damn thing they’re coding and just copy and paste stuff around and say that it works? It’s amazing how long people can skate by with only knowing 50% of how what they’re working on works.

We had some dumb know it all on our team who would regularly ship half-done stuff to production and then scramble to fix it after the users bitched about how it didn’t meet the requirements.

This stupid person changed an else to an if having no idea what any of the logic did in this section of code, didn’t adequately test it, and it somehow made it through code review because the better devs were out of office.

This bullshit goes to production, fucks up 200,000 records, and users start complaining about it. Shitty developer refuses to revert the offending code until multiple people on the team overrule them. They spend the next week unfucking the data and decides to just take a day off on Wednesday because it’s been “too much mental energy to fix.” The shit wasn’t even fully resolved yet.

Some people seriously do not belong in this industry. This person’s thought process was:
“Changing an else to an if can’t possibly have significant consequences. Let’s just change this so my code change executes to see what happens.”

Still not sure how they weren’t fired when this happened. They unfortunately got to quit on their own two months later.

I'm a contractor at a product company and today I had the pleasure of working with some jQuery.

A function needed to be called before another function, hard work right?

So I moved the call to the function 3 rows higher, checked it in, set the task as ready for test and started to look for other tasks.
Within a couple of minutes I get a direct message from another dev, let's call him Steve.
Steve wanted me to set the task to ready for code review instead of test, so I did just that and tried to move on.

Some minute or two later Steve contacts me again:
"It would be great if you'd move the comment so it'd be over the call to the function"

Well, I'm not one of those who likes comments... If you need a comment, it's probably not good/readable code. In some cases sure, it might be a complex block coming up.
Sorry, lost my train of thought.

I answered Steve : "Are you sure, I could just remove it instead?"

(for readability S will be Steve and M will be me)

S: Well, it's always good to have comments
M: In this case I think it will be alright.
S: But it's nice to see what the function is doing.
M: I'll do it if you really want me to.
S: It's better to have the comment than to not have it and needing it.
M: Okay then

The name of the function : LoadOrganizationTree()

And this is the comment :
//Load organization tree

So after 6 months of asking for production API token we've finally received it. It got physically delivered by a courier, passed as a text file on a CD. We didn't have a CD drive. Now we do. Because security. Only it turned out to be encrypted with our old public key so they had to redo the whole process. With our current public key. That they couldn't just download, because security, and demanded it to be passed in the fucking same way first. Luckily our hardware guy anticipated this and the CD drives he got can burn as well. So another two weeks passed and finally we got a visit from the courier again. But wait! The file was signed by two people and the signatures weren't trusted, both fingerprints I had to verify by phone, because security, and one of them was on vacation... until today when they finally called back and I could overwrite that fucking token and push to staging environment before the final push to prod.

Only for some reason I couldn't commit. Because the production token was exactly the same as the fucking test token so there was *nothing to commit!*

BECAUSE FUCKING SECURITY!

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

So, idiot me decided it would be a good idea to never get around to configuring my UPS to gracefully shutdown my server after a powercut lasting more than x duration...

Long story short, we had a powercut that lasted 4 minutes or so longer than the battery in the UPS could keep the server up for...

UPS died, server went pew, and after rebooting itself once the power came back on, my raid array wouldn’t mount anymore...

After Googling around, it seemed like running e2fsck would solve the problem.

Didn’t seem to do the trick... and tired me at 3am decided it would be a good idea to poke around.

Pretty sure I ran a command wrong, or two, because now I can’t even mount the fricken array in read only, and fsck complains with a shit ton errors...

Been researching for hours, and no dice...

Test Disk shows the ext4 partition, but fails to list any files...

I may have destroyed the tables or something... I’m a noob at this point.

I’m able to access files with the RStudio tool, however this doesn’t help with file names and directory structure 😭

Is it all over for my 5 years worth of photos and other bits and pieces that I don’t have any backups of ? 😂😭😭

If any of y’all are pros with data recovery and can help a fellow boi out, I’d be more than happy to pay for ya time !

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */

=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.

=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.

=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.

So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.

Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.

I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs.

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

We actually had a small "code on paper" test (more like a recap test) yesterday, but we didn't have to write much rather than just have a basic understanding how classes and instances of those work. It was like 6 small lines of code to insert. I don't mind coding on paper as long as you don't have to write a big program with it as a 1-hour test.

Rant on anti devs.

I helped my friend crack a fairly simple hackerank. The questionnaire was basic JavaScript questions and little on CSS selectors nth child. The test is finished in half hour instead of 75 mins.

5 months later. He calls again and ask if he can get the question solutions (code snippets). I didn't have those but curious why he needed it. He says he wants to put that solutions to Github. So would look on resume. This is not even a project just code snippet with a for loop. He just wants any codebase to upload to his profile.

My ears are bleeding. It makes me sad that some people had to do Masters in computer science purely out of societal pressure. Just because software development is booming field a lot of folks who are not genuinely interested in development are being forced into the industry.

A fellow mate I graduated with recently asked me to help him with his interview sample coding questions. Basically he had to write a function to test different conditions using Java. I wrote the function, pushed it to git and asked him to go check it out. He told me afterwards that, my function was wrong..lol, really? (BTW, I tested it and it produced the results the company wanted)

I asked him to send me his code and all he did was write a "main", created an instant variable and passed it in a switch statement. Mind you, the test condition was big that, switch statement was the worse to use...

I told him to do whatever he wants but he should remember that the question wants a damn function given a certain input. Didn't hear from him again...then later asked me to help him with a SQL question...hah, I didn't even bother looking at the question.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

My coworker became super restless and incompetent during the initial 2020 Covid lockdown. Like playing hours of video games during work hours restless.

For one project, my coworker was working on the backend and I was working frontend. Coworker also wanted to be overlord of the epic branch.

My coworker merges the epic to our test branch and our code is broken. Coworker didn’t pull my FE changes before merging. Dude, I shouldn’t have needed to tell you to pull. You changed the api response that your BE code delivers so of course I had to update my FE code so it could work with this change.

I had to resolve the conflicts because coworker left work early to “rescue/pickup” their girlfriend from work.

You bet I leave this person on read when they try to text me on Signal

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

Project: pool cleaner.
Hey guys. So here's the story I mounted my pool one month ago in a very hot day, but the weather is getting freakyer with each year and this was the first sunny day.
But I fill my pool with water from a well. Chlor takes care of bacteria but the damn algy are a problem.

First part: pump the shit out.

First test: not working properly.
- Reason? Buie keeps the dirt from reaching the motor;
- Hazardous: motor must be always under water
- Main problem. Pump is ment to sink in the bottom and pull water out, so only has one exit, the entry goes directly to the engine.
Workable? Turned a snail into fine dust, needs a hose with a buie that goes directly to the motor.
Just having fun... I would be in the pool if I had cleaned it last week

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer

My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.

After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila

we had copied a shortcut :)

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

What is it with devs (not all, by any means!) who don't understand networks or basic computer operation? I'm not talking about anything complex, but things like the dev who asked if his IP address could be whitelisted so he could remote in from home. We asked what his public IP address is and he said 10.0.0.27.

Or the new dev who started and said her laptop camera didn't work and logged a ticket, only to be asked if she had the camera cover open or closed and said, "oh, that's what that lever is for."

Don't get me wrong - many devs and sysadmins and IT people of all fields are excellent. And there are some who are crap in every field. This is no rant about devs in general, just *these* crap devs that I can only throw my hands in the air and think, well, they scored ok in the SQL test.

When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...

and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...

because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.

Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.

!Rant

TLDR: What's your favorite REST API Documentation tool?

I'm about to start developing a really large REST API. I have never really had need to document my previous API's since they were small, self explanatory and had only me using them. Aside from this one being too large for me to keep track of there is also a remote team that will need to integrate with it.

Basically I need write exceptional documentation while using as little time as possible. I love postman and am planning to use it for documentation since I currently use it to test during development anyway but I have seen some really neat looking tools like swagger and apiary so I figured I would check for some other suggestions.

What is your current / preferred REST API documentation method?

I dunno about coolest, but I did sort of cement my reputation as the "database guy" in my first job because of this.

My first job was with a group maintaining a series of websites. Because of the nature of the websites, every morning we had to pull the records from one database on one network, sneaker net the data to a database on another network, and import the data via custom data import function.

However, the live site would crash after 100 or so records were imported. The dba at the live site had to script out a custom data partitioning script to do his daily duties, but it definitely messed up his productivity.

Turns out, the custom mass import function had recycled the standard import function, which was only used to import 1 record at a time, and it never closed its database connections, because it never needed to. A one line fix to production code was delivered 6 months later (because that was our release cycle) and I came up with the temporary work around, which was basically removing the connection limit. It would still crash with the work around, but only with multiple days worth of data. So basically only on Monday. Also developed the test set for the import (15k+ records).

So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.

*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*

Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.

I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.

And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.

TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...

TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...

I didn’t turn down a dev freelance project when the client decided against going with best practices because the solution I offered was a well-established design pattern but created a need for a financial management change she didn’t like. I stupidly built what she asked for. It worked fine in the 3rd party vendor test environment but failed on production. After hours of analysis of code to ensure no changes happened to my source during test->prod deployment, and the vendor denying they had config differences between them, and the client refusing to pay, all I could do was abandon the project.

Rant about the Hungarian corruption.
Today I was on a driving test with two others, I was the last one.
They just flat out told us that two of us will pass, the first two who bribe them(the driving instructor and the inspector)
I was the last in line, and both paid before me so I failed my driving test automatically and I have to retake it(because if all three pass, than attention is brought onto the corruption), and even have to pay the fee to be able to retake the exam, and now I will have to bribe them too, so I can pass.
This pisses me off so much, I wish I had alexdelarge as my personal rant writer so he could express my pure anger and hatred.

Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...

So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together

So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.

Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?

After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.

Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.

The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.

Lockdown started.

There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.

A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.

Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!

It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.

The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.

Suddenly my manager is fired.

Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.

The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.

Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.

...
...

Fuck

"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.

...

It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.

I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.

But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.

It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling.

Not sure if I'm disappointed or relieved.

Just spent 5 years trying the get into this class. Studying and asking and getting recommendations. I knew it had less than a 5% pass rate but it's all that I've been aiming for for years.

Finally got into it, and spent 4 months working my ass off. Today I got told that I'm maybe being dropped. And honestly, as disappointed as I am, and I might need a new dream to aim for, I'm actually pretty okay with it.

I've been so stressed and annoyed and unhappy lately. I was starting to debate if this is even what I want. And for the first night in a while I can just drink whisky and not worry about the next test or doing classwork at midnight instead of sleeping.... I can just relax and whatever happens happens. I can't control how tomorrow goes.

Not sure if "oof. I need a drink" or "thank god, lets celebrate with a drink!"

This is the most wtf thing that happened me with Javascript, I had a regular expression and it caused bugs only with 4 digits long words, then I just noticed this:

/^.{3}$/.test(null) // false
/^.{4}$/.test(null) // true

What the fuck, I can't believe that who designed the .test method didn't think to avoid null coercion

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

I was working on email reporting to business customers and in the test phase was mass sending email to my own account. However it suddenly stopped working and it took me a few minutes to realize I had commented out the hardcoded line with my email address. I had to write to each Customer and apologize for the spam after my error. Also had to get whitelisted our email server after the incident with a few.

First software refactoring in the company I worked for. No test environnement because "who needs it?", no unit testing, no comments, had to make sql updates and shit, was scared all day long that something would fuck up.
"Fuck fuck fuck, forgot a part of the where !" Had to fix everything quickly so no one would notice, no coffee/smoke pauses. On top of that, got a ton of retarded requests from the PM and other technicians working with me like "hey boi, could you add an icon to every button we made? There's like a thousand, we need it for tonight, our client will come visit us and I want to show him a better interface blablabla"
And since I was an intern, I couldn't refuse, had to work like a prostitute in virgin-land, and for what?

"Oi, you did good, now do other stuff"

Living on the edge!

One or two years ago I managed to deploy a DDL change directly on the production server. As I knew there was a backup job which will run every day at noon and at midnight. So I run my script some minutes after noon. So far so good. But somehow I tested it badly in my test environment and the UI of the application throws error after error now in production.

Well, just revert the db to the latest recovery point with the backup, I thought.

It became clear then after a couple of minutes of searching the backup folder for the db backup that there was no such file. The youngest backup file was 3 years old.

Now what happened: The backup script had a switch "simulate=true" and then simulated a successful backup on each run. Therefore the monitoring system got no alerts for not correctly executing those jobs correctly. Then the monitoring job which should do the backupfolder surveillance stuck with green, because there was a valid backup file inside. But it did not check for a specific creation date.

Now this database is the one we need for doing our daily business and is really crucial. Therefore It was easier to emergencyfix the application than doing a rollback of the db 🙄

Well, not really a data loss story, but close to one.

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

- 5 days until customer integration test. I finished my work for the test a week ago so I am relaxed. 10 days of estimated work for other team, 1 dev scheduled for this task.
I reminded of the deadline, which seemed not realistic anymore; "Don't be so pessimistic" they said, "Everything is fine", "We'll get it done".

- 2 days to go and half of the system doesn't work, the external test system rejects all data (nobody had time to read the specs -> let's call it 'assumption based development' (ABD))
I reminded of the deadline, and that I would like to have an internal test with all components beforehand; "Don't be so pessimistic" they said, "Everything is fine", "Just some minor issues".

- 1 day to go and dev from other team called in sick... (and I can really empathize this decision); "Someone else can jump in and finish the work" they said.

- An hour later the test was cancelled not even 24 hours before it should take place. We could have rescheduled the test more than a week ago, that wouldn't have been so disgusting and even save our customer some hours of preparation effort.

I hate myself when I was right from the start but wouldn't enforce my position because I'm too kind sometimes.

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

Now my client does not want to rely on Amazon S3 because of the One Outage that it ever had a couple what weeks ago I forgot already. So my dumbass blurts out well we could always just back up to some other image or file storing website. But now I'm expected to implement this right away when I really haven't thought about it at all I mean I would have to write some sort of failover and some sort of daily or syncing mechanism. I guess I should forget about any direct upload to S3 code that I have written. Really I guess I have to wrap all of the image and file handling stuff with my own solution. Which actually that will be very nice when it is done and I could use this on other projects but it's quite a lot of work for something that I don't feel we really need at this stage in development. Just because you're using stuff on production that has am enormous red TEST label in the way of the ui doesn't mean i can code bullet proof software any faster

Bug I had to fix today: some elements in our React app were being swapped with other elements.

We had `<foo>bar</foo>` on the component but on the html `foo` was being swapped with some other element in our app. It's contents ("bar" in the example) were being left in place, though, so we were getting `<baz>bar</baz>`.

This would only happen when running on production mode. On development everything was fine.

Also, everything seemed fine on the React dev tools. `foo` was where it was supposed to be, but on the html it was somewhere else.

Weirdest shit I ever saw when using React. I found a way to go around it and applied that fix, but I'm still trying to track this down to the source.

The worst part was waiting for fucking webpack to finish the production bundle on every fucking change I wanted to test. I didn't miss the change-save-compile-test flow at all.

What a shit day.

Alright, I’ve got a question for some of you who may have felt this way or currently are feeling this way.

I’m burnt out. I hate my job(s), I hate computers, technology, programming, etc. Honestly, at my primary job because shit is so bad, I haven’t even set an alarm clock to wake up in the mornings for the simple fact that I just don’t give a fuck anymore. My direct supervisor is the same way. This place is falling apart and honestly I’m welcoming it.

I’ve grown up with computers my whole life. When I was younger my brother would hack and tamper with shit just to test the limits. To see what he and his machine were capable of. My dad, he was always taking computers apart, anything that had a board, it was at one point taken apart to see how it worked, and when put together; always worked. They liked modifying and testing the limits of things... the shit I use to enjoy...

I guess what I’m trying to ask is, how do you gain a passion back for something that has faded away over a period of time... I truly hope I haven’t forever lost a passion for computers and every subclass under it, but I fear as though I have... How do you guys get it back?

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

Me: Oh, man, there are hooks for react-redux now? I don’t have to wrap components in a higher order component to get information from the redux store and dispatch actions? Could this solve the problem I’m having with data fetching and consistency in the app I’m working on?!

Spends entire Saturday writing a basic server, connecting to an mLab instance, filling said instance with dummy data, starting a create-react-app, writing a reducer, action creators, components, etc. just to test how useSelector(), useEffect(), and useDispatch() would work in an application that isn’t just a simple counter (why is it that like every example is always the counter example?!). Bonus, react-router now ALSO has hooks, so got to play with useHistory() and useParams()

Conclusion: Maybe. It does appeal to me to not have the cascade of virtual DOM that you always get nesting HOCs, but I’m also wary of appearing too willing to jump on it just because it’s the new thing.

Has anybody else played around with react-redux hooks? Your thoughts?

Also, yes, I know, not every app needs redux. It had it when I was brought on and I don’t really have the ability to change that implementation detail now.

Most intense day for me was at the very start of my career. Internship... went with product manager to client's office while PM installed new test version of our product for on-site integration testing. Shortly after deploy, client manager came over to ask why production had gone down...

Turns out that manually typing DB name as part of deployment script is not, erm, risk free. PM entered production DB name and took out a very busy call centre for a few hours. Agents in tears, customers raging on phones, etc! After we restored and got everything back up and running, he reached me the keyboard and said "You're doing it this time."

My attempt was problem free, thankfully. Earned many brownie points that day.

Just needing somewhere to let some steam off

Tl;dr: perfectly fine commandline system is replaced by bad ui system because it has a ui.

For a while now we have had a development k8s cluster for the dev team. Using helm as composing framework everything worked perfectly via the console. Being able to quickly test new code to existing apps, and even deploy new (and even third party apps) on a simar-to-production system was a breeze.

Introducing Rancher

We are now required to commit every helm configuration change to a git repository and merge to master (master is used on dev and prod) before even being able to test the the configuration change, as the package is not created until after the merge is completed.

Rolling out new tags now also requires a VCS change as you have to point to the docker image version within a file.

As we now have this awesome new system, the ops didn't see a reason to give us access to kubectl. So the dev team is stuck with a ui, but this should give the dev team more flexibility and independence, and more people from the team can roll releases.

Back to reality: since the new system we have hogged more time from ops than we have done in a while, everyone needs to learn a new unintuitive tool, and the funny thing, only a few people can actually accept VCS changes as it impacts dev and prod. So the entire reason this was done, so it is reachable to more people, is out the window.

Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.

A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.

My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.

Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!

I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?

But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.

I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.

And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.

It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?

It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?

By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

Had my junior test at work yesterday, and...oh boy. I don't think I've ever been so stressed in my life.

>inb4 "welcome to the real world kid"

Yeah yeah I know but god damn, this was too much. I heard from seniors that you get used to everyday stress, it comes with the job, but junior test ( aka "stress test") is the breaking point for most "new" arrivals.

The test itself tho is not even that hard. Dealing with so much stress and time pressure for the first time is what gets you. Not knowing what happens if you don't pass certainly doesn't help.

I broke down at one point and even after finishing, going home (got no sleep) and coming back today, that feeling of hopelessness is still there.

No real point to this rant, I just needed to vent

I once made an oopsie in an API for a logistics provider (one of the biggest in Germany...).

To understand the oopsie...

Based on input data a string must be created containing several hex / string / formatted values.

Think of ...

$return .= sprintf("%02X", ...)

I think there were around 15 to 20 lines, although more complicated.

The bug happened because I had a brainfart.

What was previously one line with... Many many many many variables, I had to split into multiple lines since internal stuff changed and it was impossible to change this oneliner of hell with >50 formatting codes.

Of course we didn't test everything.
XD

What we didn't test was - funnily enough - wether the casting was correct in all cases.

I misplaced a formatting code.

And we had a major brainfart because we tested integer, but not double / float values....

We sent for a long time packages much cheaper than allowed (took thw logistics provider nearly 3-4 months to realize this :) ).

Spot the difference:

@highlight
print sprintf("%01.2s", $money).PHP_EOL;

print sprintf("%01.2f", $money).PHP_EOL;

My colleague was once writing a test which deletes a file. And due to some fuck-up all the files in the C drive started getting deleted. By the time we found out half the files went missing and most programs stopped working. Had to secretly patch everything back up with me to ensure that he finishes his work and IT or management doesn't find out.

Went for a dev job interview in which the senior software engineer said this...

"Javascript is like Java but scripting"

I didn't say anything to this. I don't know if it was some sort of a test (even though I was in the middle of a 4 page test for them).

Evything text and every every reference I have ever seen about Java and Javascript is that they are nothing alike. What would others have said to this?

FYI - I didn't get the job. Which I am pretty glad about as I didn't like the software engineer guy, and I don't think I would have liked working with him. He had this fake friendly exterior but the fuckwit personality was shitting through every gap in his skin.... I just noticed I used the work shitting instead of shinning, I think it is suitable so I will leave it.

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

I work with content. More specifically I work on content migration and improvement.

We connect to many platforms and pull and push documents into it. This one time we had to connect to some outrageously expensive (6 figures) system which we obviously couldn't afford to buy just for testing. The client wouldn't give us a testing server either.

My literal warning: "We need a testing server because we're gonna push it until it breaks. Then we know the limit." Client: "nah it will be fine." Us: "I promise you the server will go down..." Client: "It's a stable system. You can test in your own folder on our server"

10 minutes later we had an angry client because the server crashed due to overload.

I'm not sure if I'm annoyed or amused :p

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

we had that one teacher in the apprenticeship in the first year who taught us C. There were some people who already knew the language but most of us didn't and we had this one horrible test where we had to do some for and while loops with stars... Like generating something like this:
********
*******
******
*****
****
***
**
*
so most of rhat stuff we never learnt and he couldn't explain to us why our code wasn't correct and we all ended up getting really bad grades in that subject for something really basic -_- just because he couldn't explain it to us and test things we never had

coolest bug our team had was not a actually a bug but a feature that is misused and abused.

tldr: its a feature that became a bug

we have an app that has a "test print" feature to test the printer and the format of the document to be printed. it has the word TEST for fields and all that.
it became a bug when suddenly, the users use that feature to print documents, instead of using the app with the business rules and all, and just manually strike off the TEST words with a pen.
the feature became a bug because it has become a security risk.

Work on a product to categorize text… previous guy implemented an NLP solution that took 20 per body of text (500 words or so) in a $400/mo AWS instance, was about 80% accurate and needed “more data for training” 🤦‍♂️

I thought (and still think) that for some use cases AI is straight up snake oil. Decided instead to make an implementation with a word list and a bunch of if statements in Go… no performance considerations, loops within loops reading every single word… I just wanted to see if it worked and maybe later I could write it more optimized in Rust or something…

first time I ran it it took so little that I thought it had a bug… threw more of the test data we had for the NLP, 94% accuracy, 50 flipping milliseconds per body of text in a $5/mo AWS instance!!!

Now, that felt good!!
(The other guy… errr… left, that code is still the core of product of the company I built it for, I got bored and moved to another company :)

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

What was supposed to be a simple HDD to SSD upgrade for my brother ended up taking 3 fucking days.

His computer's idle temp was fucking 90c because of fucking YEARS worth of dust preventing fans from breathing, one of them was even dead so I had to go to best buy to get a new one.

Had a power outage happen in the middle of cleaning the damn dust out before replacing the bad fan. It took close to 24 hours for it to come back, and I just didn't bother until the day after cause fuck that.

When I go back to it, I finish cleaning the dust, clone the old HDD to the new SSD, do the swap out, replace the thermal paste on CPU cause why the fuck not at this point. Then turn it on to test, yeah from 90c down to 20c : |

Yeah... so I charged him for the new fan, and the hour-ish it took me to clean the damn dust and replace the fan... (drive was agreed to be done for free as a favor) Yeah not really worth charging for but I was pissed and that was the 'nicest' way I could show how annoyed I was with him not properly caring for the PC. Like honestly 90 degrees celsius. I refuse to believe he didn't notice impacted performance in his games

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.