"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"

They're being marked as spam...

"oh damn, how can we fix that?"

You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.

"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"

Have you tried not spamming people?

"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"

No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.

"But we aren't spamming people!"

IT VS Marketing 100% of the time

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

Someone on a C++ learning and help discord wanted to know why the following was causing issues.

char * get_some_data() {
char buffer[1000];
init_buffer(&buffer[0]);
return &buffer[0];
}

I told them they were returning a pointer to a stack allocated memory region. They were confused, didn't know what I was talking about.

I pointed them to two pretty decently written and succinct articles, the first about stack vs. heap, and the second describing the theory of ownership and lifetimes. I instructed to give them a read, and to try to understand them as best as possible, and to ping me with any questions. Then I promised to explain their exact issue.

Silence for maybe five minutes. They disregard the articles, post other code saying "maybe it's because of this...". I quickly pointed them back at their original code (the above) and said this is 100% an issue you're facing. "Have you read the articles?"

"Nope" they said, "I just skimmed through them, can you tell me what's wrong with my code?"

Someone else chimed in and said "you need to just use malloc()." In a C++ room, no less.

I said "@OtherGuy please don't blindly instruct people to allocate memory on the heap if they do not understand what the heap is. They need to understand the concepts and the problems before learning how C++ approaches the solution."

I was quickly PM'd by one of the server's mods and told that I was being unhelpful and that I needed to reconsider my tone.

Fuck this industry. I'm getting so sick of it.

Most hated language features?

PL/SQL:
• it exists

XSLT:
• it also exists

PHP:
• it still exists.

VB:
• Significant parentheses: `subName` calls the subroutine, and `subName()` calls the subroutine and gets a return value. If you use the wrong invocation, it yells at you. Why!?
• For reasons unknown, you can only have `sleep` appear once per codebase. (So put it in a function!)

Ruby:
• It’s bloody easy to write code with absolute shit performance, and it kind of feels encouraged because of just how easy Ruby makes everything. Less critical thinking means worse performance, and Ruby’s blissful elegance encourages mental laziness.
• Minor: You cannot pass a hash as the first method parameter without enclosing it in parentheses, ex:`method({key: value})`. This is due to the ambiguous case between passing a hash argument and a (curly) block/proc (`method {|args| code}`). This could be remedied pretty easily with a little bit of look ahead.
• Minor: There is no `elsif` for `unless` (a negated if). Why? No reason given.

Python:
• no block endings, so nested code can be extremely difficult to follow.

Bash:
• The freaking syntax oh god why.

All languages:
• rand vs rand() vs Rand vs Rand() vs rnd vs RND vs random() vs random vs randInt() vs Math.random() vs Math.randInt() vs ...

Today a colleague was making weird noises because he was modifying some data files where half of the data needed to be updated with a name field, there were 4 files all about 1200 lines big.

I asked how he was doing and he said he was ready to kill himself, after he explained why I asked why he was doing if manually. He said he normally uses regex for it but he couldnt do this with a regex.

I opened VS code for him, used the multiselect thing (CTRL+D) and changed one of the files in about 2 minutes. Something he was working on for over half an hour already.... He thanked me about a million times for explaining it to him.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you have a tedious task which takes hours, please ask if somebody knows a way of doing it quicker. Doing something in 2 minutes is quite a bit cheaper and better for your mental state than doing the same thing manually In 3 hours (our estimate)

STOP SHITTING ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES.
Now, I'm not talking to the people that don't take it too serious, but rather to people that think their language is superior and others inferior. Why shit on PHP? A lot of stuff is build with this, including devRant. For me, I'd love to learn any languages that has a proper use for me. (With this sentence I'm excluding all exoteric languages, because they are useless) If anyone says, Python is awesome as fuck, yeah, I FUCKING AGREE. Anyone telling me anything is crap, I disagree. If it's that terrible, how do you know about it? If it was never used ever in a project, how can you know its terrible? You can't. Unless you coded that thing yourself.

Next time don't waste your time on shit like that. I AM ALSO LOOKING AT THE HOLY WAR APPLE VS MICROSOFT VS LINUX

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME WITH SHIT LIKE THIS.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Why are we still having degree vs autodidact arguments/debates?

It's fucking 2018, who gives a flying fuck how you learn?

Stop giving a shit about how people learn and give a shit about their abilities and skills.

I'm tired of people from both sides (people with degrees and autodidacts) acting like they're better than the other. Stop being arrogant cunts.

Some people have the self control and motivation to teach themselves.

Congratulations! That's fucking awesome.

Others don't and could use a structured environment like University to motivate and encourage them.

Hey it happens. At least you're trying.

My god. Just stop with this shit already. It's annoying and unnecessary.

If you made it this far, how's your week been going?

So... Some fake accounts on Twitter claimed to be Elon Musk and to give shitloads of Bitcoin to those who sent a little amount first. They stole... Wait for it... 180 grand.

That's basically your everyday 419 scam. Existing since before the internet, done with the names of Gates, Buffet, Bush, Obama...

They say "the big bad evil criminals and the poor little innocent victims" I say natural selection. Sorry, in those lion vs gazelle scenarios I always thought that it was fair, no matter how it went.

Just when did humanity get so brainless? Have we always been, is the internet just a catalyst for stupidity?

Just why the fuck must I be an infosec sheepdog instead of a wolf? Man, I could live the life, drink beer and smoke herb while working... Get up at 12, don't give a shit, no boss, no taxes, no social security payments that I don't see jack shit from, and the pay would be better to.

Damn.

It was not me doing the screaming but one of my colleagues. He is a super programmer and joined our team early this year as my partner on frontend development.

We're a React/React Native dev house and he has always been uncomfortable with how loose it goes here because of dynamic typing. He has been advocating typescript and Angular since he started and I even allowed him to use typescript on one of the projects.

A month back I started to make jokes about how dead angular was (trigger alert) and he almost lost it. We are good friends so he as been taking it in good spirits.

Last week our boss allowed him a chance to propose a Tech stack for a new project. Naturally he started comparing Angular vs React. I chime in to trigger him again with "why would we work with a bloated zombie framework", he picked up his chair and almost threw it at me while screaming " React is just hacky ". I was laughing so hard and in the end we both did some research. We are proposing Jquery to our boss... (Evil laugh)

SICK AND TIRED OF READABILITY VS. EFFICIENCY!!!!!!!

I HAD TO SEPARATE A 4 LOC JSON STRING, WHICH HAD AN ARRAY OF A SINGLE KEY-VALUE PAIRS (TOTAL OF 10 OBJECTS IN THE ARRAY).

ITS READABLE IF YOU KNOW JSON. HOW HARD IS TO READ JSON FORMAT IF YOU GET YOUR STYLE AND INDENTATION PROPERLY?!?

SO I HAD TO
BREAK THE POOR FREAKING JSON APART TO A FUCKING DIFFERENT YAML FILE FORMAT ONLY SO I CAN CALL IT FROM THERE TO THE MAIN CONTROLLER, ITERATE AND MANIPULATE ALL THE ID AND VALUES FROM YAML BACK TO MATCH THE EXPECTED JSON RESPONSE IN THE FRONT END.

THE WHOLE PROCESS TOOK ME ABOUT 15 MINUTES BUT STILL, THE FUCKING PRINCIPLE DRIVES ME INSANE.

WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I WASTE TIME AT AN ALREADY WORKING PIECE OF CODE, TO MAKE IT LESS EFFICIENT AND A SLIGHTLY BIT MORE READABLE?!? FML.

Although I see how powerful Vim (with all its variants) is, I still don't get why people are so into it.

I mean, it's 2017, we have IDEs and some of them are very good, such as VS for C#, Eclipse for C++ and so on!

* grabs popcorn *...

Lets create a library.

Lets use that library in a project.

Lets wrap the library call in a wrapper functione to remove duplicate code.

Lets add an overloaded wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that calls the library to partially undo the duplicate code removal.

Lets add another overloaded wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that wraps the wrapper call that calls the library to partially undo the duplicate code removal.

How I love it. Not.

Sometimes redundancy makes sense, especially when it are two lines which make it obvious whats going on vs a single line that leads to a fuckton of overloaded wrapper functions.

Sheeesh.

Today in "code monkeys deserve divine punishment".

Another funny thing is creating a Helper class for Junit 5 tests, making it instantiable and adding to it all kinds of shit like testcontainer creation, applications instantiation, mocks, ....

... Then " crying " why the tests are so slow.

Yeah. Logic. Isolation of concerns, each test should be a stand alone complex.

But that would lead to redundancy... Oh no.

Better to create a global state god object.

Some devs... Really amaze me, especially when they argument in ways that makes one really wonder whether they are serious or just brain dead.

!rant
As a self taught, I used to break what i want to learn into pieces and watch tutorials where people use these pieces. Then I could easily do what I learned, but I could do it exactly how I learned it from the tutorials.
Until one glorious day I found a tutorial about js that doesnt teach you the "how" of things but the "why" of things.
I cant describe how easy and in depth I understand js tutorials now. It is easier even when I have to learn a new framework.
It feels like I fast-forwarded my knowledge growth overnight.
I now see my 3 weeks old code and it disgusts me.

When every ubuntu based distro fails, from kubuntu to xubuntu, lubunto, mint etc.

You will always have Linux Lite. How the fuck this thing manages to keep 2 vs code editors opened as well as firefox and chrome at the sime time while at 3.55g mem(according to htop) without fucking up?

Good engineering, das how. Kudos to my ninjas at the Linux Lite team. This is why I recommend this distro to anyone wanting to go Linux. Good for the beginner and the working professional alike(I use it for work)

As we're all going about our various Easter, Passover, et al., family celebrations, I have the perfect solution to help train your families to stop asking you for help with mundane computer stuff:
Every time someone asks you to do/fix something, give them a full talk about what is going on in their computer around that system.
Don't forget you can talk about lots of things too:
- concurrency
- TCP IP / socket networking
- multi-threaded programs vs. single threads
- RISC vs. CISC processors
- Why linux is better than Windows or Mac
- algorithms
- logarithmic runtime
- teach them how to convert between hex, binary, and base ten
Really pour it on too. Soon they'll either figure out that you are a highly-skilled individual who is not their personal geek squad, or they'll be too afraid of a big lecture to ask for help.
Works with my in-laws like a charm.

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

*Gives the list of top three candidates (All women) to hire to HR Manager (A Lady)*
HRM: Ha, I always knew it, women are always better than men. Alas, you are realising now.

*At that moment, it felt as if all my hard work to judge all the candidates abilities without any prejudice whatsoever, just got collected by the garbage collector*

Why does it have to be Men Vs Women, why does there have to be any comparison at all, except the question that how does this individual compare to the rest.
I really don't care whether one is old, young, male or female or whatever other factor that can be used to separate humans into groups. Why can't it simply be: Does this individual produce the end result required? Period.

Don't hire monkeys that write shitty code that cause production issues.

Just spent the entire morning with our global team (10+ ppl) looking into the cause of a production issue.

Root cause: shitty code that anyone that has read an algorithm book (array resizing costs) and understanding how DB functions should be used and why (bulk inserts vs one at a time) would never write.

Even the code itself is a mess...

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Elasticsearch, from the bottom of my heart...

How can one ecosystem be so batshit crazy inconsistent?

Seemingly every agent does the same (e.g. filebeat vs journalbeat vs packetbeat)… yet there are subtle changes in configuration everywhere.

Plus YML. The most shitty markup language one can use and the cockslubbing durps used it fucking everywhere.

Makes fun to have complex stuff and requiring a python Jinja to JSON to YML converter to be able to write the complex stuff without having the fucking migraine to count like a stupid 4 year old whitespace with both hands...

To make it even more absurd: the ingest pipelines which contain a lot of regular expressions / grok and are thus very prone to quoting issues... Yes. Let's do this in YML too.

If you need to add an fucking manual section how to debug YML errors you should have realized what a fucking stupid idea it was, morons.

Now I have the joy of having a python script regex quoting the shit for a Jinja template which then generates JSON which then generates YML.

Why the JSON part?

Yeah... Because ECS and changes in the upstream YML files / GitHub.

To be able to run diffs in a sane way because in YML distinguishing thing is pretty much impossible, so JSON as an intermediary format solely for the purpose of converting upstream YML to JSON to diff it against modified JSON ingest pipelines downstream.

I fucking hate elasticsearch

!rant

I spent a few hours making a VS Code plugin to improve my work flow, published it on the marketplace a few days ago so that I can easily install it everywhere. But to my surprise that shit gets about 7 installs a day! I don't get why. I don't have clear instructions on how to use it anywhere.

But hey, I'm not complaining! 😁

I'm very angry at C# 😡 (and java in some degree). Recently I decided to create huge project in C#. (It is my favorite launguage now because of great VS2017 its features, lib and such). I used windows form app in order to make pretty gui for this program. Everything worked fine, but i decided to implement some 3d rendering system in order to display grafs in 3d, oh how foolish was I.

Ok so what are my options?
1.DirectX9 -> abandoned by microsoft, they say its ded so nope.
2. DX11 -> great! i even can use sharpdx or simpledx to use it! oh wait, what is that? INVALID DX CALL
(in demo code)Damit!
3.OpenGL -> obsolete, lib non existent.
4. Library that comes with .NET -> WFP only sorry!
(i found some dogdy tutorials on yt for dx11 but they need .net 2.0 really?) 😐

In that moment i decided to swich to java. (because Java c#_launguage = new Java("microsoft");)
After 1 day of instaling eclipse and 2 more to install the newest jdk MANUALY i realized that java isn't that easy to use as C#, because:
- no dynamic type-> HUGE PAIN i cant use a single list to store everything buuuu!
-console? yes but its burried inside some random lib and its not consistent with every java version!
-gui editor similar to VS one? oh you need to create it from scrach!😫

Well at lest i can render things. So maybe java will render suff as another tool in my app? Nope pipes NON existent, we need to use sockiets! (unity pipe plugin was easier! worked but it was SLOW)

Ok so after few more days of struggling i managed to render simple graf using directx9 in my original C# project that works fine.. 😥 I only need to create a lib to wrap in and we are done!

Why can't companies create a laungage that will have ALL the features i need? Or at lest give me something like pipes that work in every laungage that will be helpful!

I know it is sometimes stressful to be a dev. But when your program works 😀 that is great feeling! Especialy when you learned to code yourself like me 😁. (student before a university, that lives in small abadoned town)

Translating win32 calls to whatever the hell there is in Unix and Unix-like OSes (well, most of them) in order to port a certain game net code library and dear god why did I volunteer myself for this task

At least pevents is there to help, but too bad cmake doesn’t want to compile it with the flag I need (“-DWFMO”) in order to make the “WaitForMultipleEvents” method to work at all. Instead no matter what options I give it on the command line or how I tell VS Code to do it, it seems to give me the finger to my fucking face.

Doing it for games on the cooler OSes... doing it for the community... come on...

DataDevNerd (ofc down to hardware bits)
Briefly blending amoung holiday tech consumers at Micro Center waiting for key-holder assistance @SSDs.

Rando: "they finally have a sale on *X, rebranded, price++* for my *ref'd only by part names* setup! What are you getting?"

Me: "replacement SSD, laptop's finally failing"

Rando: "Yeah, I totally get you, I hate that. How old is it? Hopefully you got a couple years outta it?"

Me: "over 7yrs old."
Rando: "Wow! Mustve not used it too much, still that's pretty long."

Me: "Actually, it's been my primary device, heavily used, as I'm a dev. I just know what/when to use SSD vs the HDD."

Rando: "Duuude, that's awesome!...wait...why haven't you just bought a new laptop yet?"

Me: "I'm not for hardware abuse or burning money"

I was quickly reminded why I tend to avoid typical consumer tech stores.

Been engaged in a silly-client-request VS stubborn-developer war since last week. They wanted a textbox where they enter decimals - generally in the form 1.234 - to automatically put the decimal point after the first number.
"What if it's 10.xxx or 100.xxx?"
"That won't happen"
"How much time will it really save them having to press another key?"
"Why, how long will it take you to do the fix?"
Etc, ridiculousness and rage increasing exponentially...
Common sense finally prevailed today. Just think of all those wasted milliseconds having to press the "." key.

This just happened. I have to tell someone how stupid I felt a few minutes ago.
I am working on a script that is supposed to rename some files in sub folders of the current folder.
I used ChatGPT to help me out with the last part of finding all sub folders. Copied the code into VS code. Changed the path from “/path/to/folder/“ to just “/“, ran the code. It took a bit too long time to finish. Then VS Code asked for permissions to my reminders… “Why?” I asked before I realized that I confused “.” With “/“ for current folder…

Didn't think I had material for a rant but... Oh boy (at least at the level I'm at, I'm sure worse is to come)

I'm a Java programmer, lets get that out of the way. I like Java, it feels warm and fuzzy, and I'm still a n00b so I'm allowed to not code everything in assembly or whatever.

So I saw this video about compilers and how they optimize and move and do stuff with the machine code while generating the executable files. And the guy was using this cool terminal that had color, autocomplete past commands and just looked cool. So I was like "I'll make that for my next project!"

In Java.

So I Google around and find a code snipped that gives me "raw" input (vs "cooked" input) and returns codes and I'm like 😎. Pressing "a" returns 97 (I think that's the ASCII value) and I think this is all golden now.

No point in ranting if everything goes as planned so here is the *but*

Tabs, backspaces and other codes like that returned appropriate ASCII codes in Unix. But in windows, no such thing. And since I though I'd go multiplatform (WORA amarite) now I had to do extra work so that it worked cross platform.

Then I saw arrow keys have no ASCII codes... So I pressed a arrow key and THREE SEPARATE VALUES WERE REGISTERED. Let me reiterate. Unix was pretending I had pressed three keys instead of one, for arrow keys. So on Unix, I had to work some magic to get accurate readings on what the user was actually doing (not too bad but still...). Windows actually behaved better, just spit out some high values and all was good. So two more systems I had to set up for dealing with arrow keys.

Now I got to ANSI codes (to display color, move around the terminal window and do other stuff). Unix supports them and Windows did but doesn't but does with some Win 10 patch...? But when tested it doesn't (at least from what I've seen). So now, all that work I put into making one Unix key and arrow key reader, and same for Windows, flies out the window. Windows needs a UI (I will force Win users, screw compatibility).

So after all the fiddling and messing, trying to make the bloody thing work on all systems, I now have to toss half the input system and rework it to support UI. And make a UI, which I absolutely despise (why I want to do back end work and thought this would be good, since terminal is not too front end).

Why is it that the tech Youtubers of this world (and tech reviewers in general) tend to completely skip development as a use case, and instead (if they do ever move off gaming) focus on things like Rendering & Modelling / CAD work? I'm sure there's *way* more devs in the world than CAD guys, surely?!

And if they *do* give it the light of day, it's always a quick benchmark based on "Firefox compile time", "Linux kernel compile time" or similar. Dude, it's 2020. Much as some would like to believe otherwise, most guys stopped compiling swathes of heavy C & C++ as part of their normal workflow over a decade ago.

Real-world tests I want to know about are things like docker performance, common IDE startup performance, compile performance of different sized applications on a bunch of langs like Kotlin, C#, Java, Clojure - or node.js performance, Tensorflow performance on NVidia's vs AMDs latest GPUs, etc. I care about how many IntelliJ instances & VMs I can have open way more than how many Chrome tabs I can forget to close.

But noooo - forget that, here's how fast Blender can render a BMW! 😬

iOS vs android? And why?

I start: iOS cause I'm an iOS dev and I hate how the OS of android works (not saying that iOS is perfect)

Is it just me, or does it seem like worse languages get more usage than better ones? Like, how many people know Haskell vs. Python? A lot of people dislike JavaScript, but why is it so damn popular then? And why didn't presumably superior Dart replaced it on the web, even with Google's support and lobbying?

I think the reason is that every language has vocal critics, and when a lot of people use a language, there will be a lot of such critics. When a certain critical mass (no pun intended) is accumulated, it begins to look like everything you can read online is bad things. Of course, the language being worse than some other hip language doesn't help.

What do you think?

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.

we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)

after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)

we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..

[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]

..because we were not using VS code to find things in files

HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE

ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?

I'm going to confess: I am the type of developer that creates the ExcruciatinglyLongAndSpecificClassNameObject with the UtterlyDetailedExplanationMethod. It's just a thing I keep doing, despite voiced frustrations from people I've worked with. It just feels right in the mindset of self-documenting code

And while I acknowledge this isn't a flawless process, I see no other way around without losing information. I've tried alternatives, but everything feels like trading one issue for another:

- Abbreviations work as long as they are well known (XML, HTML, ...). As soon as you add your own (even if they make sense in the business context) you can bet your ass someone is going to have no idea what you're talking about. Even remembering your own shit is difficult after X months.

- Removing redundant naming seems fine until it isn't redundant anymore (like when a feature with similar traits gets added). and you can bet your ass no-one is going to refactor the existing part to specify how it differs from the newly added stuff.

- Moving details to namespaces is IMO just moving the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. Also have had folks that just auto-include namespaces in VS without looking if they need the class from namespaceA or namespaceB and then proceed to complain why it doesn't compile.

So, since I am out of ideas, I'd like to ask you folks: Is it possible to reduce class/method name lengths without losing information? Or is self-documenting code just an ideal I'm trying too hard to achieve? Or are long names not a problem at all? I'm looking forward to your answers.

Man it is retarded how VS re-aligns your precompile statements to the BEGINNING OF THE FUCKING LINE EVERY TIME YOU ADD A NEW ONE.

Why does it do that in the first place, it looks ugly when it’s not in-line with the code, fucking stop it.

I hate this feeling.

Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.

Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).

To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.

My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.

Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...

Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....

And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.

Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.

Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....

Those days.

I hate those days.

And I hate the timing of some people...

Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.

*gooozfraba*

And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.

Sucks to be in management.

You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.

To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.

Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.

*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*

Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.

*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*

Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....

"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...

You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.

For over 5 mins.

For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.

*Second round of whiskey*

Back to work after a wasted half hour.

What says monitoring?

Ah. Everything's working.

At least luck hasn't failed me.

Good server. Brave server.

Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.

The servers know your personality.

They're afraid. Terrified.

Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...

Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.

"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum*

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

Currently working on a GUI config generator using MFC in VS.

Firstly, fuck sake Microsoft. Why can't I just use a normal string? The amount of times I've had to do god awful conversions to/from CString using their numerous typedefs L, _T and don't even get me started on LPCTSTR, LPCWSTR... It's just ugly and tedious. I've gotten used to it and all but still, ugh.

Secondly, some of the functions are just stupid. Want to disable a control? Hmm, we'll there's a function called EnableWindow, but no DisableWindow. How did I do it before? Oh, so to disable the control it's EnableWindow(FALSE). Of course it is, duh. Why am I so stupid?

Let's use the GetWindowText function. Simples. CString something_txt = GetWindowText().
Nope, it takes the CString as a parameter and copies it into that rather than just returning the text. Now one line becomes two. I get that this is a really small semantic thing but it irks me.

I just want to go back to my fedora partition. Wah.

PS: I'm sure there's good reasons for what I'm ranting about, but I really don't care. I just need to rant about my frustrations. 😂

To use Unity with VS you have to get Unity Build Tools as a plugin.

Alright, I'll download that.

Oh but now there's an error with connecting to unity, I need to get a newer VS and switch to the 2018 version of the engine.

Ok fine that's annoying but I guess I might as well upgrade.

Oh now there's no Intellisense? I guess I need to reload my project.

Oh what's this? Some major build error due to a missing component from Vs 2015?

This is getting stupid, fine let me install it.

Oh but to install the component you need to rerun the installer for VS, fine I'll redownload that.

Oh but apparently the installer _I JUST DOWNLOADED A FEW SECONDS AGO_ is outdated and needs to be upgraded. I can't _not_ update the installer and still install the components because that would be stupid, why would we let the developer decide what versions to use obviously they don't know what they're doing I mean it's not like they know how to use computers?

To get simple code completion, let's force developers to download an installer that then needs to be updated to install a component for this giant IDE that also requires the 2015 version of the IDE to be installed alongside a special plugin and patch designed for a specific game engine.

All this. For fucking code completion. I can't even get Intellisense to work in VSCode without fixing the issue since the C# extension in VSCode just binds to Visual Studio tools and runs the same shit with a different GUI.

I don't get why the company where I work is pushing a new cloud platform to create website with.

So yesterday I dove in a website(that an intern made) to make a search and filter on some items.

I thought sure, just finished a website with a lot of search thingies and filters.

But this intern wrote 500 lines of code to just get items from an API endpoint. Dude really why??? Ok, your cool an all and you definitely have skills, but this is just ridiculous.

Burned an day on the piece of shit, while this is in an stupid cloud platform. Without even es6 to write JavaScript. I could have write the whole thing in react In just one day!!

Just work locally on your machine and put you code in a git repo. And deploy when finished. That how I like to work, but no this company wants to keep pushing this cloud platform.

For fucks sake, just let me code! And don't let me use vs or that stupid cloud platform.

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:

Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.

Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....

Drinking the first beer.

Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...

First beer poof.

Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...

Opening next beer...

Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...

Oh. Another half bottle gone...

Filling in the columns...

Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...

*burping*
*cracking finger joints*

Now let's get to the sad part...

Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...

Cost and description as columns.

Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.

Another beer...

Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.

Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...

SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.

Now we can add another sheet.

Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.

Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...

Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.

Why do I want to get even more drunk.

Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.

Let's add some colored highlighting ...

Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.

Too much red.

More beer.

Don't give a fuck.

Hm.

Time for some whiskey.

What else is there to do....

Oh yeah.

Diagrams.

The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.

Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*

Hm. More whiskey...

Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.

Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....

"Copy paste the last mail from last month"

Hm.

Ah.

*sipping whiskey*

Spell check extension - to the rescue.

Thesaurus *burps*.

Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.

Uh....

Trying to attach file...

*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*

Done.

Damn.

Need to press send button.

*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*

Done.

*Pressing computers power button*

Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.

*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*

Couch ... Where Couch...

After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.

(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey)

Dear Python linters, why can't any of you implement some actual linting features? Like, say, consistent use of single or double quotes? Or dict() vs {}? How about indenting nested function calls? Forcing list / set / dict literals as multiline? Trailing commas?

And while I'm at it, why can't you handle dependencies properly? Say, separating linter & linter plugins from the remaining dependencies in a way where I don't have to manually remove them from the requirements lockfile every time?

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

I’m feeling a bit stuck at work recently. I have a new department head and he keeps periodically asking me to do things that are very much not the normal responsibility of my role. These are always very simple things, things I am certainly capable of doing, but should fall outside of my purview. We even have documented methodologies indicating this sort of thing is not the sort of thing I’m expected to be responsible for. The trouble is, I’m not sure if when he’s asking me to do this it’s because he’s still new and not completely up to speed on who does what, or if this is a situation where he is The Boss and if he’s telling me to do it then now it is my responsibility, if not permanently, at least on these specific occasions. I’m also disinclined to just run with it without saying anything because then it really will become my responsibility, and there are good reasons why it currently is not.

I am having difficulty thinking of a way to bring this up that doesn’t sound like I’m refusing to do it. On the one hand, it’s not my job, but I also know that going around saying “that’s not my job” is not appropriate. The situation is not quite that I don’t have the authority to do the task, but that’s closer to the type of reasoning for why my role isn’t responsible for the thing, and it’s always restricted to people in a different role. Part of the internal rationale was a sort of “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation in the past, but there are also other logical reasons why staff in my role are not intended to be involved.

I’m also hesitant to push back at all since I can’t tell if the boss is coming from a place of not knowing or one of reassigning. I don’t want to seem difficult (but also reallllly don’t want this added to my plate). I don’t know the new department head well enough to guess whether it’s more likely a misunderstanding vs a change in policy. I’m struggling with finding the words for how to bring it up without sounding like I am saying “that’s not my job”. Is this the sort of thing that is better handled in the moment, or waiting for a time separate from when he’s making the request to talk about it more generally? Help!

Spaces vs tabs has kind of become a non-argument for web tech and the former has won (at least in every place I've worked or observed in open source projects).

Although I don't really care (just stick to one for the same codebase) I don't get why spaces won. Given the argument is mostly about how we like to read code individually, and tab width can be configured per editor while space cannot, why did spaces win?

The documentation of scala akka http may be just gibberish as far as I am concerned. You would think that hooking into the marshalling process (aka de/serialization) would be straight forward, I've dealt with similar problems before and solved it.

I have an object, it should be transformed into a Json and vice versa. Should be easy as pie.

Not with scala and akka-http. The docs tell you how to achieve something in dozen different ways yet lack a complete example. My first custom marshaller I created in a "marshall" package in my! namespace, but it was breaking scala compilation due to some black magic.

It's not clear how when and why marshallers are added, they just somehow are. Why do I have to deal with entity marshallers vs response marshallers. I just want each instance of a certain type to be transformed into a specific Json presentation.

Asking on stackoverflow also only yields in incomplete hints of "just do boargh" presupposing certain knowledge while sounding borderline condescending.

Currently, I just want to burn the project and rebuild it with fucking PHP. Flame all you want, at least I would get things done and the JMS serializer library has decent documentation and it works in an expected way.

Akka-http, combined with Scala, looks from my current rage-driven perspective like a solution worse than the problem.

Everything is shit and I have to work drive thru till 11.15pm.

Everything appears to require js at one point or another (though kotlin requires groovy which, in the intellij IDE, the template it COMES with is fucking broken from the start)

c# could work (and microsoft shop jobs are plentiful) but fucking VS code is a headache and microsoft seems intent on locking everyone into VS and making everything they touch turn to shit, like the king midas of diarrhea (thanks MS, monodevelop is source only on windows). Also c# for android (xamarin) requires apache cordova to do anything, which means...TADA, FUCKING JAVASCRIPT and all the other shit it brings with it.

Java seems like an option, lots of jobs available, but I need netbeans for desktop (javafx) and Android Studio
separately in order to do anything. And Android Studio now uses, of all things...FUCKING GROOVY.

*cocks gunfinger and points in mouth*
why must every fucking thing be it's own DSL and make everything about the fucking ceremony of configuration over
fucking convention?

Haven't any of these fucking cocksuckers heard of MAKE? Or do they just masturbate over how intelligent and smart they are for having reinvented the god damn WHEEL?

I'll see you at the drive through. Will that be all for today?

So, I just (few hours ago)made a new variable that's either brilliant or innately flawed... not sure yet. It's an oddly unique var...

__bs__

So far I only made it in python and windows env (i script like the methodology of css).

I bet you're wondering how I've defined __bs__ and the practicality of it.
__bs__ is derived from a calculated level of bullshit that annoys me to tolerate, maintain, etc. as well as things that tend to throw nonsensical errors, py crap like changing my strings to ints at seemingly random times/events/cosmic alignments/etc or other things that have a history of pulling some bs, for known or unknown reasons.

How/why did this come about now?

Well I was updating some symlinks and scripts(ps1 and bat) cuz my hdd is so close to death I'm wondering if hdd ghosts exist as it's somehow still working (even ostream could tell it should be dead, by the sound alone).

A nonsense bug with powershell allowing itself to start/run custom ps1scripts with the originating command coming from a specific batch script, which worked fine before and nothing directly connected to it has changed.

I got annoyed so took an ironic break from it to work on python crap. Python has an innately high level of bs so i did need to add some extra calculations when defining if a py script or function is actually __bs__ or just py.

The current flavour of py bs was the datetime* module... making all of my scripts using datetime have matching import statements to avoid more bs.

I've kept a log of general bs per project/use case. It's more like a warning list... like when ive spent hours debugging something by it's traceback, meticulous... to eventually find out it had absolutely nothing to do with the exception listed. Also logged aliases i created, things that break or go boom if used in certain ways, packages that ive edited, etc.

The issue with my previous logging is that it's a log... id need to read it before doing anything, no matter how quick/simple it should be, or im bound to get annoyed with... bs.

So far i have it set to alert if __bs__ is above a certain int when i open something to edit. I can also check __bs__ fot what's causing the bs. I plan to turn it into a warning and recording system for how much bs i deal with and have historical data of personal performance vs bs tolerance. There's a few other applications i think ill want to use it for, assume it's not bs itself.

*in case you prefer sanity and haven't dealt with py and datetime enough, here's the jist:
If you were to search any major forum like StackOverflow for datetime use in py, youd find things like datetime.datetime.now() and datetime.now() both used, to get the same returned value. You'll also find tons of posts for help and trying to report 'bugs', way more than average. This is because the datetime package has a name conflict... with itself. It may have been a bug several years ago, but it beeb explicitly defined as intentional since.

Why the fuck does Visual Fucking Studio SSIS delete scripts in script codes? A completely bullshit bug in VS 2017, completely in fucking excusable to find my fucking scripts GONE when I try to run the package. Download it from TeamCity? Still gone.

How does a business like MICROSOFT let this sort of bug even happen?

Nix vs. Win
Dual boot vs. virtualization (VirtBox vs Xen)

(TLDR at the end)
- gaming laptop ("when you student but gamer")
- "Nix nono like gaming laptops"
- currently dual boot Win10/Debian
- Debian almost breaking apart
- only xfce because nVidia
- intel-virtual-output^2
- Atheros drivers sometimes freeze whole sys
- MiXeD SoUrCeS
- **Stretch Buster Kali enters the chat**

As you can see after 2 years I have come to the point of redoing everything, wanted to ask any tips on how to setup win and any nix enviroment, win just to play some games and sometimes to reverse win specific CTFs.

Main plan was to have my lovely debian as the only system and run win10 in virtualbox - problem: windows don't like virtuals(?) and it's probably going to be unusable for games.
Also running Kali as separate virtual (why the hell I didn't do that in first place ?)

Xen is the other interesting way but I am not experienced with hypervisors.

TLDR: Would running Win10 as virtual in or alongside(hypervisor) Debian be better/same as having them separated - dual booting?

I've been getting a lot of mixed input on this lately and I'm curious to gauge the public opinion on it.

For key identifiers in key/value pairs (eg. days of the week, high/med/low, etc), is it preferable with semantic string naming wherever possible, or are int enums usually preferred for being more clean and robust?

I suppose it's a case of "it depends". I tend to use stringed keys myself since they are more readable but I do think it's a hassle with asserting case insensitivity and how the keys can be accessed as properties - "sometimes, probably".

People often comment on it when they see it, and it turns into this weird mutual "why strings?" vs. "why ints?".

2 questions:

1. Why would i use keycloak if i can code the same shit by my custom jwt implementation?

2. Is jwt still secure today or should i use oauth2? If jwt is still fine to implement then I'll continue doing it because i know exactly how to implement it. But How can i determine when to use oauth2 vs jwt?

To hell with this auto path rewrite VS Code, when I rename a file you find all files and rewrite the imports, but now you did it wrong

and I have a huge mess to pick, I have no idea how you did this but you wrote long paths which don't make sense

why did you put node_modules in-front of all my imports when I moved a folder which has nothing to do with node modules

What a day. I was cleaning up some of my styling tweaks for this react app; removing superfluous rules, nailing some hard to pin alignments that have been off up until now, and removing unused files and code in general.

I managed to delete an entire folder. I'm not sure how I did it, but apparently I had highlighted the folder when wanting to just delete one file via vs code. This was hours of uncommitted (yeah, my bad) tweaks and cleanup.

But - I still have the app loaded in my browser. I can't see the prebuilt source code, but I can see the compiled, raw main.chunk.js which gives me the exact code albeit not in the format I need.

So that's my day. Re-tweaking, re-adjusting everything while working my way down a compiled javascript file from top to bottom while explaining to my team why I haven't pushed my changes that I was just going to clean up.

Now I'm having a beer.

Working on a portfolio project - I ran some tests, everything is all good - 100% passing. Computer freezes - pop_os has been giving me shit lately, so I have to restart. Fine.

I get back into code, i re-run pytest - nothing works. Python apparently can't find my modules anymore. I try a few things, nothing. Why? Who the fuck knows - "oh you need this conftest file", "oh you need to remove __init__ from this directory or that one", "oh it's a pytest version iss---" no, no, no - listen here you little shit, it was working two seconds ago. Tell me why and how software I wrote with the most basic ass package structure - literally TWO directories suddenly has no fucking clue how to import the modules. hmm? Even from within the app directory, app.server now no longer recognizes imports from app.main or app.database.

ALL of this worked. It works in new directories without dedicated venvs - it works in new directories with my global python install - it works with any one of my conda envs - it works on other computers - WHY doesn't it work in THIS directory all of a sudden?? Ugh.

What's terrible is that relative imports will probably solve it within the app dir, but the tests dir won't accept them. Moreover, vs code autocompletion can find all the modules, but python itself cannot. Fucking infuriating shit like this is.