"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Type it in, type it in, type a bigger number in. Oh how fun it is to break other people's software!

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

"DOH!"
Taken from "How to break software" by James Whittaker

The joys of using overpriced enterprise software...

Me: Hey, I tried connect to the server, but I'm getting a "connection refused" error. Is it really running.
Other: hmm, I'll check
Other: The host restarted, but I'll get the software up again, no problemo
Other: I started the server again, but there's, but it's throwing errors while initializing. Time to write customer support

And then you get that premium customer support that think we don't know how to use their software at times. And once they realize we do, they don't know much better either. And once they realize we know how to use it there are 3 possibilities:
* They need our help to debug stuff before knowing what is going on
* They need to release a new version and accidentally break backwards compatibility and create enough work for us to burn through the clients contact hours
* They provide helpful advice (secret ending)

These fuck don't even release a proper changelog for their software nor their manuals.

I started thinking and worrying about numbers much more than before

in the US, you write numbers like this:
1,000.00
in Germany usually like this:
1.000,00
and in programming languages like this:
1000.00

now i wonder how to type a number, whenever i have to use german software
should i use the US way, the german way or the dev way? the wrong one could possibly break it

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

Just going to combine my rants;

Gotta love when random updates just break everything, the auto tag rename plugin in vscode breaks the css intellisense plugin, after one of them updated sometime recently.

Synergy 2 is such a trash piece of software, its incredible how they are so bold to even demand money for that, they are just abusing the fact that Synergy 1 is so good and popular.

The edge detection is non-existent, theres no settings at all anymore to add dead corners, it never actually acks the receiver so it's forever in the loading state, even though its connected, the mouse is twitchting if it goes from one desktop to another, you have to literally smash your mouse across the room to be able to actually change from one computer to another and the list goes on and on.

On the positive side of it all though, thanks to remembering the existence of browsersync and synergy 1, I now have my 6 monitor setup I wanted for a while, by having 3 monitors and 3 laptops, that especially comes in handy since I am currently doing a ton of cross-platform testing.

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

Rant Mode: ON

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

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

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

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

Rant Mode: OFF

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

This week's huge fuck you goes to... Drumroll please...
Slack!

You earned this prize for your stupid auto-sleep if there is no interaction for x minutes!

I don't want to install your crap software on my system, so i am forced to alt tab every 15 minutes just to press space and then delete, because God forbids i am being productive on my freaking IDE, second computer, test device and/or meeting!
Also lovely how phone notifications are not sent on mobile unless you are on sleep mode... How could I ever ask for urgent notifications if i take a small break? Oh, right! I should go to sleep mode, so people will think i didn't touch your shitware for 30 mins every fucking time i go to the toilet! :D

Please get your prize whenever possible!

GWT.
Let me explain:
Tl;dr : someone fucked up, I took shit, it was a gwt project. In a sense I don't hate GWT because of the framework itself but because how I was introduced and forced to "work" with it.

Context:
Was working as a paid intern at a small company there were 3 devs 2 interns and one senior employee that only worked from home handling the shit ton of legacy VB6 code he wrote over several year and a boss with no technical knowledge. (Other unimportant people as well)
I was working with their DBA (cool dude) because I was writing statistic and report generating software.

Story:
The other intern was tasked of doing a gwt app that was supposed to use a input file.
Rather than asking the user to upload it with a file picker (I guess they exist in gwt I didn't got to dig in the framework) he was trying to load the file with a http request directed at the same host the app was running on.
It did not work.
Then his contract was other and the app was left in an unfinished state.
The boss then tried to have the app deployed, the remaining dev dodged the bullet invoking some bullshit because he was clearly incapable of doing it.
So it fell on me, couldn't deploy the app because it was not even close to working.
Tried to fix things and make it work.
Turns out he thought it would take me 3h to deploy when I clearly explained that the other guy didn't finish the app.
Boss got mad, threatened to ruin my studies and my future career.
Couldn't because my uni had my back.
Didn't want to see me anymore.
Couldn't break my contract.
Told me to work from home for the end of my internship.
I got 3 weeks early vacation and got paid, fuck him, fuck GWT, fuck his company.
Still got well marked for the internship as my supervisor was the DBA who was happy with my work.

Morality:
Don't let your intern unsupervised, don't let your main dev work from home when you don't know shit, don't piss me off and send me work from home.

Do not touch Salesforce.

Especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It is a fucking joke this product even exists. Buy Hubspot instead. Marketing Cloud is the single worst piece of software I have had to implement out of 4 years working in software and a lifetime working in tech.

Literally nothing works. You click a button and bam, nothing. The UI actively lies to the user. Nothing is guaranteed to work and support is some guy in India who shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Things will randomly break and warning messages are tiny, indecipherable babble that mean nothing.

If you are dev, walk away. If you are a potential customer, walk away. This company DESERVES a bad reputation for the absolute heap of dogshit that is Marketing Cloud.

The worst part is that it's likely going to affect my job and my career because of how fucking dogshit it is.

Fuck Salesforce in case the messaging isn't clear.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

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.

!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev

Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃

I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.

Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..

My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)

i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..

i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..

i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..

i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅

I would like to stop and genuinely thank the devs and anyone that contributed to NW.js for allowing users to work outside the sandbox. Fucking sandboxes these days make developing editors and tooling a bunch of bullshit hassle. I understand why, but it makes an entire class of software that much more difficult to develop.

And on a semirelated note, I decided to go with nw.js because unlike electron, I don't have to tell users "just install these two gigabytes of npm dependencies *from off the net after already downloading the main application*, dependencies that could break at any time at all for any reason."

Does anyone even bundle their dependencies any more or is this something only clinically insane people like myself do?

Because last I checked most users still don't know how to debug console autobarf when a single command goes awry due to something obscure like a version conflict between two brittle cogs in the organ grinder known as package management.

Edit: also, nw.js startup times and memory requirements are relatively sane compared to electron.

I absolutely hate software to the point where I started converting from sysadmin to becoming more like a dev. That way I could just write my own implementations at will. Easier said than done, that's for sure. And it goes both ways.

I think that in order to be a good dev, you need these skills the most:
- Problem solving skills
- Creativity, you're making stuff
- Logical reasoning
- Connecting the dots
- Reading complex documentation
- Breaking down said documentation
- A strong desire to create order and patterns
- ...

If you don't have the above, you may still be able to become a dev.. but it would be harder for sure, and in some cases acceptance will be lower (seriously, learn to Google!)

One thing I don't think you need in development is mathematics. Sure there's a correlation between it and logic reasoning, but you're not solving big mathematical monsters here. At most you'd probably be dealing with arrays and loops (well.. program logic).

Also, written and spoken English! The language of the internet must be known. If it's not your first language, learn it. All the good (and crucial) documentation out there is in English after all.

One final thing would be security in my opinion, since you're releasing your application to the internet and may even run certain services, and deal with a lot of user data. Making those things secure takes some effort and knowledge on security, but it's so worth it. At the most basic level, it requires a certain mindset: "how would I break this thing I just made?"

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

Convo b/w female software engineer and her boyfriend;
him-Hey babe
her-Hello world;
him-??
her-Ohh no, I meant to say hy babe, actually u r my whole world;
him-Ooo pls!...wt were u dnh anyways?
her-been doing coding for last 12 hrs with boss;
him-gosh!! ...did u eat?
her-0;
him-??
her- I mean false;
him-false?
her-sorry , I meant no;
him-ur mom called , so call her
her-mom();
him-WTF?????
her-I will call her...dont worry;
him-I think u should rest for a while
her-while(project!=over) {work();}
him-U r enjoying this...irritating me...aren't u?
her-what? :)
him-When will u come home?
her-if(boss==leaves){cout<<"soon"<<endl;}
him-Now its too much...its really annoying...are u getting me? Have u lost ur mind?
her-ERROR 404....mind not found!
him-u do realise...I m not getting any of ur jokes
her-JokeOutOfBoundException
him-Are u drunk? How many eyes do I have?
her-1
him-Idiot , I have 2 eyes
her-oh sorry I counted from 0
him-i think we should break up
her-oh no!!, dont break; continue;
him-thats it, urBF.exit()
her-No wait..... ; is imp , write like....urBF.exit();

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

Continuation from last rant
Yay I got my first internship as a software-engineer!
Now the story how I got it.
For my bachelor’s degree I need to get a internship, after searching companies in and around my area I found a company that focusses on app development. I’ve got some experience in that, And really enjoyed it. Well I figured why not apply there right. After not hearing anything about it for a week I gave up hope until I got called by an unknown caller.
They saw my e-mail and wanted to talk with me. So Super excited we made an appointment for today. Not knowing what to expect I came there about 10 minutes early searching for a receptionist or something. But they didn’t have one… then I just asked a random employee. He offered me a coffee and I waited a while. Until one of the senior developers brought me to the big boss of the company and the interview begun.

First they asked my about myself and what I do besides my study, once they had a good idea who I am they explained a bit about their products and how they developed them. Then the scary part started… They wanted to see my skills, And I hadn’t done anything with apps in a year. I showed them some code I wrote a year ago hoping it wasn’t as bad as I thought. So while feeling super uneasy about that they asked me on what skill level I thought I was. I told them I’d manage myself after a summer focusing on app development and they accepted me as a future intern.
Next week I get shown around the code base. And I start after the summer break.
Updates come when something interesting happens :D

Sorry to break your heart but if u have 3yrs of expert here is no way you are a senior software engineer, no matter how good you are

[Long rant about one of the worst school project I got]
I just saw that post about Lego coding, and it reminds me a project we had to do for high school.

The project was about a robot that will do volleyball services. My group decided with me that I should go on programming the robot since it was my idea to pick that subject to work on. So I started to investigate the robot and the programming software.

This was one of the worst thing si could get. For some reason I didn't find any tutorial about how to program the robot, so I had to test it out. When you don't want to break the robot, that's clearly not the best thing to do.

So what about the teachers? We had 3. Two told me they don't know stuff about this, and one MIGHT know stuff but not how to use the software. Great...
Plus I add that we were asking a teacher some help, being desperate, and literally, he came, made a joke about "how long he didn't play with Lego toys", laughed at his own joke and left. Thank you, that was really helpful while I was worrying about the project that will help us getting my degree, clearly helped us.

So I managed to do something really basic, where you input the direction for the aim with the arrows on the robot, and central button was for shooting. Basically basic stuff. Even not optimal because the robot hit its own screen but a weaker throw wasn't working, so we had to put some protection over the screen and the arm.

Another group of another class were working on the same subject, so we visited them one day to see their stuff.
They made a joystick that was fully operational, with analogic direction input, precise aiming and shooting stuff. The best way to make myself doubt about my stuff.

So we did the presentation and for whatever reason, the other class (not only the other group) got bad reviews of their projects, made by my famous joking teacher, and we got a good review. Didn't understand, but whatever.

So did I learn stuff?
Absolutely not. It was one of the worst pain in the ass to learn the programming syntax and stuff, and when I graduated, I forgot anything concerning programming stuff, my engineering school did all the stuff.

This is some experience you don't forget, the one that don't make yourself grow at all but the effort is real.

So I've been a professional software developer in variously named roles over the years since I was 18, now 35. I've had many ideas for my own projects over the years some great, some not so great, and as with most ideas, if you don't act on them, someone else will suddenly come up with it, which is frustrating as hell obviously. Anyway, I never find enough time to do these things in what little free time I have, so the idea of stopping working for someone else and work on my own stuff seems almost unobtainable. I've worked with companies (startups) that have had ideas that have never made anything significant but still keep going on investor money for some reason or another. I realise my question is quite vague, but how the fuck do you break away and do your own stuff? Time is running out (at least in my mind), anyone here actually done it, succeeded, failed?? Can't be writing other people's badly designed software my whole life, would be nice to design my own and see it through.

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

!rant

My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.

So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.

I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?

It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)

If you compare a software developer's job with another, let's say a doctor or a lawyer, the former doesn't require mastery and there is continuous chase on fast changing version numbers or an entire platform coming out. Former innovates without question and gets burned out in the process. While the latter demands mastery of certain fields and the specialization isn't diverse enough compared to former. Yet the pay for latter might be higher. What are the pros and cons have you felt as a developer and how do you cope to address it internally? Is it just the thrill and excitement of new things coming out? What fulfillment do we get aside from the satisfaction of clean code, unit test and successful deployments? How much impact have we really given? And is there a place for developers to final settle down? Don't get me wrong; I won't stop until death probably but I hope adulting responsibilites won't make us break.

Embarcadero tracked my progress on a potential commercial project. To my employer, I know for a fact my employee email is not connected to my personal PC. How did they get that email?
I used the unlicensed pro version of 10.3 because I thought the community version would have the necessary components needed open the source and not break the project. I planned to use the software over the holidays to dissect the code to see what changes I can bring to the table before asking them to buy me the legit license. Embarcadero caught me. Even know my project directories. How did they do it I wonder?

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

Always liked to tinker with software.
And build stuff.

The latter started out the opposite, used to be a bonafide skid.
Until I learned that the most efficient way to break in, is to know how it's built.

My specialty? Mmh probably Laravel, MySQL, Vue & NuXT JS.
& React native.

Built quite a few things with those tools.

.net, asp, sqlsrv, Xamarin & uwp is in my toolbelt too tho.

Whichever tool is the better fit 😁

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

I'm starting to gain a dislike for OOP.

I think classes make it easy for me to think of the entities of a problem and translate them into code.

But when you to attempt to test classes, that's when shit hits the fan.

In my opinion, it is pointless to test classes. If you ever seen test code for a class, you'll notice that it's usually horrible and long.

The reason for this is that usually some methods depend on other methods to be called first.

This results in the usual monolithic test that calls every goddamn method on the class.

You might say "ok, break the test into smaller parts". Ok. But the result of that attempt is even worse, because you end up with several big tests cases and a lot of duplicate code, because of the dependency of some methods on others.

The real solution to this is to make the classes be just glue: they should delegate arguments onto functions that reside on its own file, and, maybe afterwards emit events if you are using events.

But they shouldn't have too much test code classes though. The test code for classes should be running a simple example flow, but never doing any assertions other than expecting no exceptions.

For the most part, you'd be relying on the unit testing that is done for each delegated function.

If you take any single function you'll see that it's extremely easy to write tests for it. In fact, you can have the test right next to the fuction, like <module>.xyz <module>.test.xyz

So I don't think classes shouldn't be used at all, they should just be glue.

As you do normal usage of this software this way, when a bug is discovered you'll notice that the fix and testing code for this bug is very usually applied to the delegated functions instead of being a problem of classes.

I think classes by themselves sound sane in paper, but in practice they turn into a huge fucking messes that become impossible to understand or test.

How can something like traditional classes not get chaotic when a single class can have x attributes and y methods. The complexity grows exponentially. And sometimes more attributes and methods are added.

Someone might say "well, it's just the nature of problems. Problems can have a lot of variables".

Yeah, but cramming all of that complexity into a single 200 lines class is insanity.

Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.

I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.

It would not receive non manual software updates

It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.

Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol

Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.

The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.

Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol

Need advice:

So I’m 20 years old. Got a decent job as software engineer with a really good pay and really want to break into machine learning.

Mastered NodeJS (my stack has always had node for the past 5-6 years) and I’m finding it difficult to switch to python for machine learning since things are so engraved in my head in javascript.

Aside from the syntax when I’m watching tutorials or reading books, I see data scientists and mathematicians make design mistakes in their code and it hurts my eyes and triggers my ocd.

I need tips on how to put my mindset in a moldable state so I can judge less and learn more and absorb data. Like you know that philosophy that when u get old your brain can’t learn things as fast anymore? I feel like that’s already happening to me rn at the age of 20.

You dipshits! Yet again...
- use contract X from team WeJustFuckUp
- WeJustFuckUps tell me I "used the contract with the wrong semantics"
- What the fuck how is that possible!? Explain to the fuck ups that if it's the wrong semantics then it shouldn't be documented. Ask what right semantics is... They do not support their own correct semantics...
Fuck you! Just say you fucked up and come to me with a new contract!

Two weeks pass, new contract breaks half the functionality... And they ask me: "is it a problem? Can't you use it as is?"

Now listen here you pile of elephant dung, you have an unresponsive system with an unscalabe architecture... You have twisted contracts and you come to me to fix them!? I have more to do then to babysit your assess!

I am so tired of your bulshit... You are a bunch of prairie dogs hitting keyboards and call yourself developers!? My dog is a better developer, he at least does not break he's own software and when he takes a massive dump he owns it...

I am this close to making a request of changing your work computers to an abacus! It's all you can handle...

Fuck off! You are waste of resources and your parents should be spanked!!