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Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!
It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"
Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.
My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.
I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.
Then I started to experiment more and more.
After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!
From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.
Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!
I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.
Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?
First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.
Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.
Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!
I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.
Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!
Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.
Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.
Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!
It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).20 -
Tried browsing reddit on my new feature phone today, was not disappointed.
It has a surprisingly feature rich browser
http://html5test.com/s/...
10 -
What's the point of using a framework if you don't use any of its features!? What the heck, I have to fix this damn web frontend that is so broken in many ways.
Instead of using an authentication middleware, every single view has the same block of code to check if a user is authenticated. Instead of templates, they used static HTML/JavaScript files and they passed data to pages through cookies.
The "REST" API is so messed up, nothing is resource-oriented, HTTP methods are chosen randomly as well as status codes. They are returning "412 Precondition Failed" instead of a plain simple "401 Unauthorized" when you're not authenticated! What the hell, did they even bother to check what 412 is about when they copied and pasted it from a crappy website!? I would never come up with 412, not even in my scariest nightmare.
What kind of drugs were they using when they wrote such code? Oh dear, I need a vacation...2 -
Intern's CV says they have technical skills with MS Office, MySQL and JavaScript. Last month I let my manager know that this intern doesn't really know anything, so we let her do a Freecodecamp course, after which she still cannot build a basic HTML and CSS page and doesn't understand the relationship between HTML and CSS.
My manager bought her a Laravel course for beginners and today I discovered that she also doesn't understand databases, because she tried to enter an alphabetic character into a column that only accepts integers. She doesn't read/understand the error codes thrown by the application.
She tried to access a route which she created in her Laravel app by accessing it via the phpmyadmin dashboard and called me and wasted my time by asking me why her route isn't working. She literally does not understand how computers work, or how the HTTP protocol works, even less so how a file structure works. She cannot translate abstractions to practical solutions.
She either deliberately lied on her CV to get a job, or she's just really dumb and doesn't understand what the term "technical skills" mean.
I've told my manager multiple times how I think she's in the wrong job, but they keep pushing things beyond her capabilities onto her desk. I was told I'd get an intern to help me with my work load, but I got signed up into an experiment I did not consent to (manager's words, it's an experiment to help uplift people with bad degrees and a poor background). I am not a good teacher, I hate doing it.22 -
So this story is from my University days. I was in the 6th semester back then, studying CS.
My University website was pretty shitty. Basically it was one of those old ass website that said "Best viewed in IE8". Anyway, I was snooping about the website, trying to find some news regarding an event.
I logged into my account, and randomly browsed into the leave request portal. This was a basic HTML form where students could apply for leaves from the classes and see the status of the leaves, if they have been granted or not. I noticed that the link to the request portal from the student login welcome page was actually something like http://univ.com/student/index.php/..., here 1234567 was my student ID. Yep, it was hardcore into the page, and sent as a GET request on being clicked. That was their idea of authentication I guess. I change the student ID to someone else's, and it let me login as that person.
Long story short, I wrote a little python script to login as every person from the starting of student IDs, till the end, then submit a leave request with a random dumb reason like "can't come, at the strip club" or "going for sex change operation". What I did not know was that when a request is submitted, a text message is also sent to the student's guardians phone number. I ran the script.
That day, over 1000 parents received text messages from the University saying that their kids have applied for a leave from random date to random date for some retarded reason. It was a blast. Students were talking about how someone had "Hacked" into the system.4 -
You know what really pisses me off about the dev community is the circle jerk that ensues when someone bashes something they have no experience in. Take yesterday's React bash on Reddit and DevRant. Thomas Fuchs compared React and JSX to the intermingling of HTML CSS and JS of 15 years ago. If you knew anything about React or spent 1 hour learning what it's about you would immediately know why that isn't true but no, a giant circle jerk ensued comparing it to PHP! I'm sorry but HOW can you compare a pure JS view library that is renderable by the browser, to a full fledged server side language?? Not to mention the React approach uses a completely different programming paradigm of functional programming.
When I first saw React and Redux I realized what this is all really about, a shift in the paradigms of programming. React + Redux is the first time that functional programming has entered mainstream. We've had functional programming available to us via Haskell and more recently Clojure for a while now but it was never very obvious how powerful functional programming could be outside of the niche that used it for more analytical type tools. Now we have things like hot reloading (https://youtube.com/watch/...) and state playback (https://youtube.com/watch/... skip to ~3min to watch the magic) thanks to immutable state.
Before you decide that React is just another flavor of the month library I encourage you to learn about the advantages that functional programming provides (https://medium.com/@cscalfani/...) and checkout Elm (http://elm-lang.org/) as well. The nice thing about React + Redux is that it gives us a way to start programming functionally, without having to learn ML style syntax like Elm and ClojureScript. Keep in mind, when Object Oriented Programming was becoming popular it was widely controversial as well and look at all it has done for us.4 -
!rant
A rather long(it's 8 hrs long to be precise) story
So I just finished an amazing homework assignment. The goal was to open a new shell on Linux using a C program. We were asked to follow instructions from http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html . However the instructions given were for 32 bit processors and we had to do same for 64 bit machines. In a nutshell we had to write a 64 bit shell code and use buffer-overflow technique to change the return address if the function to our shell code.
I was able to write my own shellcode within 1hr and was able to confirm that it's working by compiling with nasm and all. Also the "show-off-dev" inside me told me to execute "/bin/bash" instead of "/bin/sh"(which everyone else was going to do). After my assembly code was properly executing shellcode, I was excited to put it in my C code.
For that, I needed opcodes of assembly code in a string. Following again the "show-off-dev" inside me, I wrote a shell script which would extract the exact opcodes out of objdump output. After this I put it in my C code, call my friend and tell him that "hell yeah bro, I did it. Pretty sure sir is gonna give me full marks etc etc etc". I compiled the code and BOOM, IT SEGFAULTS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FRIEND. Worst, friend had copied a "/bin/sh" code from shellstorm and already had it working.
Really burned my ego, I sat continuously for 8 hrs in front of my laptop and didn't talk to anyone. I was continuously debugging the code for 8 hrs. Just a few minutes ago, I noticed that the shellcode which I'm actually putting in my C code is actually 2 bytes shorter than actual code length. WHAT THE F. I ran objdump manually and copied the opcodes one by one into the string (like a noob) and VOILA ! IT WORKED !!!
TURNS OUT I DIDN'T CUT THE LAST COLUMN OF OPCODES IN MY SHELL SCRIPT. I FIXED THAT AND IT WORKED !!
THE SINGLE SHITTY NUMBER MADE ME STRUGGLE 8 HRS OF MY LIFE !! SMH
Lessons learnt :
1)Never have such an ego that makes you think you're perfect, cuz you're retarded not perfect
2)Examine your scripts properly before using them
3)Never, I repeat NEVER!! brag about your code before compiling and testing it.
That's it!
If you've read this long story, you might as well press the "++" button.6 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
----------------------------------------------------------------
For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
----------------------------------------------------------------
No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
Well... I had in over 15 years of programming a lot of PHP / HTML projects where I asked myself: What psychopath could have written this?
(PHP haters: Just go trolling somewhere else...)
In my current project I've "inherited" a project which was running around ~ 15 years. Code Base looked solid to me... (Article system for ERP, huge company / branches system, lot of other modules for internal use... All in all: Not small.)
The original goal was to port to PHP 7 and to give it a fresh layout. Seemed doable...
The first days passed by - porting to an asset system, cleaning up the base system (login / logout / session & cookies... you know the drill).
And that was where it all went haywire.
I really have no clue how someone could have been so ignorant to not even think twice before setting cookies or doing other "header related" stuff without at least checking the result codes...
Basically the authentication / permission system was fully fucked up. It relied on redirecting the user via header modification to the login page with an error set in a GET variable...
Uh boy. That ain't funny.
Ported to session flash messages, checked if headers were sent, hard exit otherwise - redirect.
But then I got to the first layers of the whole "OOP class" related shit...
It's basically "whack a mole".
Whoever wrote this, was as dumb and as ignorant to build up a daisy chain of commands for fixing corner cases of corner cases of the regular command... If you don't understand what I mean, take the following example:
Permissions are based on group (accumulation of single permissions) and single permissions - to get all permissions from a user, you need to fetch both and build a unique array.
Well... The "names" for permissions are not unique. I'd never expected to be someone to be so stupid. Yes. You could have two permissions name "article_search" - while relying on uniqueness.
All in all all permissions are fetched once for lifetime of script and stored to a cache...
To fix this corner case… There is another function that fetches the results from the cache and returns simply "one" of the rights (getting permission array).
In case you need to get the ID of the other (yes... two identifiers used in the project for permissions - name and ID (auto increment key))...
Let's write another function on top of the function on top of the function.
My brain is seriously in deep fried mode.
Untangling this mess is basically like getting pumped up with pain killers and trying to solve logic riddles - it just doesn't work....
So... From redesigning and porting from PHP 7 I'm basically rewriting the whole base system to MVC, porting and touching every script, untangling this dumb shit of "functions" / "OOP" [or whatever you call this garbage] and then hoping everything works...
A huge thanks to AURA. http://auraphp.com/
It's incredibily useful in this case, as it has no dependencies and makes it very easy to get a solid ground without writing a whole framework by myself.
Amen.2 -
```
Greetings @dfox @trogus, et al,
Here is some feedback with aspirations for the backlog.
I think it would be a good addition in the devRant UI if we could paste in code snippets and have that code display with proper fonts and syntax formatting, and even ideally with highlighting by language.
Currently, if we paste in any code or text for that matter it is translated into a sans-serif font (14px Helvetica Regular on webapp) which is fine for the poetic prose from our fine and noble devRant colleagues, but not ideal for shared monospace snippets of lesser and grand design.
Here are two websites that provide conversion of code snippets into formatted syntax, and HTML. http://hilite.me/ and http://markup.su/highlighter/
Both of these sites provide an API so highlighters can be used as a service.
Mockup attached.
Thank you @jaaku for your post, and welcome.
Cheers
devRant for the win
```
13 -
I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.
I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.
I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.
I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.
I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.
JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.
Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.
The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.
And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.
Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.
"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...
34 -
So I have to fix this motherfucking insane regex with over 1k chars in it ...
This fucking shit is not maintainable and there are no comments or any other sort of documentation.
And this bullshit was not build via code so that bastard wasted weeks of time to develop that shitty expression by hand on a online regex tester website.
So I have 3 options:
1. Reverse engineer everything and waste my precious time
2. Delete that shit, analyze the input and write the regex via code instead of creating it by hand
3. Look for that "super duper clever" dev and break his legs.
I think option 3 suits me best.
And for you dear reader, if you are regexphile, enjoy this gigantc regex with >16k chars:
http://madore.org/~david/weblog/...7 -
Apart from having a baby which is the hardest in the world，i think the hardest project is to learn to code.
I studied philosophy and anthropology but gamed a lot. Me and a good mate decided to work together and he told me hed teach me coding.
The guy is a genius but he is a reckless rebel genius who tells everybody to fuck off.
So，after 1 year in a half of intense coding where i had to learn linux， networks， and im not shitting you html and css as well and of course javascript.
He has now put me on， for the last 2 month， in charge of our front end backoffice. I have to design forms that do the right http requests，do the unit testing， play with redux-form， react-redux and he has thrown me into the basic java backend so i can begin working with entites and how i serve the data and link it to the database and even create tables.
Every time i fail hemakes me remake everything.
I actually came on devrant to study the dev community (i always gamed a lot but this is a whole different community). The dev community is pretty awesome and unique.
Anyhow， i remember when i saw him as me to complete an exercise and i didnt event know which words were the reserved language ones and those i could use myself. It was like fucking magic.3 -
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
Fuck CSS
Fuck it in the ass
With a baseball bat
Lubbed with hot souce.
Want to change from this : http://rjpf.ddns.net/ to http://rjpf.ddns.net/index5.html
First uses w3 framework
Second is using css grid with no framework.
Did everything right as I saw on tutorials (no copy paste)
Only uses 25% of the screen
Now I understand why everyone tells me to use bostrap... But noooo I must learn css
Ps: not gonna learn frameworks without knowing pure css9 -
So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.
I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)
Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.
Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.
So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..3 -
I hoped I would write about other things than EU internet regulation... But I hoped wrong.
The new online antiterror regulation is flawed, too.
What will the new regulation change?
The EU plans stricter anti terror laws for online platforms. In a nutshell, reported terroristic content has to be removed in <1 hour> after reporting. While automated filters are not required (the EVP party and the EU commission wanted those, but couldn't get a majority in the perliament), but it is unclear how to fulfill the regulation without.
What is the current progress of the regulation?
The EU parliament approved the draft, the trialogue will begin after election. The parliament has to approve the final trialogue result again and might reject it then. The characteristics of the regulation might change, too.
Who (platforms) will be affected?
All platforms, "offering servicd in the EU, independent of their business address" (free translation from German).
Will there be exceptions (e.g. for smaller or non commercial platforms)?
No.
At the very first report, the platform will have 12h time.
What are the consequences of not following?
Regularly breaking the law _constantly_, up to 4%/of the total yearly revenue.
Sources?
- The "fact sheet" of last year (upload filters were still a requirement): https://ec.europa.eu/commission/...
- The law proposal itself (also outdated): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con...
- Proposed changes by the EU parliament (I'm not sure which ones were approved): http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...
- German news article: https://golem.de/news/...2 -
TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.
Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.
I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).
I'm not shy so I'll go first:
MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).
GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).
STACKS / SKILLSETS
I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache
I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract
MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).
SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85
*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.
I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.20 -
[CMS Of Doom™]
Ah, yes, their built-in bullshit newsletter module just sent the n-th user n emails. Wonderful considering n=368.
The culprit? Better don't ask...
OK, anyway: So the mailer is running as a CRONjob, but nah, not as a console script call but by a public HTTP GET URL call, fucking obviously (it's the CMS Of Doom for a reason).
So these fucking imbeciles "implemented" an ob_start() callback where HTML links are - for whatever fucking reason - modified by some regex (obviously everybody knows parsing HTML by Regex is trivial). In this case the link was somehow modified to recall the mailer Cronjob...
This must have upset the pngoing mailing process thus spamming mails. Whyyyy
And I've thought I've seen it all after 6 months in this legacy hell...
This is why you don't run a company consisting of only beginners in PHP (in cluding their "CEO")! -
So... our software is... really old. Part of it was built 20 years ago in Delphi 6 and is still used to this day. It's an automation tool, which supports some scripting... In WSH. Meaning, it only supports JScript (that's right, not javascript, just JScript, the 1998 version), VBScript, and through the use of activex, Python or Perl.
And even our *newer* software, built a couple years ago, just released an update where the HTML rendering engine was updated... to Gecko 38, the version from 3 years ago. And the JavaScript engine is Rhino, the "old" one now replaced by Nashorn a few years back, and barely updated since.
But... there is *some* light on the horizon. The very newest automation tool now has a new plugin, which is based in NodeJS. Having just installed this newer version, I looked in the files to find the nodejs.exe executable... to find that it's on version 8.9.4. Ok it's not precisely the "latest" version, but knowing the history of development for these things I almost expected node 0.10.
It's great news in all this ancient technology I have to deal with. When's the *last* time you made an HTTP request using this code?
var http = new ActiveXObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1");
http.open('GET', 'http://example.com/', false);2 -
Sharing a first look at a prototype Web Components library I am working on for "fun"
TL;DR left side is pivot (grouped) table, right side is declarative code for it (Everything except the custom formatting is done declaratively, but has the option to be imperative as well).
====
TL;DR (Too long, did read):
I'm challenging myself to be creative with the cool new things that browsers offer us. Lani so far has a focus on extreme extensibility, abstraction from dependencies, and optional declarative style.
It's also going to be a micro CSS framework, but that's taking the back-seat.
I wanted to highlight my design here with this table, and the code that is written to produce this result.
First, you can see that the <lani-table> element is reading template, data, and layout information from its child elements. Besides the custom highlighting code (Yellow background in the "Tags" column, and green gradient in the "Score" column), everything can be done without opening even a single script tag.
The <lani-data-source> element is rather special. It's an abstraction of any data source, and you, as a developer can add custom data sources and hook up the handlers to your whim (the element itself uses the "type" attribute to choose a handler. In this case, the handler is "download" which simply sends a fetch request to the server once and downloads the result to memory).
Templates are stored in an html file, not string literals (Which I think really fucks the code) and loaded async, then cached into an object (so that the network tab doesn't get crowded, even if we can count on the HTTP cache). This also has the benefit of allowing me to parse the HTML templates once and then caching the parsed result in memory, so templates are never re-parsed from string no matter how many custom elements are created.
Everything is "compiled" into a single, minified .js file that you include on your page.
I know it's nothing extraordinary, but for something that doesn't need to be compiled, transpiled, packaged, shipped, and kissed goodnight, I think it's a really nice design and I hope to continue work on it and improve it over time
1 -
I started building an application for FIDAL (Italian Federation of Athletics) because why not: I was bored and wanted to learn Flutter.
There is no API, but I didn't even expect it. Parsing the HTML is easy enough.
BUT OH MY GOD THE ENTIRE WEBSITE IS SHIT. Take this page: http://www.fidal.it/graduatorie.php, it uses some useless jQuery plugin and uses a buttload of JavaScript that isn't even needed. BUT WAIT. Try entering an invalid "club code" (http://fidal.it/graduatorie.php/...), a FUCKING white page with 200, are you kidding?
I'd also like to mention that all pages that require form input won't load correctly if you don't include "submit=Invia" in the URL.
I am not giving up.3 -
Hey Guys
Today I'm bringing a tool for you guys, mount servers with old phones Or have servers in your phone for testing.
Tool: Servers Ultimate Pro
Web:: https://icecoldapps.com/app/...
Note1.: Doesn't handle well above android 6+, So test one of the free servers you're intending to use before buying.
Note2.: This App costs around 10€/$ but you can get single App servers for free (I think even html + php + mysql package for free).
Not promotional, I'm just a user that loves this App.
I already talked about this a few times (usually I just call the cell phone I'm using my web server), but as a noob I don't even knot the possibilities.
This App comes with more then 70 protocols (60+ servers and a mix of servers).
From ssh, ftp, html (nginx, lightppd, Apache, simple) with php and mysql, Webdav...
<quote>
Run over 60 servers with over 70 protocols!
Now you can run a CVS, DC Hub, DHCP, UPnP, DNS, Dynamic DNS, eDonkey, Email (POP3 / SMTP), FTP Proxy, FTP, FTPS, Flash Policy, Git, Gopher, HTTP Snoop, ICAP, IRC Bot, IRC, ISCSI, Icecast, LPD, Load Balancer, MQTT, Memcached, MongoDB, MySQL, NFS, NTP, NZB Client, Napster, PHP and Lighttpd, PXE, Port Forwarder, Proxy, RTMP, Remote Control, Rsync, SMB/CIFS, SMPP, SMS, Socks, SFTP, SSH, Server Monitor, Stomp, Styx, Syslog, TFTP, Telnet, Test, Time, Torrent Client, Torrent Tracker, Trigger, UPnP Port Mapper, VNC, Wake On Lan, Web, WebDAV, WebSocket, X11 and/or XMPP server!
</quote>8 -
I was like 11/12 y/o when I encountered this site : http://ecole-art-aix.fr/rubrique81....
It's a French design university's Processing course. I don't remember how I got there, but I guess Internet had a pretty good influence on me then. However, as I had not learned about variables in math classes yet it was a pretty tough bite for me, so I didn't finish it but it was a good start for me -
GET Requests with a BODY as a payload are legit and stop living in denial!
TALKING TO YOU ANGULAR!
I'm fucking sick of seeing ignorant people(on SO or GitHub) coming up with the generic advice, on HTTP GET issues with having a BODY as a payload, to don't do that or you shouldn't, yadayadayada.
It's not a fucking issue at all in general, because as RFC-7231(https://tools.ietf.org/html/...) sais:
"A payload within a GET request message has no defined semantics; sending a payload body on a GET request might cause some existing implementations to reject the request."
So, if your fucking server can't handle them(aka living in the past), [rest] in peace and suck it up!
(ps, I happen to use modern servers)
But why should you limit a fucking front-end framework(ex. Angular) in the first plate to being able to send such requests?!
It's a moronic limitation and the person or team responsible for it are at least clueless and as far the issue has reappeared through time, for how old is Angular, they didn't move an inch.14 -
Surely I can't be the only one curious enough to start this discussion; so what's everyone's backgrounds?
I'm sure we're all under the assumption that we're all developers of some sort and like to rant about what we do-- hence the app name-- but what does everyone do? Such as what you make, what you've made, your skill set and a little info about yourself
Myself, I'm a 21 year old male from the North West of England. My name isn't actually Markshall, it's Mark, but I'm a huge fan of Eminem so it's a play on my name on his (Marshall).
I'm primarily focused on web development but I started programming at the age of 11ish in Visual Basic 6 and found the web development was my chosen area of expertise. I know the obvious HTML and CSS, but also know PHP and JavaScript and have lots of experience with MySQL databases and rather extensive knowledge of the jQuery library -- yes, I do know it's a library and not a separate language before people get pissy!
I'm not yet employed by a web development company, I work in retail whilst I freelance my web development skills
I have an online portfolio at http://mark-eriksson.com (needs a little updating-- not all my projects are on there and you're unable to view any information about them)
I write code in Brackets (http://brackets.io) on my 21.5" iMac. I use Google Chrome and have iPhone 6s Plus 64GB. PS4 player. Vodka and Jack Daniels enthusiast.
So, what about you?
Side note: devRant needs an edit feature :-(12 -
My experience with getting Linux on my dell i7559 was not so good. So, here is a tiny blog post, just to help a fellow ranter.
http://iostreamer.me/chip/2016/...
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