Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero" The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for an entire week." The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a year and do ANYTHING you want." Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a year and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The man said, "Look, I'm a computer programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool."

My colleague sent me this. Think before you act!

Hi Bob,

This is Alan next door. I’m sorry buddy, but I have a confession to make to you.

I’ve been riddled with guilt these past few months and have been trying to pluck up the courage to tell you to your face but I am at least now telling in text as I can’t live with myself a moment longer without you knowing.
The truth is, I have been sharing your wife, day and night when you're not around.

In fact, probably more than you, particularly in the mornings after you’ve left for work.

I haven’t been getting it at home recently, but that's no excuse I know.
I can no longer live with the guilt and I hope you will accept my sincerest apologies.

My wife has known for some time now and I’ve promised her that it won't happen again.

Regards, Alan.

Bob, feeling anguished and betrayed, immediately went into his bedroom, grabbed his gun, and without a word, shot his wife twice in the head, killing her instantly.

He returned to the lounge where he poured himself a stiff drink and sat down on the sofa.

He took out his phone to respond to the neighbour's text and saw he had another message:-

Hi Bob,

This is Alan next door again.
Sorry about the slight typo on my last text, I expect you worked it out.
Anyway, but as I’m sure you noticed, my predictive text changed ‘WiFi’ To ‘Wife’.

Hope you saw the funny side of that.

Regards, Alan.

Me and my love-hate Linux.

I lost virginity really early. In the age of 5 it was my first time with windows 95. I spend almost 10 years with Windows before something happened that would change everything. I met Linux. Her forename was Arch. I had a crush on her right from the beginning. It didn't take long for me to abandon windows. Arch had everything I wanted. She had latex which was pretty hot and looked simply and elegant on her. Sometimes she was really hard to deal with and almost drove me crazy, but I knew I fell in love.

Until that day. I had to write a short paper which was quite fun and Linux helped me alot. It was a breeze to work with her. The evening before the deadline she was quite thoughtful. She sometimes was, so I thought it'll be alright, but this time was different. She struggled a bit, so I put her to sleep and she never woke up. I brought her to the emergency lab which was open 24/7. Since no one was there I had todo the surgery myself. After 5 hours I was almost to tired to continue when she finally woke up. I asked her about the things she should remember for me - then I killed her. I started to hate Linux for what she had done to me. The unbelievable stress and horror.

I returned to Windows. Besides that she got a bit more curious what I was doing when and where nothing really changed and she was glad to have me back. I just was happy how simple our relationship was.

One day then, I couldn't believe it at first, I met Archs sister. Manjaro. No matter how strange that is, but it was as if I would meet Linux again for the first time. She was just a bit simpler but as flexible as arch. Since then we are happy together. It seems that we both just grew up a little.

And with Windows? She got even more curious! Actually I have the feeling she is stalking me now, but I don't regret anything!

!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Got very little sleep last night, not in a great mood to begin with. Came into work to find someone borrowed one of my cables that I need and hasn't returned it. It was wrapped around a few things to keep it tidy, all of which have been moved, stretched, bent etc. Now my battery is running low and he has emailed to say won't be in for 30 minutes.

Think the only reasonable course of action in a just world, is for me to strangle him with the cable when he gets in. I mean come on, whats the alternative? Still haven't gotten that pen back from last year ... this place is going downhill fast!

Appreciation post.

Fucking love Amazon even more now.

Story -
I created a new Aws account and they asked me to pay ₹2 (0.031$) as part of the verification process.

No big deal right?

2 days later, I got a notification saying - "Your account has been credited with ₹2.66"

Not only they returned me my money, but they also paid a certain interest with it too.

And the fact that they are taking care of their dev community (as if we are their customers) is appreciable.

Amazon - you bloody have my respect. I trust you.

No big deal

After using Windows for two years because of work and university, I finally returned to Ubuntu.
When I saw the logo while booting I felt that I have finally returned home.

And on the very next boot grub shat itself.
I am home alright. 😂😂

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

I told these people that this issue would happen. Did they listen? Nooo

It'll be fine, they say. We likely won't be having that much data returned to the front end, they say.

Day of the install. Web Application attempts to query 68,000 rows of data straight into the web page.

*Surprised Pikachu face* when they are consistently getting crashed browser tabs.

And now everything gets pushed back and we're behind by an entire month because they didn't heed my warnings.

Oh, and now I have to pick up after them, and do some stupid work arounds that will likely be defunct in a month or two. 🙄

After a long time in .NET and JavaScript, I have returned to Java today. I was quite happy about it for a few minutes!

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

First time my laptop acted as a CV.

I've been in a personal project with my pal for like a three months. We meet sometimes at a cafe which is a very nice workplace, we often see more people with laptops, so we are not the only ones that thinks so.

My pal was waiting for me, he got a table early and then I arrived. there was a guy nearby us.

Me: (this guy has a newest new macbook pro, fucking riche)

-- I sit, put my laptop and start to work with my pal --

The guy starts looking at my stickers without hiding his doing at all. I noticed that instantly

Me: (Crap, he's gonna ask something :( )

-- I kept discussing stuff with my pal for like 5 minutes and then it happened. the guy stands up and... --

Guy: hey! how are you? sorry for bother, are you perhaps developers? I'm asking because I saw your stickers

Me: mmm yes

Guy: Do you have a job currently?

Me: We are in a project (No need to mention this is personal project and I got my full time job)

Guy: Oh, ok, no problem, you see I got a company, and currently we are looking for people to work with us, we want frontend developers with javascript skills preferable, but anything is welcome. Interviews starts next week, so if you are interested or know someone that could be, I'll give you my card and please write me at my mail if anything.

Me: got it, no problem.

-- I tried my best to hide my displeasure face(but I think I showed it a little), for him to being a riche with a new macbook pro, and you know, the interruption, I wanted to be focused while working in da project --

-- I got the card, I read it a bit, didn't dig into too much, there was stuff to do at the moment. the guy already returned to his chair and my friend --

Pal: Excuse me Mr Guy, what's the job tittle?

Me: (FUCK! dude!, we're working in our shit, don't give him more reason to try to scout us. we are behind the schedule and I need to explain this shit to you FFS)

Guy: Oh yes, will be frontend developer(again), but if you are a full stack that will be a plus too, we got some stuff with angular 1.x(ugh), and sencha touch(ugh) and ...(don't remember what else was it)

Pal: Ok and the job is full time in site? or are you open to work remotely

Me: (ok man, you sound interested, that makes me look interested too >:( )

Guy: preferable in site, but we would consider remotely depending on the person.

Pal: Good! thank you very much Mr. X

Guy: cool

-- Later on, like two hours, my friend goes to the counter for more coffee --

-- I text him: dude, I feel the guy will kidnap me or something --
-- then the guy start looking again at my laptop and... ---

Guy: hey! Jhon was your name right? Do you have experience with devops? I see your aws stickers

Me: yes

Guy: do you have experience with microservices?

Me: yes, a bit with lambda, also I've done some stuff with kubernetes, opsworks, rds and whatnot. no biggie

Guy: oh cool! we have a devops job too, there is a migration we need to do for an app to micro services. again if you are interested or know someone that it does. please mail me :)

Me: gotcha

There were no further interactions with Mr. Guy the rest of the day.

I'll be thrilled if someone ask me about my bee and puppycat sticker

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

Anytime I have to deploy to iOS store. Part of the stack includes human review... Need I say more?

If I had a dollar for every fucking time they ignored our flagging to not put it on iPad, and returned with their review 2-3 days later saying:

"App UI did not run on iPad resolution cleanly."

Then having to submit an appeal and wait 2-3 more days...

I never had problems with punctuation marks during coding, especially the notorious semicolons because I've always used an IDE, ain't gotta time to waste on compiler errors.

But today I meet my nemesis, a fucking comma wasted an hour of my precious time, causing my unit tests to fail in Python, my unit tests where expecting a list and the actual value is a tuple, it turned out that there was this trailing comma - which I don't know where the hell it came from - at the end of a function call that returns a list.

I only noticed this freaking comma after Pycharm indicated a conflict between the returned type and the expected type and underlined the culprit, that small invisible fucker 😬.

Thank you Pycharm and type hints in Python 3.

this is why, my fellow devs, you have to use an IDE.

PS: For those of you who aren't familiar with python, a trailing comma at end of a variable turns it into a one element tuple.

1, = (1,)

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

I did it - I went outside! Felt strange, like Y2K and Maya doomsday would have been together. Of course I went out only during daylight because THEY hide in the dark. Infrastructure was mostly still intact, I've even seen some houses. Occasionally, survivors scrambling the area.

GPS didn't work so I used my magnetic compass. OK, it was because I forgot my mobile at home, but anyway. Should I take petrol with me so that I could burn my clothing upon return? Or would this attract THEM? Occasional gunfire in the distance. Might also be some pneumatic hammer, that's what the media would try to tell me.

The local supermarket had still trolleys outside. I took note because I might need them to bar the stairwell, along with the land mines that I still have left over from New Year's Eve.

Deserted cars standing around. Looked like neatly parked, but that doesn't mean anything. When Germans turn into zombies, their last human action is to park their cars. That's so genetically hardwired that no virus can override it.

Dusk set in. I better returned home.

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

Not a rant. Just a story.

So two weeks ago, a cat gave birth to two beautiful kittens in our balcony. We started giving milk to the mother and sometimes inviting the family to our house. The kittens are naughty charming. The mother sits for hours and sometimes sleeps while watching us do our chores (watching movies, coding, etc.)

Now, we live in New Delhi and Wednesday was Diwali. The family was playing in the balcony and we had to go out. So we locked the balcony door and went to have fun with friends. We didn't realize that people would burst firecrackers which could scare the cats. When we returned, the mother was very scared and (kind of) screaming. One of the kittens was missing!! We live on the fourth floor and I got scared too. We searched using a flashlight but there was no sign of kitten. After 30 minutes of search, We gave up. I assumed the kitten jumped from the balcony and might be dead. I tried to sleep but could not. Around 4 AM in the morning, I heard some noise. When I opened the door, the second kitten was there. Her mom was scolding (or so it seemed). It was a moment of joy.

Thought of sharing. This family has become our friends. Now I realize how cats are good companions.

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

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

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

Here it goes..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

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

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

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

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

It was a Monday morning, and I did what most people do - I got up late. When I came to senses, I realized I have an important client meeting today.
I ran towards my closet and grabbed my favorite shirt, but it was a mess, badly wrinkled.

But no problem, I decided to put this task on my old but trusty laptop, I waked up my laptop (Which has just celebrated its 12th birthday yesterday), it literally coughed 100 times as i opened 3-4 chrome tabs and android studio on it. Within a minute , my newly found laptop-iron become as hot as the surface of sun, i gently placed my shirt under it and in 5 seconds my shirt was looking brand new !!! I quickly got dressed up , while my laptop was cursing me at the back.

Luckily my meeting went well and we secured a new project, on my way home I was happy and satisfied that my oldy has found a new purpose of life as a makeshift iron.

I returned home, and to my surprise my laptop was'nt turning on....!!! I though maybe its tired from todays work so i let him rest..........

Oh look, a new fancy MacBook Pro 2018.

How come noone is talking about the extreme heat throtteling problem they have with the 2018 laptops?

They can't even hold their base clockspeed when doing compiling code. And they become extremely hot (worse then the last gen, which was already insane).

I know devs/creators/editors want the most powerful computer out there, but supporting something like this is just laughable.

Regards, disapointed customer who tested and returned the laptop after 2 days.

Did some updates to an older Web Forms website built by a previous SENIOR developer who is a notoriously horrible developer.

Now before I start, you have to understand this guy studied at a University and had been working for at least two years before I even started working. He is supposed to know the basic shit mentioned below.

This also happened a couple of days ago, so I have calmed down since then so I apologise for the relaxed tone. My next rant will contain a lot more swearing.

This fucking guy did the stupidest shit imaginable.

On the details view of a post|page|article|product|anything that would require a details view this jackass would load the data from the DB.

Using an OleDbConnection, OleDbDataAdapter, DataTable and the poorest writter fucking sql statements you have ever seen. All of these declared in the Page_Load method.

There was literally no reason for him to use OleDb instead of Sql, but he simply did not know any better.

He especially liked: "select * from tbl where id = " & Request("T") & ""

ZERO fucking checks to see if the value is even passed or valid, nothing. He did not even check whether the DataTable had any rows.

He then proceeded to use only the Heading column of the returned row to change the page's title.

Stupidly I assumed the aspx page will be in a better state. Fuck NO!

This fucktard went, added server tags to the opening of the asp:Content tag, copied that shit he used to fetch the data and pasted it between the server tags.

He did not know how to access the DataTable mentioned above from the aspx page!

He did this on every fucking project he worked on. Any place that required <%= %> to display data instead of using asp server controls, this cunt copied whatever was written in the code behind and pasted everything between server tags.

Fuck I could go on forever, but I think this is enough for my first rant.

Wow i must have been brain dead when i wrote this code. Needed to exclude certain elements from response for the the list of objects.

for (obj : objects) {
If (obj.skipFromResponse()) {
break
}
add obj to response
}

I used break instead of continue at the if condition which meant it would break out of the loop at the first instance of condition being met.

This went through qa and has been in production for 4 weeks so how did this not break before. Well little did i know the list of objects was sorted and all the test data, qa data and everything so far in production coincidentally only had the last element with matching condition. This meant it returned everything correctly so far.

Today was the first time there was a situation where this caused incorrect output. Luckily as soon as I heard the description of the issue I remembered to check the merged PR and hung my head in shame for making such trivial error. I must have written way more complicated code without any problem but this made me embarrassed to even admit. 🤦‍♂️

I spent 4 hours finding a good way to instanciate golang structures. Came up with a function that returned a value or pointer and I just kept reusing the nomenclature for an entire project. Then my buddy looks over and goes, "Ethan, you're a f****** idiot", and shows me the standard nomenclature. Now I have to refactor my entire project. FML.

(Edit: typo)

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

Have a function that takes parameters and then performs a switch statement to determine what function to call next with those same parameters. One of those parameters is a Union type.

During CR, my reviewer said they’d like if instead of returning the function per case, I instead assigned a handler to the value of the function per case and then returned that handler at the end of the switch. Simple change, right? Only snafu, I’m casting one of the parameters on a per-case basis.

Somehow, through no fucking change of my own, TypeScript in its wisdom has decided that the type of that value by the time I call the next function is a fucking Intersection.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT’S AN INTERSECTION?! I’m fucking casting it per case! I’m ensuring it’s the right type for the next function called on a per case basis!

…. And that, my friends, is how I wasted a day with a stupid refactor that was ultimately just scrapped because no one could figure out how to make it work.

Goddamn fucking TypeScript. I

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

Just read a comment on rant that stated "You’d be surprised as how disgusting people are especially in the work setting.". In regard to bathrooms. This reads true, for my current place of work

I was about to reply to that, but I thought this is worthy of a rant of its own. Allow me to quote some emails...

"We have had reports of excrement being left on toilet seats, which surely could be seen by the person responsible before they left the cubicle. "

"very poor toilet hygiene in some the ladies toilets.

Firstly, someone person should I say.... has used a toilet brush to clear a blockage in the Ladies loo nearest [removed]. They obviously couldn't unblock the toilet due to the density of the blockage and therefore.. returned the brush to it's holder full of the blockage!! "

"The phantom "snot" wiper is back and is using the back of the toilet door nearest the [removed] as a tissue! Again.. the poor Cleaner has had to clean this up... "

"Toilet paper being put in the Urinal blocking the system in [removed] and faeces being left on the toilet floor in [removed]. This goes without saying that this can't go on and it's not the cleaners job to be cleaning such messes! "

Its ever worse in our other office that contains a call centre. A lady was fired for leaving shit in the stairwells on multiple instances. She had been fired from her last role for the same thing.

There were also reports of subway subs been left in the toilet bowl.

You also find the most curious items in the waste bins (they have no lid, we're not search through them - just to make that clear) everything from half eaten sandwiches to watermelon.

I’m going through the book automate the boring stuff and I’m working on the chapter with web scraping right.

Well I wanted to just count all of the comic links that are in the xkcd archive as a small exercise to help me get used to and better learn web scraping.

I go through hell trying to do this but after more than a few hours later I finally have done it I returned every link of ONLY the comics, so it was time to start counting them.

I implemented the counting. The total number as of today is 2279 and it my code counted 2278, and I started to lose it.

So I go through this motherfucker manually to see where my loops count and the count on the tags start to differ. I found it, whoever made it went from 403 to 405. The euphoria I felt for this incredibly small task was incredible. (Still haven’t pieced it together yet)

I found the email of the guy who I assume owns the site and I started writing an email that basically said “hey the count of your comics is off by one and you made me rethink existence trying to figure out why, you skipped number 404-”

I look at the gap between 403 and 405 Then the words “Error 404 Not Found” popped into my head. I proceeded to scream for a second and stopped writing the email and now I’m trying to come to terms with this.

TL:DR the guy who runs xkcd comics trolled me with a simple error 404 joke

Not the worst, but probably the only one I can sort of explain & not get into trouble for NDA breach..

Umm.. here it goes.. wrong id returned from db procedure, tried to do something on db with that id and got exception that the id doesn't exist. Instead of checking why the procedure returns nonexistent id, he just wrapped everything in try catch without any logs.. & of course, didn't tell anyone about this.. o.0

I know, I know, code review could have prevented this, but holy fuck..
Guy's cv had more experience than I have now, so at the time, I didn't think I'd have to check every line of code he wrote, especially not for shit like this.

applying for a job at a company whose website is broken is kinda ironic

Todays gems are
- the menu item jobs isn't clickable. I have to find a link elsewhere
- the application form has a second page a "this is what you entered" page. It switches month and day of my birthday. I returned to first page to check. Here it's still fine. Now I needed to reupload my attachments because the "field is empty" - lets see if they get my CV twice
- the jobs page doesn't even load. firefox eventually prompts "This site is slowing down the browser ... [stop]"

So after the original idea getting scraped during a hackathon this week, we created a slack bot to fetch most relevant answers from StackOverflow using user's input. All the user had to do was input few words and the bot handled all typos, links etc and returned the link as well as the most upvoted or the accepted amswer after scraping it from the website.
The average time to find an answer was around 2 seconds, and we also told that we're planning to use flask to deploy a web application for the same.
After the presentation, one of the judge-guys called me and told me that "It isn't good enough, will not be used widely" and "Its similar to Quora".
Never ever have I wanted to punch a son of a bitch in the balls ever.

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

Writing a truly crossplatform terminal library is the biggest pain in the ass.

And you thought windows was bad. They have a proper API with droves of features, freely allocatable screenbuffers, scrolling on both axes, etc.
Fucking xterm vtxxx compatible piles of shit are the problem.
Controlling kinda works eventhough the feature set is pretty bad. The really fucked up thing is reading values back. They literally get put into the input buffer. So you have to read all the actual user input before that and then somehow parse out the returned control sequence. Of course the user input has to be consumed so I have to buffer it myself. Even better is when you get a response with non printable characters which the fucking terminal will interpret as another control sequence. So when you set a window title to a ansi control sequence it would get executed when queried. Fuck this shit but I'm not giving up. I will tame this ugly, bodged together dragon

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

Rant

I'm tired of this shit!!!

First I receive a task to create a new functionality for the app that I'm working on and some documentation (this is the only good part of all the rant) but no design.

It's been 2 weeks since I got assigned to this and still no design, no assets, no API calls that ACTUALLY WORK.

Today was testing a plist to get a banner link, and for 1 hour that little fucker didn't returned the image I was asking.

Better, I wasn't getting ANY IMAGE. Turns out that the link sends me to a HTML URL that doesn't have any image... go figure!

So I've been working on this from some images inside the PDF with the documentation given.

Oh! Wait! There's more!

The cherry on top is that I'm implementing a chat/voice call/video call into the app and the framework that I will be using is being created now, and it's not even finished!!!!!!

Now Kim Jong Un as returned. And all those meme that were circulating last week. I think this anime needs to be made.

We have the artwork. We have the story. Japan your call.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Quick rant, I dont have time.

I have no idea how the fuck but I managed my IDE to show me that it's confused if my class "PackModel" is "PackModel" or "PackModel" (I have only one definition if you are hands first to ask).

its few years and first time when I see shit like that.

Fun fact, it was working OK until I used getter that was returning another object and than IDE got absolutely lost.

I had to use workaround in middle of nowhere as shown on image and suddenly its back fine with it. Not like it's returned by function hard typed and PHPDoc typed to return instance of this very object and in other scopes it just works...

It's Jetbrains so Im confused, it's robust IDE ;-;...

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

Story && rant && dev && linux

I was using linux mint for a while... more like 5 months for work, there's this Touchpad/mouse issue in it that was driving me crazy, so basically the mouse stops responding out of nowhere in the middle of my coding and I have to restart the fucking laptop to get it back. Yeah, I tried all the solutions I could find on the Internet and nothing works.

This issue likes to fucking mess with me so much, it seems to only happen when I absolutely mustn't restart the laptop or I'm working on a task and have a tight deadline and I don't have time to waste restarting my pc.

A couple of days ago, I had this major feature I needed to release to production and the time I estimated for it and shared with my team turned out to be insufficient, so I had to work extra hours from home to finish it ... while I was working, the mouse issue returned and I had to restart my pc like 20 times that day. It was fucking frustrating and It was already midnight and all you can hear are keyboard sounds and fucks flying.

I made a promise to myself that once i finish this task, I'm gonna fucking migrate to another distro, I'm fed up with linux mint's BS. I've been putting up with it for so long it's time to move on.

Yesterday I installed Manjaro and I'm happily working on it today xD.

TL;DR My parents should have known that I was made for computers
Note: I am pretty young. Most of you were probably at least as old as I am now when it happened.
My parents told me about the first time I used a PC. They left me and my older siblings home alone with a movie on and returned later than they wanted to. We were still watching the movie, and when they asked how that was possible we told them that I restarted the DVD twice. I had never touched a computer before.

The first thing I actually remember is me playing Age of Empires II on a PC our family got for free somewhere. Although AoE3 was already out by that time, it ran slow af, but it was the most fun I had in my life up to that point. I was and still am pretty bad in both AoE3 and AoE2, but that was the first step into my preference for RTS games.

A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.

He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."

I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)

I really wanted to reply ...

"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."

But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..

Frack..people suck.

I wish I could declare variables IRL so I wouldn't have to repeat myself 6 times in a row before being acknowledged. Yes, the client left these fields empty, that's why the form returned an error as it should have. No, it's not the code's fault. For once.

This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.

I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.

GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.

Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.

Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.

That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?

As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.

Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.

And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>

If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

I had the oppertunity to join a non profit organization to help them automate stuff instead of serving the army. One of their core applications got rewritten like a year ago from a terrible and very old Symfony stack to Laravel / React.

The guys who were in charge for the rewrite didn't really adapt the mindset of either MVC for Laravel nor the component idea behind React. There are a few controllers in the backend, but they sometimes have functions defined which would clearly belong in a model or service class. They rarely defined relationships on models, instead they're joining the tables together for the same effect. The frontend rendering mostly happens in for loops over the returned array from the API instead of breaking things down into little components. This ends in components which have sometimes over 1000 lines with super-nested logic in it.

But I did find my favorite piece of code today in of the controllers. Some many questions ...

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

OpenCL...

Okay so I'm completely new to OpenCL and I just put some stuff together to get a simple GPU Kernel running. Well that worked pretty good.

The reason I got into OpenCL was because I wanted to do some simple SHA1 cracking on my GPU. What I did was, I got a fast implementation of SHA1 from the internet, which works perfect in normal C++, but for OpenCL I have to rewrite some things. So I replaced all the memset and memcpy and so on with simple for loops and it still worked. Now, this should work on OpenCL, too, I thaught. God I was wrong!

Somehow the clBuildKernel got executed normally, but when I try to access the returned value (the error code) I get an Access Violation? It just doesn't make any sense to me?

Well I will try some stuff tomorrow again and I will find a solution for sure, but still, until now I just don't understand it.

So my boss asked us to start using a timer app (toggl) to measure the times spend doing each thing, the thing is I suck at that, so I started a meeting activity and then left to have breakfast, when i returned my timer showed I had bren in a meeting for an hour lol. Even worse I have no current activities assigned so I am just watching videos how should I call that activity?

So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.

The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.

The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.

Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.

What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.

Unless of course either of them is < 1.

So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.

And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?

I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.

But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.

Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).

The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.

You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.

It turns out my intuition was correct.

Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.

I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:

if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1

This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.

And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.

So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.

!rant
We were finishing another sprint of our grocery shop site at school and it was time for a demo.
There we are, showing our work before the other students. Our teams have a healthy habit of always checking each other not to leave some stoopid mistakes in the final versions, so everybody always regExes and validates THE SHIT out of every input field, both in the view and on the server side. But this one team found out that sometimes it's not enough.

Like every team, they're asked to buy a negative value from their shop. The guy clicks through the process, buys exactly -1 of a banana. He clicks the button to purchase and the site returned "Added banana to the cart!" and we're like "haha n00bz". But someone asked them to show the cart and everyone stopped immediately.

There were 9999 bananas in the cart.

Turns out the member responsible for purchase validation made it add 10000 if the quantity of a bought product was negative.
To this day I can't understand why he did that. xD

When I first began with Python I really missed the static typed checking from Java, I barely know anything about a returned object from a method and have to read the API extensively for every new library.

After a while I finally understand why Python is so powerful, the combination of dynamic typed language and rich default methods make the language unbeatable for your productivity.

While Java's Object only has toString(), hashCode(), equals() or clone(), Python's basic Class has every fucking method for every scenario I could ever image. No wonder that libraries like numpy or pandas work so well and fluidly.

In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.

In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.

But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.

In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.

The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.

Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.

I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.

I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).

Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.

Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.

My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.

I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.

I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.

The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.

If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Pro tip: always make sure your methods return the correct variable.

I’m currently working with deep neural networks using tensorflow. I needed to generate some test data and wrote a program to create it. I had two text files which each consisted of approximately 5000 lines of text.

I wrote a method that should sort out some words, and make my final data shorter. When I executed the program first time on our server, it spent about 25 minutes, then crashed due to MemoryError (which in Python means that the server didn’t have enough ram). That seemed quite weird since I only had about 10k lines of text, and I even sorted out a bunch of it, and the server has 128gb ram, and nothing’s using it.

Apparently I returned the wrong variable. That meant that my program tried to save 750 quadrillion lines of text rather than just a few thousand.

Always make sure to return the correct variables!

*So I have a function where the date is formatted as 20180317 and get returned if I pass a date to it.*
Junior Dev: I'm selecting March as a month but it's showing 20180217 and not 20180317, what should I do?
Me: I've written function for formatting date just go there and there will be date.getMonth() just add 1 to it by doing +1.
Junior Dev: It's still not working!!!.
So I went there and checked what she did, and she did this .....
date.getMonth(+1);

If you have clumsy people around you, your belongings are never safe.

I left the laptop on the table for just a few hours, and this is what I returned to. Someone carelessly moved the laptop to the right without paying attention to the USB stick, so it bent from the table to the right with a higher position.

Indeed, lack of protrusion is the main reason SD cards are better than USB sticks, and why laptops should have full-sized SD card slots, and why external SD card readers are no valid replacement for built-in SD card slots. Relying on an external SD card reader outright defeats the primary benefit of SD cards, lack of protrusion.

One can be careful with ones belongings every day and have them last a long time, but then someone else comes and ruins it for you. Years of effort with being careful have been wasted. Clumsy people will certainly find new creative ways to break your stuff.

When I hit the endpoint from Postman it works. When I hit the endpoint from my application that pushes data to the endpoint it doesn't work, returning a 404 status code. I KNOW the endpoint is there and operational and that both Postman and my application have the same endpoint configured, letter for letter.

So lost. So confused. What the hell is going on.

I decide to install Fiddler to monitor the traffic to see if I can see anything helpful.

I initiate the request again from the application and immediately see that the request size is huge. BAM. It immediately hits me, the payload to the endpoint is too big and the server is "rejecting" it with a 404. I post a smaller request with the application and it works fine.

Yay, saved by Fiddler.

Why does the endpoint default to 404 in such scenarios. The definition of 404: "the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested"

In my case, the 404 returned was a red herring. I understand that the substatus code gives more information on why the 404 was returned, in my case the request size being too big, but 404 in general feels like the wrong status code to return because the endpoint IS there. It made me troubleshoot the wrong thing.

Thanks, IIS.

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).

!dev

So that new keyboard I bought? They sent me a French azerty instead of a Belgian azerty layout. Meaning the special keys are in the wrong places.

It's from a third party vendor. Here was me thinking I was getting a good deal on a second hand product in a box that had been opened but returned. Think I can guess why that happened.

I contacted support who will contact the third party but I have a bad feeling about this already. Both the third party and website where I ordered this are Dutch and they are used to Qwerty. Guess I should have bought on a Belgian website at full price :(

I got a new keyboard in my office. One hour ago i have been restarted my pc 3 times, because power button is in delete position. One more hour ago, i have returned my old keyboard.

So we were able to do a pre-test in programming I, and if you passed, you would get 70% of grade. Then doing the homework would net the rest 30%.

I passed the test and returned first homework, answer: "Sorry, you haven't been in classes, so you need to defend your work. It will take 10-20 minutes max"

I then informed the professor that I have done the exact same course in open university, and have proof of working as a programmer for 2 years, but it wasn't enough.

So in the fucking defending that took 50 fucking minutes, I had to answer to 15 fucking questions regarding the code.

How on earth am I supposed to remember what 2 fucking lines of code do in a program I wrote 3 weeks ago, if you don't give me the whole code?!?!
Or if Euler's fucking constant is defined in math.h, and why did I define it by myself?
And apparently scattering 50% of the code over 8 pages is sufficient for remembering what the whole programs does!??!?

Oooh and did I mention? I NEED TO GO AND FUCKING DEFEND MY NEXT HOMEWORK NEXT FUCKNG WEEK!!!

Fuck that course

I think mine had to be when I was working with SQL and Lua. I was attempting to store some ints into the database but kept having it fail randomly. It was a 50/50 chance that it would succeed or fail. I tried reading errors (Limited on what I could see) after a while (Almost 3 days, since everything I could think of didn’t have issues and was completely lost) I realized the system another developer setup returned either string or int, thus it causing it to error out when I gave it a string. Once I added a tonumber statement, all my headaches went away.

I just returned from a 1 week vacation and my boss summonned me for a 1 on 1, and said he is not satisfied with my work, as I don't deliver "fast enough" according to him and do not show enough enthusiasm. I just nodded and didn't answer out of shock.

Background: It's my first dev job, and it's in a really fast paced startup. I have no degree, and I'm here for 3 months. I'm 23 years old, he is around 30.

I really don't know how should I feel about this. It's the first time someone tells me stuff like that and I'm kinda depressed. I know I sometimes work slower than my colleagues because I have less experience but I never thought it would come to this.

Any advice?

I've just spent the last hour or so banging my head against a brick wall trying to figure out why I'm unable to retrieve some data via AJAX even though I know data is being returned as I can see it in my error log.

Turns out the permission system I wrote a few days ago actually works and because I didn't specify a permission it automatically denied my user from retrieving the data. One thing I forgot to add was an error message to tell me when I don't have sufficient permission to do something. Adding a message could have just saved me a lot of time :/

Recently saw a rant here asking how bad it would if SO went out for a while, with most replies saying it would be good, and asking people to read documentation instead.

Well i tried to prepare myself for that and tried to read the selenium documentation for getting the html of a page. After 30 mins couldnt find it. A google search returned a SO answer which i didnt have to click on coz it had it in the first line.. How difficult is it to provide documentation functionwise/attributewise instead of long tutorials when i click on Documentation.? C++ libs and major python libs do it so good.

In the lab:
"Look! I have compiled and that gave me no errors! On the first try!"
So I look closer and
"Dude, ehm.., you are compiling the wrong file..."
Then he tries to compile the right class and the compiler returned errors on errors
"You know what? I hate you."
Never laughed that loud

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

I think UPS' Api documentation and service must be the worst documented and build API I have ever seen from a corporate.

1. The developer website is a mess. A total mess. You can barely find the API type you are looking for.

2. When you get the API and download the documentation, the files, .pdf etc is still a mess. Pages long that most are craps.

3. Each request returns Status Code 200. Even if it is an error. This blew my mind.

4. Each request, based on error type or based on tracking activity returns different JSON schema.

For example, the JSON Schema for a shipment in transit is different from JSON schema for a shipment that has been delivered. A shipment that has been returned, a shipment that required signature etc. They are different from each other.

5. And the worst. They do not provide with test tracking codes. I have found some on internet, but they do not work in development and production environment.

I've ranted about this before, but here we go again:

Go Plugins.

I was racking my brains trying to figure out how one could possibly implement plugins easily in Go.

I had a look at using RPC, which requires far to much boilerplate to be realistic. I looked at using Lua, but there doesn't seem to be a straight forward way of using it. I was even about to go with using WASM (yes, WASM). But then I came across Yaegi ("Yet another elegant Go interpreter", you heard right: "interpreter"), Yaegi is also very easy to use.

There are a few issues (including some I haven't solved yet), including flexibility (multiple types of plugins), module support, etc. Fortunately, Traefik just released their plugin system which is based on Yaegi (same company), and I got to learn a few tricks from them.

Here's how module loading works: The developer vendors their dependencies and pushes them to a repo. The user downloads the repo as a zip and saves it to the plugins folder. I hash the zip, unzip it to a cache, and set the the GOPATH for the interpreter to be that extracted folder. I then load the module (which is defined by a config file in the folder), and save it for later. This is the relatively easy part.

The hard part is allowing for different types of plugins. It looks easy, but Go has a strict typing system, makes things complicated. I'm in the process of solving this problem, and so far it should go like this: Check that the plugin fits an arbitrary interface, and if it does, we're good the go. I will just have to apply the returned plugin to that interface. I don't like this method for a few reasons, but hopefully with generics it will become a bit more clean.

Exam in networking in a week. It's a group project with individual presentations. No one but me have done any work until now, so I threatened leaving the group and do everything myself, which I am able to, since I have a lot of experience with this before university.
All people reacted but 1. He hasn't returned any messages nor met at campus in over a week. How should I react to this issue?

More of a moaning than ranting.

I feel like I care a bit too much.

I'm not a great programmer - I may be decent, but nothing more. I know Java and C# enough to write production code that works but as I gather more experience it's getting more and more annoying that I have no one to teach me in work. All I know is what I have learned by myself, from courses online, books and just writing code.

And what drives me crazy is how I'm being pushed from one project and technology to another! It's been a week since I've returned from my exams and I've already worked in C# (ASP.Net Core, MS Office AddIn, WPF, .Net console app), Java (Spring, some legacy project with JBoss, Android) and to top it all, I had to come back to the worst project I've ever been in, where I'm implementing some third party system to county administration, just to finish it off.

I'm happy to gather experience - invaluable with only two years of real, production experience, but I can't focus on one thing because I'm immediately forced to work on another. For some reason I'm seen as Jack-of-all-trades but I really don't feel like that. It makes me anxious as fuck. Not to mention that my personal development as a Dev is held off because of working all alone with no supervisor.

Post Scriptum
Fuck my boss. He won't let me refractor our biggest project yet (console, C#) because "he can listen to my moaning all day but when clients start complaining he has to act fast". Yeah, right. Wish me luck with fixing sluggish performance without reworking base of the app.

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

Why the flying fuck does a resultset get returned with the pointer going to BEFORE the first fucking entry? And why does the error say "no data available"????
I saw the stinking values in the debugger, you fat cunt, don't tell me there is nothing there.
But hey, at least now my boss doesn't have any expectations whatsoever. I sure am dense motherfucker.

After a year-long (or something idk) hiatus, I have returned to devRant! Dusted off the old profile (and updated a bunch of outdated info). I never realized how much I missed this place. Great to be back!

Dear Diary,
Today is October 31st, ‘Halloween’ according to ancient pagan tradition. I can’t help but wonder if those pagans of yore felt as I do now in their attempts to yoke unruly bands of spirits. I sit wearily at my desk in painful and tiresome reckoning with those new hellcats we call node dependencies. Many an hour I have toiled, maestro of a cacophonous orchestra akin to that tucked in later pages of Bulgakov’s magnum opus, pleading with the band to follow my wand. And to no avail. In the wee hours of the morn I can scarcely tell who is conducting who. My sleep laden eyes blink on each execution of yarn install, my fingers knowingly re-execute with an up-arrow enter when that instruction is returned with gnarled, gruesome errors. And I ask again: “who is conducting who?!“. Will this great devil of machinery eventually meet me with an error so fearsome that I myself lay asunder? It is a battle, make no mistake. It is the “trial of a thousand years”! And who shall come out victorious I know not, but rest shall not come until I either lay myself down into the jaws of dependency hell or emerge victorious.

Dear Diary,
Today is November 1st. Compiled on the first try, no additional changes FML

The other day I was debugging an internal app we have which is used to develop screens for an embedded device and noticed a function which enumerated the widgets on a particular screen. One would think this would be a simple task of having a local variable to keep count, assign the widgets a number, index itself, and continue. But no. The previous (and no longer employed) developer for some awful reason, created a TStringList, got the name of the widget, added it to the stringlist, used the result of the add function which returned the index, and used that result to assign widgets their index. All while creating the object and freeing it within the same function. WTF.

Fucking retard Liferay.....

At least 2 users (one inour team and another at client's) are claiming they've successfully opened a portlet view multiple times at day X. And a month later it stopped working.

I open up Liferay's (tomcat's) localhost_access.log and can see all the portlet requests at day X have returned http:400

Normally I would consider the human factor and rule this as a human error, assuming they were connected to another environment, another server, etc. But since this is The Fucking Liferay - I'm not that fast in trusting even logs :(

Who the fuck made this piece of shit....

I had to contact technical support for an API. I’m pretty sure I was emailing with a bot because I was getting all sorts of stupid replies.

Me: I’m using your SDK for language X. It’s returned null for some properties. In the user portal, I can see there are values for those properties for the transaction. I don’t know why I’m not receiving them on my end.

Tech Support: Hi! I see the following was sent in the API response. [Sends api response to me.] You can also go the the portal to see those values.

Me: Yeah, I know. You just repeated everything I wrote to you. I don’t want to go to the portal. I told you I want to figure out why your SDK doesn’t seem to map those properties correctly when I receive the api response.

TS: Let me look at the docs. I think you need to send the properties you want in your request in order to get them back in the reply from the api. Such as <property>value<property> in the xml message.

🤨 The docs do not say that. They don’t even imply that.

Me: What the fuck?! That makes absolutely no sense. We have already established that the api **is** returning values for those properties. I want to troubleshoot why your SDK is mapping them as NULL.

Windows ffs stop shoving your fucking updates into my ass. It was prompting me to restart computer for 6 fucking hours and it never gave a fucking option to postpone the update beyond one fucking hour. So I literally kept postponing it every fucking hour and went for a shower. By the time I returned it was updating it. I had more than 25 tabs opened on incognito window of chrome and atleast 8 Microsoft office files open and editing atleast 4 of them. It fucking ruined my work flow and I don't even remember the locations of the files I was referring. Who is going to open all those tabs and files. Ffs what is wrong with you WINDOWS. I AM SO PISSED OFF AT WINDOWS AND MY UNI THAT DOESN'T FUCKING ACCEPT ASSIGNMENTS IF THEY ARE NOT IN DOCX, PPT AND OTHER MICROSHIT'S CRAPPY PRODUCTS. I AM NOT IN A MOOD TO DO THE ASSIGNMENT NOW. FUCK WINDOWS. I SWER BY THE Old GODS AND THE NEW THAT I WILL CONTRIBUTE TO WINE IN THE NEXT 5 TO 6 MONTHS SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO USE WINDOWS AGAIN.

Every time I have to use CloudWatch, I feel like I'd be more productive if I shoved glass shards in my eyes.

Every query/filter either returns nothing or errors out because too much is returned.

Something weird is happening at my company. Me and my colleague were in a team building a web application (October CMS and angular 8). I just returned from vacation and was absent for the first 2 weeks of dev. Some days in management announced that the project is "on hold", I guess something to do with paperwork, but the dev will continue. I got to work in the project only for 2 days and was shifted (with a colleague) to work on regression tests for some app I have never seen. A week or more has passed and still I have no VPN access to the app. (the app is hosted by some other company) I am bored of doing nothing. I have experienced a pattern of shifting between projects a lot. Still have not been in one from start till the very end. It is annoying. I feel that there is a lack of communication here.

!rant
I have my 121 in a few days with my new manager and am trying to get a raise either through moving from junior to mid level dev or being given a significant raise , am being paid a tad below the London market rate's lower range for my skill level.

Any advice on how to approach the topic?

Some bits of my background:

I got almost 4 years of exp :
almost 2 working there...
6 months short term contract as a ruby sql dev another company...
1.5 years worked for an abusive joke of a company who took advantage of my naivety since i was fresh out of uni ( did stuff like pressured me to add more features to a pojo system i made for them) barely learned anything there since i was the only IT person there developing solo, the project lasted 1.5 years and was a total mess to finish, so am not too sure of factoring it into my years of exp.

My Qualifications are:
bsc in information systems
Msc in enterprise sw engineering

My "new" Manager is seeking to retire real soon.

The company isn't doing too well but we just landed 2 big customers who are buying the product my team is working on

I Am one of two last devs on my team and we are barely holding on with the load, can't afford the time to train a newbie to join us

my department is soon to be sold (soon according to what mgr says). They have been saying so for 10 months now.

Last year , since the acquisition Is taking so long and funds were running out We were hit by a wave of redundancies which slashed our workforce in august/ july, told we could last till march this year on our funds . Even senior staff were on a reduced work week...but since we Got new customers then money should be coming in again , this should mean thats no longer the case. Even the senior staff have returned to 5 day work weeks.

Am being given only JavaScript work to do despite being hired as a junior java dev, my more senior colleagues dont wanna even touch js with a long stick

Spoke to 3 recruiters , said they got open roles in the junior- mid level range that pay the proper market range if am interested to put my cv through.
Thats like 25% more than I currently make.

Am a bit scared to jump into a mid level position in another company because i lack a bit confidence in my core java skills.
although a senior dev who used to be on my team thinks i can do it.
i recon i can take on the responsibilities of a mid level dev in me existing company since am pretty familiar with the products

I dont get to work with senior devs and learn from them since we are so stretched thin, hence am not really getting the chance to grow my skills

I know i have gaps in my knowledge and skills having not been able work in java for a while hasn't allowed me to fix that too well. I badly need to learn stuff like proper unit testing, not the adhoc rubbish we do at the moment, frameworks like spring etc

Since I have been pretty much pushed into being the js guy for the large chunks of the project over the last year , its kinda funny am the only guy who has the barest idea how some of the client facing stuff works

The new manager does seem to be a nice guy but he is like a politician, a master bullshitter who kept reassuring all is well and the company is fineeee (just ignore the redundancies as the fly past you)

The deal for thr aquisition seem to have sped up according to rumors
And we heard is a massive company buying us, hence things might pick up again and be better than ever

Any ideas how to approach the 121 with him?

Any advice career wise?
Should i push for a raise ?
promotion to mid?
Leave to find a junior to mid level position?
Tought it out and wait for the take over or company crash while trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge ?

Sorry for the length of this post

!rant

I had that installation of windows 3 to 4 years now.
I'm using a third party software for backup so everyday at 23:00 the backup service starts. The image is stored on a second HDD.
First i want to point out that i set up the windows maintenance around that time too. So any updates should occur then and i remember finding my PC at login screen couple of times meaning a restart had taken place.
Everything was fine all this time.
Couple of days ago i returned home late around 2 am to find a blue screen saying that the computer did not boot property the last time. Had two options, just restart or try to fix.
Of course i will fix it, come on.
Everything failed. Everything. Even safe mode won't boot.
Who cares i have the back up system image. Boot from the bootable usb stick and restore. Well nothing is happening. It's just freezing at 5%. Cancel. Try again. Cancel. Verify the image. Success! Try again! Nothing.
Damn. Im really tired, off to bed.
Woke up tried fixing and restore but to no avail.
Fuck it i will just install Windows fresh. I was set up after an hour or so installed the necessary drivers and such. Let's see that image of any file i want to get back.
Image is corrupted. What the fuck? How? Damn it. Mount and recovery also failed.

That's it. I did not lose any important files. I save everything on a different drive and also the backup.
But I'm wondering what had gone wrong.
My guess windows rebooted when the backup was running. If that's the case shouldn't be a check if such service is running?

I just lost my rant. Luckily it's easy to recount. Whilst using Microsoft Edge to dowload and send same files without clogging up Google Chrome, after sending a file on its way, I returned to Microsoft Edge to discover my font size had been shrunk by 50% without my knowledge or consent. I decided to do something futile and useless : I composed a memo to Google: "Google, who the fuck do you think you are that you can make a small change that will anger millions of people? And when those people wish to tell you exactly why you have once again dumped unnecessary shit on them, you are unable to provide any information to help them? Fuck you, fuck your disgusting corporate ass kissing cuntery and fuckery. You are disgusting and inhuman. You make me sick, you make me wnat to puke my guts out."

That lovely moment, when I have to spend an hour on mail delivery issue, only to find out the message was flagged as spam due to a faulty dns blacklist.

Though the way it got flagged is idiotic and funny at the same time, too.

The blacklist domain got parked, dunno why, and of course, all of the dns queries thus got redirected to a different dns server that just returned the A records of the dns park owners.

Guess what that causes when you use that blacklist? Every single email gets flagged, including that one of ours that I had to debug.

Fml, an hour of overtime for a stupid malfunctioning blacklist...

I have returned to work in one of the best places where I have worked but one of the few things that I hate is that they force me to use Win10

Today I returned from holiday since Christmas day and the office doesn't have heating until the 9th

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.

Fucking taiga wasting my day.

Client asked to set up a private taiga (taiga.io, some open source Jira alternative).

All goes fine and dandy until you need to link domain user creation to taiga user creation.

Seems I have to choose between having public registration (allows to programmatically create users, but also randoms to sign up) or use their private registry API that asks for a fucking token that is supposed to be returned from their membership/invitation API, that, guess what, doesn't return any bloody token. You can only get the token on the Django admin control panel.

Guess I'll have to end setting up LDAP or integrating with their existing gitlab, but this gig is already starting to smell, and we are close to the weekend 😡

I finally have some motivation to write some personal code... on an existing project.

(Work has been too hectic the last few months so don't want to do anymore at home...)

Anyway... I noticed that my Prime Video Tracker app doesn't pick up some of the new Movies now available on Prime, so I did some fixing.

Good News (GN): The search URL is actually static so can goto the same URL for the same search results
GN: The program can filter the movies by a Minimum # of Ratings they have (currently set to 100... use to be 10)

Bad News (BN): The number of movies in the search results is over 5000 (used to be 100-200) so even with this filter, a lot get returned.

GN: the traversal is fully automated

BN: Need to manually look at the descriptions of each and add them the Watchlist

BN: I now have 200 movies on my Watchlist and still going...

So now I have another "Infinite list". Existing ones:
-TED Talks
-NLegs
-Blinkist Read List
-Comics (sort of, I have a huge backlog for Cyanide and Happiness)
-Photos that need "post-processing"

I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some others...

wow its been a while, hi community i have returned to pillage your stickers >:) hand them over peacefully or i shall remove your kneecaps in your sleep.

Random error that was occurring in prod discord authentication for new users (only in prod):

It wasn't returning the discord ID of the user logging in (only in prod). This should not even be possible if the user authenticates. So the null value from the ID was used and returned the first user in the DB (I know, weird mongodb edge cases). It should have returned null for the user searched not the first user in the DB wtfff.

Anyways, new users logging in would be logged in as me. Bahahah

Pushed the fix. All is good in the hood.

4 hours wasted due to a rather strange "scope poisoning" bug... it was really fucking strange.
Had to move the 5 lines of code, above where the error happened, to a private function.
The 5 lines just called an XLSX library which read a given file and returned an array. I don't know how but the thing somehow messed with my Soap client call one line below. The culprit must have been some IO resource handle which didn't get destroyed when in the same scope due to persisting object references..