So, this random teen on subway asked me if it was 9GAG I was scrolling [i was on this app ofc]. I said it's better than 9GAG.
He went on like this "oh cool, does it have the the NSFW section too?"
...
Me: a...No, but can learn coding stuff
Him: hacking?
Me: hacking is not what you thin... [He interrupted me]
Him: Damn cool, I wanna learn hacking, it's my stop nice meeting you tell me the name of the app
Me: a...9...ha...ck, 9hack!
Him: cool, thanks. [Gets off]

(Um...Some people just don't deserve DevRant, if you know what I mean)

Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.

- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.

- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.

- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.

Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.

When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.

!Rant

Support Call:
”our PC stick isn't booting up! Come and fix it! (angry)”

Me:
”The PC are meant to boot up whenever power is delivered to them. Are you sure your TVs are powered on?”

Support Call:
”Yes! I just pressed the power button on both TVs and it didn't turn on the PC sticks.”

Me:
”So you can confirm the TVs are on? Can you change the input and see what happens?”

Support Phone:
”Stop wasting my time and send someone down to fix it now! I told you it isn't working!”

Me:
”Ok, we will get someone out to you as soon as possible.”

Then a support guy drives 2 hours to their store.

When he gets there he realizes that the TVs power is connected to a light switch and they has the switch off!!!

He said ”can we turn on some lights so I can see behind the TV?” and then all the fucking TVs came on.

These are times when I fully understand the concept of “firing a customer”.

The customer sent an email saying ”the downtime for your product was unacceptable.” even after it was explained to them that the problem was them turning off the power.

These fucking idiots actually expect us to deliver products to display on TVs without fucking electricity to run them.

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

*happily tapping along on my projects while commuting*

Some random kid appears, overly interested in what I'm writing, so I let him look.

Then he goes *snort* do you know why Java threw c out?

No.

*giggles* because c told Java to stop treating women like and objects.

Well, treating them like primitives is no good either.

*kid walks away*
Then I hear: mom. That man ruined my joke, he said treating women like primitives is no good.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

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

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

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

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

If you think you know the most idiot person in the world, you haven't met my brother.

His brain absolutely can't comprehend anything!

He forgot his Roblox password and told me to do something. I said I can't do anything about it. Then he yelled at the top of his lungs saying, "you don't know technology! You're too stupid and selfish. Fix it!"

I said I can't do anything about it. He throws the mouse at me and says, "I never get to have fun. You ruin my life!"

He's not a little kid btw. He's fucking 14.

Today my mom forgot to pay the wifi password, and she thinks its better not to pay it today so it can stop my brother from playing games. (He plays it from morning to night. No homework, no cleaning, no nothing. Just games all day.)

So he told me to fix it. I said I cant. There's nothing I can do. Then he punches my arm really hard. (He's taller and stronger than me so it really hurt) then he threw a shoe and said, "you're useless and stupid! You have your laptop so you can have fun but I never get to have fun. You ruin my life, and I hate you. I hate my life."

Then he ran to mess up my room by tossing things from the self, removing clothes from my closet, and messed up my bed. He pushed my sister, pulled my hair, and ran to his room, slamming the door.

Please. Please someone give him a brain! He desperately needs one. I said I can't fix it, and that my mom has to pay the WiFi bill, but he thinks I'm being mean.

He has the mind of a 5 year old. Dropping to the ground crying.

First internship: accepted within two weeks, only got to do Google translating and fired after five weeks for bs reasons.
Grade: bad.

Second internship: accepted right after the interview. Rewrote websites to their newest cms, not that fun sometimes but alright.
Grade: pretty alright.

Third internship: was accepted without asking after a successful pilot program from my study. Designing and developing a huge back end system, done some smart light bulb hacking and get to solve server problems.
Grade: Great! Just one little thingy: they said I should stop doubting myself because "you're a great dude and programmer!"

It's getting better and better!

Free advice take it or leave it
A few days ago I completed my one year work anniversary(is that how it's said) at my first job. And this rant is basically stuff I learnt and stuff I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. Here goes:-

When you are starting out your first job you would be a fresh out of college and people around you in college are your friends where as people around you at work are colleagues. Your friends can like you, but you have to earn the respect of colleagues.

If you sit yo ass too long u will become fat(started going to the gym again).

Don't bother your seniors too much. they have their own shit to deal with.

Don't bring your personal shit to office I don't want to hear how cute your dog looked while it took a dump on your carpet.

Avoid the person who gossips.
It's a two way street.

Whatever you find amazing your boss may not you know coz you are a geek and your boss isn't.

Don't talk to people when they are coding.Yeah just don't.

Avoid "below the belt" humor you may look funny but you loose respect in the long run.

Keep upgrading yourself don't stop learning.

Admit stuff you don't know don't Bullshit.

To sum it up it's a game of respect, respect of knowledge,respect of skill and most of all respect of attitude.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

I once had a manager who would, at every stand up, ask everyone if there was a better way to solve their problem. She did this even if the team had already decided on a solution or even if there was no problem at all. She wouldn't let us continue the stand up until we had proposed a new 'solution' that was close to her 'suggestions'.

Some of my favorite suggestions were: "Are you doing everything you can to not make it too 'spiffy' ?". If you said yes the follow up was always: "can you tell me how?"

Then when you said you hit a bit of a bump yesterday due to something unexpected she always demanded that you pair programmed today. Now I don't have anything against pair programming, I even think it's useful from time to time, but being forced to sit next to someone or have someone sit next to me every time someone encountered something unexpected annoyed the shit out of me. Needless to say no one had any problems to speak of during stand ups after a while.

Whenever I was sparring with one of my colleagues she would always join in and start proposing 'solutions' about technical problems she didn't even understand. Again, she wouldn't back down until we had accepted her 'solution'. We would then go to a different room and hope she wouldn't find us there.

This went on for months, until several people had disagreed with her so much that it ended in shouting matches.

It still makes me angry when I think of one person crippling a team that much. I took my issues to her, to HR and finally to the CEO directly, but no one did anything about it.

Finally one of my colleagues decided to quit. After he handed in his two weeks notice our manager came to me and asked if she could talk to me in private.

She told me that she didn't understand why our colleague quit and she thought everything was going great. This was after just about everyone had told her that they hated how she acted and that if she wouldn't stop they'd quit. I had told her that myself twice.

She then proceeded to tell me that I was the most valuable employee and that the company couldn't go on without me. As a gesture of their appreciation for my invaluable effort, she was so generous to offer a salary increase of 50 euro, before taxes.

I laughed, said no and handed in my two week notice the next morning.

I vowed never to work with fucktards again, and I haven't since.

This isn't really a hacking story but it does remind me of something I did as "revenge."

In middle school, this one fool kept bullying me. Always tried to harm me, always tried to insult me, always tried to make me fall during PE.

I hated him a lot, so instead of trying to kill him as planned, I did a harmless little keylogger prank thing.

I installed a keylogger on the school's laptop before class. (I did it during break, and when class started, I placed it on his desk.)

He took the bait, and instead of doing work, he logged onto his social media accounts. Now I had his passwords and everything.

When I went home, I logged onto his social media. I checked his messages so I can get some dirt on him, didn't find much except for the fact he snuck out a few times, and smoked before.

I changed his profile picture to some cringy anime thing and messaged one of his friends (the one who always copied my test answers in History and would steal my homework) and I said, "tell --- that if he doesn't stop being an asshole, I'll do worse than "hack" his social media."

It freaked them both out a bit, but didn't change their behavior, which is a shame because my threat was empty. It's not like I was able to do anything more than that in middle school. To this day, they still have no idea who did that.

This was about 4 years ago.

Excuse the profuse amount of profanity below.

Fuck this fucking fucked up motherfucker of a fucking director. Money does not make you a fucking decent person, and you come in here and tell me that you pay my fucking measly salary so I must be fucking grateful.

Starts off with a boardroom meeting this morning. Wireless connection on my laptop takes two minutes to connect, I get told that I am wasting company time and that the salary of everyone in the meeting is quite a lot ("with me being the highest"- cuntface director) so stop wasting time. Fuck you man, it's a fucking wireless connection. I am building your motherfucking company applications and doing web design and for what, so I can earn fuckall and be told that I am fucking wasting time. I am presenting your fucking site you wanted, so give me a fucking minute extra to start up the fucking wireless connection.

The fucking mails are taking long to send, great, let's come down and fucking scream at the dev who regrettably said he would try and assist IT (by calling the provider). I literally just got told that I am the following. 1) Fucking stupid 2) He is going to close the dept down because I apparently fuck up (yet again cuntface, your fucking mailserver is NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM) 3) He is going to contact an external company to come and check my work. 4) I am fucking useless. 5) I telling him lies (yeah fuckface, I worked as a sys admin, I know what a motherfucking DNS server is and what it does. you don't - so don't fucking tell me that I am lying when I tell you there is a DNS fucking issue, because you don't know what the fuck you are talking about - to top that off motherfucker, I FUCKING BUILT YOUR FUCKING SERVER AND YOUR FUCKING NETWORK. I FUCKING KNOW HOW IT WORKS AND WHAT THE FUCK I AM TALKING ABOUT).

On top of that, I got pushed out of the way of my own PC, my code got some fucked up gibberish in it (because he was trying to minimise my editor and he typed some in it, and now I have to fucking roll-back. He told me I am wasting company time and he will take my shit away from me if I download something again. It is an open network. I downloaded JAVA and fucking updated Sublime. Jesus man. What the fucking fuck.

"why is your gmail open?!?!" because I was testing your emails from an external network. "DON'T FEED ME BULLSHIT" (even though the top mail states "test"). It's the whole fucking "my money determines my dick size" mentality.

That being said, I got told that I need to work overtime, without pay, to resolve IT's issue, even if I have to on the weekend.

That being said,my new Dell that I had just bought (my own) got thrown on the floor and he fucked out of my office. Stupid motherfucker. I fucking earn nothing but cannot leave. I will find another job, and when I do - you can go and fuck yourself and your fucking degrading opinions. I am not fucking stupid, so fuck you.Fuck your company and fuck you. Cunt.

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

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

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

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

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

Manager (via phone): You need to setup the CEO with access to the app IMMEDIATELY

Dev: Ok…What’s the occasion?

Manager: There is a big important meeting right now where we go over our achievements for the year and my plan was to have him log in and play around.

Dev: Likely would have been worth mentioning at this mornings standup.

Manager: Don’t be a smart ass. In fact, if you were actually smart you would have given him an account in the first place! So you’re just an ass then, what kind of idiot doesn’t give the CEO an account to an app like this?

Dev: Actually you specifically asked for him to be removed when I added him. “Unnecessary Optics” you said.

Manager: THAT’S BULLSHIT, I NEVER SAID THAT!!

Dev: It’s in our meeting minutes from 2 years ago.

Manager: STOP WRITING THE THINGS I SAY DOWN IT’S COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

Dev: I’ll make a note of that request

Manager: YOU ABSOL—ok looks like he’s waving me back in the room now the account must be working now bye. *click*.

Dev: Moron.

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

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

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

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

"My cousin said he can do it for less. But I like you so blah blah"

Why don't you go your fucking cousin then. Stop wasting my time.

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

Well today I got a fantastic surprise (truthfully). We hired a dev some months ago, who was on 6 months probation and, to put it politely, he was not going to pass it.

*side note: for details of some of the above, read my last 10 or so rants. They are pretty much all him.

Anyway, management put him on an improvement plan to make sure everything was fair, it wasn't working out, but they said we had to finish it to be fair.

So we had another 2 weeks left when he announced last night he's leaving for a new junior role, technical but not a dev.

Months of stress, heartache, bewilderment, late nights and weekends all just came to an end.

The English language fails me to express my overwhelming joy at this moment. The only way I can come close to it is to say that when he made his announcement, a colleague told me I should stop smiling as it could be taken as being rude.

I'd like to take this moment to thank the community for supporting me over the past few difficult months. Without you I probably would have tried to kill him with my dev rant stressball.

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

True rant:

A student close to my place ask me to help him install some Software.

Me: Sure this does not take long.

Over to his laptop I noticed this weird popup on screen.

he said: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm clicking it away and opens up his browser typing in the address bar the search term for the software.

The Laptop quickly copy and paste my search term into a sketchy search website with not correct results..

Then another popup came again on screen.

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm already internally face palming. but continue my effort to get him his software.

tried different approach on the searching part en trying to click the install button for the software..

and again. my click is high jacketed and it downloads something completely different.

and guess what.. a popup showed up

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

Stop Molesting your laptop dude! Fix your Shit I'm out!

I can't believe this company.

They want to stop using Certificates because it bothers the customer.

I had to use https because we were using service workers for a PWA.

I tried explaining we need them for the product to work, and also it's a basic security measure.

They were removing the certificates without my knowledge.

I found out because a colleague wanted a way to disable the service worker and asked me for help.

The manager said your not the boss of the company, it's not your company to make decisions.

Just do what they say, he tried to justify the decision from above, I said ok when was the last time you installed a certificate? he said never.
Ok, then what the fuck are you talking about, its 10 minutes to get a certificate letscrypt HELLO.

This company is very hierarchical 1900 style, I'm the person who does innovation in the organization, that's the most fucked up part, they say no to everything.
OMG, I'm going to quit.

There just asking to get hacked, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Is this common or are they morons?

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Me and a junior coder are working on a project. However, he likes to think he's funny and say "Ok google" to stop me from using my phone.

He said "Ok google, search midget porn" when I was calling my mom so naturally I need to get back at him, so when he's in the rec room, I backed up all his code on my flash drive, and copied it to the clipboard, and removed all project files from his computer.

He came back while I was in the bathroom, and when I reentered the room and was balling his eyes out, that his project was gone. I said to him, don't ok google me again and I handed him the flash drive back. He has never done anything bad again.

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

So...
I'm penetrationtesting a network and the servers on said network
The network administrator and IT security officer knows this, because they hired me..

TL;DR a scan caused the network to crash.

Today I received a very angry email going "Stop scanning NOW!" from one of the IT departments.

Apparently I crashed their login server and thus their entire network...
It happened d the first time I scanned the network from the outside and they had spend an entire day figuring out how and repairing the service they thought was the problem, but then it crashed again, when I scanned from within the network.

Now they want to send me a list of IP's that I'm not allowed to scan and want to know exactly what and when I'm scanning...

How crap can they be at their job, if they weren't able to spot a scan... The only reason they found out it was me was because the NA had whitelistet my IP, so that I could scan in peace...

Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

A Fellow Ranter said I should introduce myself, so here I go.

Me = {
Gender = "Male",
CodeOfChoise = {"lua", "PHP"},
Age = "28"
Location = "404"
}

No really here we go, I am Rex, I am dyslexic and forget code really badly but it does not stop me from trying to have fun with some ideas, I use mostly PHP these days but when I want to make a quick windows tool I use a app called AMS or AutoPlayMedia Studios what as a nice lua scripting language back end.

I been coding on and off for many years since I was about 15 and I been in love with computers since I was about 6 (don't tell my wife).

So far I like the site, its better then Twitter and Facebook as it's code related and fun to read and some stuff gets the cogs a turning.

I don't have any real foot print in the dev world, I get by but I not here to be loved, or to be big in any field, I am here because I enjoy my tech.

I leave this little introduce me with a question, what was your first or first memorial computer.

Mine was the Acorn A4000 Mixed with parts from the A3000 and A5000's :) she was a little bit of a mix match.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?

Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!

Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?

Dear sales team please stop promising the customer stuff that doesn't exist within the system and then promising them dates for getting said functionality without discussing it with the product team let alone the development team. Also repeating 'but I promised the customer they'd have it by august' will not make 6 months of development work fit into that time frame!

What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.

What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.

Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.

We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.

I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.

This was my rant.

10 years of repeating cycles of the following:

#interview
them: yeah, this is a gamedev position, c#, unity, prototyping, maybe some hololens r&d

me: cool! exactly what i was looking for, as i said a few times, i can't do php anymore, it literally causes me literal deppression.

them: don't worry, we have people for thaz, but we have nobody for c# and unity, with some art skills feel as well as you do.

me: great, glad we're on the same page. i'm taking the job! <3

them: great! oh btw, there's this enterprise intranet app in php that needs some additions, can you please do them?

me: ... what did we talk about during my interview?

them: yeah, but it's just gonna be a short thing, don't worry.

me: ...well...ok, i think i can do that.

*3 to 6 months still on the same, or the next, php enterprise bullshit app. i'm totally exhausted in all ways possible, stressed literally permanently, dreading every day, every new ticket, every meeting every contact with everyone, not able to give a shit about what i do anymore, thinking about suicide*

them: you lazy incompetent fuckup, you're fired!

* i stop communicating and coming out of my room for anything else than toilet, and shopping. stop communicating with my friends, with anyone, anxiety and exhaustion caused by even the thought of talking to anyone about anything, or doing anything, is usually unbearable. i spend 3 to 8 months like this, just sleeping, drinking, watching youtube, sometimes playing games but even that "activity", or rather even the thought of that "activity" is often exhausting. after that time, i kind of recuperate emotionally and mentally, start looking for another unity+c# gamedev job, find it, apply,
goto #interview

CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".

So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.

At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.

A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:

"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.

"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!

I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!

It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.

Dev related: To actually finish my projects instead of working on different ones, and end up finishing nothing.

I said I was going to create my own operating system. I started it, but barely. I haven't touched the compiler I was working on for months. Oh, and I'm working on an android app related to writing. I started it a while back, and never got to finish it.

My need to stop starting new projects, because if I keep doing this, I'll never finish anything.

Non dev related: To get my manuscript out of the slush pile, and finally published. It's currently in the dreadful querying process.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

The story of my webshop with this fuckin' asshole continues! I decided to stop with the webshop as my partner didn't do anything, so I handed over my shares to my business partner. This was done formally at the notary. Immediately after, we agreed that I would hand over everything that same week. 1 day later I cannot access any accounts. He said that a hand over was not necessary and that he took appropriate measures. Now, 4 months later, I got a letter from a collection agency telling me to hand over the tradename. Uhm what? Tradename? I don't own it so I replied that there's nothing to hand over. A day later again a letter that he will sue me if I don't hand over the tradename. Mr. Prick Lawyer, I understand that you mean the DOMAINname, but why the fuck do you keep referring to the tradename?! You too stupid to understand the difference? So, to get rid of this crap I made an offer to sell him the domainname, which he accepted. But mr. Asshole moved the shop to a different hostingprovider thinking that the dns would be magocally updated. Of course not asshole. So I offered (to be cooperative) to update dns so his site will work again. I did. A day later again a letter that site still not reachable and he'd sue me for all damages etc.

What a muppet show! You think ypu can sue me because YOU made a config mistake? He's a funny guy! I told the lawyer to not send me any 'issues' caused by mr. Asshole's unprofessional acting and if he does, I'll charge him for every second spent.

Today mr. Asshole's webshop says 'Apache is functioning normally' and that's it. Well done, asshole! See how eaay my job is and how little knowledge it requires? You proved ypu can do it yourself Big boy! Good luck selling shit on your website. Good luck with your seo rankings. And good luck fucking yourself in the ass!

Now I'm going to sue you because of copyrights violations. You use my software and you don't have a license. Either pay or remove it or I'll make you pay!

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

Got a call while on vacations, the main server is down.
*holy shit* I thought.
As I opened my MacBook, the phone kept ringing and slack was going crazy.

“What should I do? Where is the problem?”, the voices in my head said..

I opened the terminal and tried to get a ssh connection.
Sweat was dropping down from my forehead.

“Connected” the terminal said.

“Fuck yeah, the server is up, only the app is not responding”, I thought and opened the log files.

Suddenly, “STOP” I shout at the log files that were appended way too fast.

Then I saw it.
TimeOutExceptions..

I added an index to the modification date column,“ kill -9“ed the process, started again and went back to vacation mode 🙂

And of course I was the office hero for a while💪

For the smart asses, I’m aware that it’s a bad idea to -9 the app process in prod, but it was so overloaded that i was not able to kill it any other way. And we needed that server up again.

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

A senior developer come to interrupt me.

Senior developer: blah...blah....blah about this concept...... that concept... So, any new things you learn lately that you would like to share?

Me: I am learning back C++
Immediately he stop me and said, "Why did you learn C++? It is obsolete, no one use it anymore"

Me (in my head): But, you just said what I learn. It doesn't matter if its obsolete or not. Infact you are wrong, C++ is not obsolete anytime soon. I was about to share on webassembly.

Senior developer: So, would you like to join me in a short sharing session this afternoon.

Me: No thanks, I am really busy (just want to avoid at any cost)

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

After 16 years of porn addiction, I've finally realized that the only way to stop any addiction, is to take control of your mind. Nobody can help you, except make you realize the source of the problem or factors that cause it.

It's strange to describe how the mind works, sometimes we need stuff in our lives because we need to spend time on something to avoid the emptiness.

Free yourself from the things you love the most, in my case I love playing video games, it helps me feel complete, but in all honesty, I don't need it. I like drinking energy drinks, but in the end, I don't need that too.

My point is that once you find a way to deal with the things you can't live without, you find a way to live with it.

The only reason I watch porn is to reduce stress or have something "fun" to do.

As Bruce Lee once said: Be formless, be shapeless, be water my friend.

I like to think that he means to let the urge flow within you, but don't let it control you.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

For my school coursework, we have to create a search facility, now the problem is my class weren't taught this. So 3 sleepless nights and with basically no knowledge of Javascript, I create it. Now, I like my classmates so I don't want them to fail, so I distributed it to them with clear instructions and told my teacher that I'd done this. They asked for my help anytime it crashed but no-one said thanks, they just treated me like an easy route to a pass. I went onto my school private development forums and it turned out my teacher had created a tag for me called 'Unsung Hero' and made a UH appreciation thread that I could read but others could only type their own post. People in my class were praising me for what I'd done and how much I helped. I understand why I do development and why I'll never stop.

My friend at my office tell me what he did everyday

6.00 am wakeup
6.10 am code while showering (using phone)
8.00 am make a coffee
8.05 am start code
12.00 pm eating lunch
12.10 pm start code
5.00 pm go to home
5.30 pm pickup a phone and do a some socmed
6.00 pm eating
6.10 pm code in pc
11.00 pm sleep

He did that everyday. Im shocked he can code like that. Then i ask him why. He tell me that he loves code so much, everytime he found an error he find a way to solve it and he said it was fun so he cant stop code

I think my boss has brainwashed him :/

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Remote IT work. I had a caller immediately berate and try to insult me because she recognized my very Southern accent wasn't local and I wasn't onsite. They tried to insinuate I wouldn't know what they were talking about with "do you even know what [x] is?" Calmly, I said yes ma'am. This is before she ever got to what her issue was. It was command line things I needed to run to fix it, but she wouldn't stop talking. "Are you even trying to help me or do anything? You must not know what you're doing." I'm a terrible multitasker so I end up sometimes typing what I hear, saying what I read, or zoning out of everything to accomplish a particular thing. So it took me a minute or two longer than normal. But that call wasn't what pissed me off. It was the complete 180 she turned when she emailed in when I resolved the ticket, praising me for how knowledgeable and professional I was, that I almost considered it all a troll.

I don't have very many high emotion stories and neither is this one. I'm pretty laid back, go with it, person.

At a meeting:

"We don't know why <past developer, they all know who this motherfucker is> did it this way but we have to..."

Me: *slams table* no, stop. I am tired of this. Y'all must've really liked this guy. But he did it this way because he was a fucking idiot.
A
Fucking
Idiot
There is no other reason for this amount of fuckery that I have to be bothered to fix and mess with on A DAILY BASIS so I am gonna go ahead and call it as it is. The dude was a damn moron and no one here stopped him. I know he was a janitor here that got his cute lil associates and y'all wanted some good will hunting shit to happen, but <said dumbass developer is no matt damon"

Them: "YOU CaNt JusT UsE ThaT lanGUAGE"

"Am i gonna fix this shit?"

"Well......no one else kno...."

Me: "exactly"

Legit man i am sick and tired of this shit. I did not earn a B.S in comp sci. Graduated in the top percentage of my class, am suffering through my MCS to fix php like a fucking moron all day.The rest of my web devs backed me up.

Aaaand btw..no, it is not my job. I am a fucking analyst, i provide data reports, i program said reports, i am tasked with this shit because i used to work for then as a web tech.....got a different position cuz i was tired of it...fuck me right?

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

Dear Atlassian Support,

In my life I had a lot of experiences...

But your software manages to replace all these experiences with a unique feeling of depression, hatred, anger... Only negative emotions.

Not once have I said anything good about your software - not once in > 5 years.

Whenever your chum bucket of mismanagement and misanthropy stops working, it's never the fault of the end user, the administrator or someone else.

It's entirely your fault.

Fucked up upgrades, lack of documentation, catastrophic handling of logging, lack of support of current database systems, lack of proper migration and clean up of plugins, ....

I could go on. But it's really just and endless tirade.

I wish I could stop management for even giving you money for the pile of poo you call software, but sadly they don't listen.

But there's hope on the horizon.

Thanks for making people go cloud only.

No one wants that.

It would mean entrusting that pile of poo to the craptastic hands of your irresponsible people.

No one really wants that.

Not even management who blindly paid the license fees all the times.

Thank you for your cloud only movement.

Maybe we can finally find an alternative and I can finally start a therapy for the PTSD I have thx to your software.

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

Installed elementaryOS on one of antique PCs at work (language school) because it was struggling with Windows 8...
Convinced the boss to put Linux on his own computer.

Today, the colleague for whom I did this told me that she said to one of her students that some programmer (Meeee 😀) told her to stop using some stupid unsecured local mail providers and to use ProtonMail.

Was very proud... Why life not like this everyday.

Worst guy I ever worked with was a Bulgarian Web dev that had been flown over to work on a few projects to make deadlines run smoother.

He would get offended if I was ever in another meeting without him and send passive aggressive emails then refuse to contribute.

He would storm off if anyone ever criticised his slow work ethic

He went on other team members desktops without permission, under one instance running a command line ddos that the IPS logged straight away and got that person a stern meeting. The Bulgarian guy said he was using it to "learn".

He would take a camera into restricted areas, take pictures and then argue as to why he couldn't do that when security would stop him.

I squashed a bee on his arm out of reflex, he screamed at me that I'm stupid causing a room of over 500 employees to go silent and stare.

Moral of the story, fk that guy

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

I need some advice: How could you stop laughing at a meeting? Help!

Yesterday, in a meeting with the development team, my boss accidentally wrote "Puto System" on the board (of course, I cannot post the real name of the project). For those who don't speak spanish, "Puto" means "asshole".

Oh, I laughed so fucking hard XD Well, we continued with the meeting, but I couldn't stop laughing, and then, I was going to ask a question about one of my tasks, and accidentally said "hard" instead of "boubt" (in spanish "dura" instead of "duda") and all of us laughed again.

At the time I'm writing this post I can't remember that without laughing, help! I need to get serious :'v

Everyone complains that a certain developer's code is not up to standard and when they have to take over his project the lack of code quality is really slowing them down.

I look at code, agree it is poor quality and put together a learning plan for said developer.

Also look at who approved every pull request which allowed bad code into our codebase. Same developers as those complaining it's no good. You had your chance to stop it!

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!

Okay, this has to be said.

I am sick and tired of YouTube web devs who went to bootcamp, developed software for around 1 year, quit… then tell everybody what it’s like to be a “programmer.”

To top it off they become “developer advocates.”

Stop misleading people with your clickbait!

One time at my first dev job, I had a one on one meeting with the international marketing manager. I was like two weeks into the job as a contract front end dev, and some how got placed into this random meeting with someone I didn’t know. Anyways, I show up to the meeting room, sit down, and she started talking about some ecom site that was going to launch soon. Then a list of features she wanted to get my insight on like analytic events, gdpr, cta modals etc I can’t remember tbh. After 5 minutes of her non stop blabbering I finally stopped her to say I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about, I didn’t know who the right person she was supposed to talk to is, and I only accepted the meeting because she said there was food(donuts). She was pretty embarrassed after that, but continued to keep talking for another 15 minutes about the job and how do I like it etc. Whole thing took 25 minutes, and I missed out on afternoon ping pong. Worst meeting ever.

If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong ~ House MD

Tl;Dr : I'm pissing the right people off and my God I like it

That's what I've known and have confirmed doing my current side project with my gf, we are working on a ratemyprofessors clone with extra spicy features, one in particular is so spicy some teachers will be put in a position in which they would rather grind hot peppers with their butt cheeks.

Don't get me wrong, there are good teachers (some of which actually showed support) but some are not good teachers and some aren't good people either; I've decided it's time to stop complaining and take action.

We recently released an alpha and I presented it to a teacher I had this semester (one of the "not so great" kind) as a DB proyect cuz fuck it I'm not doing 2 projects.

This teacher is your run of the mill "I'm lazy and I don't care" teacher and she ran the classroom like a shitty kindergarten, so much so, one of the teams was presenting a buggy admin site as their project and she started talking on the phone! Right up on their faces!!

My turn, I go up and handle her a 30 page printed thesis of my project and said that unlike my mates, I was going to start presenting the idea and then the actual software...why is it printed?, She said; Because I won't be projecting the PDF ma'am, I actually made a professional presentation and that way you can read more technical details while I give a broad overview...

I started talking about the huge issues students face and my research about it, undisciplined teachers, no class structure ~ abrupt interruption ~ "yeah I know like, you are giving so much statistics and numbahs but where is the database?"

I got pissed off because the whole purpose of printing and giving her the docs was for her to ask specific questions AT THE END! So I told her I was getting there and to ask questions at the end...I start showing off the system's sweetest features... everyone got quiet...a girl on the front row kept looking at the teacher and then back to the board with her eyes wide open, the teacher was visibly upset.

I asked someone to please help me by using the site being projected for everyone to see, he searched the teacher's name and it obviously popped up cuz I scrapped the whole teacher index site... some people gasp and others start murmuring.

She freaked and started arguing saying that frontend can't be just HTML and CSS, where did you mentioned x and y feature? admit it's just teacher evaluations! where did you get the teacher names? I want the scripts!....it went on even 10 minutes after class and the next class with a police like interrogation.

So yeah, something tells me I'm not getting an A, but I'm happy after all because that's the kind of reaction I want from those types of professors.

Worth it 😎

In 15+ years of full time work as a C++ software engineer there is one tool that I always hated: CMAKE. What a fucking pile of shit, seriously, every time there is project that uses it I simply cannot build said project with one click. In all these 15 years working in different companies the only reason people speak about cmake is to avoid adding source files to multiple projects (VS, XCode, Android).

I'm not some kind of newbie: I've make cmake projects myself, I've build hundrends of projects that use cmake and I even contributed fixes to their code. I still believe that cmake is garbage that should stop to exist.

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

Got it in WhatsApp...😃😂😂
I am sure you will have a laugh too

A wealthy manager was driving in his car when he saw two men along the roadside eating grass. Disturbed by the sight, he ordered his driver to stop and he got out to investigate. He asked one man "Why are you eating grass?"

"We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass." "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you" the manager said.

"But sir, I have a wife and five children with me. They are over there, under that tree".

"Bring them along," the manager replied. Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You come with us also."

The second man, in a pitiful voice then said, "But sir, I also have a wife and seven children with me!"

"Bring them all, as well," the manager answered.
They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large as it was.

One of the poor fellows turned to mr. Manager and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you."

The manager replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place; the grass is almost 1 meter high!"

Lesson: Never trust managers... They will take u to any extreme to finish their job.

And there is nothing like KIND MANAGERS 😜

Dedicated to all managers and upcoming managers 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂LOL😜😡😡

Since my first high salary dev job in 2018 and until 2021, despite all my attempts to explain, my mom thought that I’m not actually a programmer but rather a scammer that just makes companies pay me salary for nothing. The argument that being a legit programmer is way easier than being a scammer mastermind fell on deaf ears.

Do you know why I said she thought so until 2021? Because I stopped talking to her in 2021 when she said that “being bisexual is a sin” and “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming out.

update of after i got fired: after the fuck developers company llc was left with no developers, there was a girl there that i didn't mention earlier because as i said: the story is more complex. she came there with good intentions but after she knew the cruel nature of fuck and shit she became notoriously mad, we're still in contact with her so it's nice to hear from her some of the gags that happen there, one of which my really intelligent ex-boss the wordpress DEVELOPER himself told her to finish one of the projects i was working on, and a friend of mine who is infamous of his coding shenanigans left it in my hands before he left as well a couple of months prior (well he was fed up before us, and when i told him to stay with us he said "dude just listen to the motherfucker's voice, i can't do this anymore", my lovely ex-boss has this equally lovely screechy high pitched voice that caused me tinnitus), it's an asp.net project, uses web forms, and a lot of apis, the database is sql server, standard shit but there's no original creation script and i fucked up the only existing database which was in a local computer he used to like calling a SERVER, now to the point: this girl is not a developer, she was however working as a reporter?? kind of like jaspersoft the human or sap crystal woman and she claims that she's pretty good at it, and she's a genuinely good person who was dragged to hell just because she wanted to be close to her daddy (she was working in a different city with more than double the salary she's given now), but she's rich and her dada convinced her to come. she's currently learning java ee on her own so she'd probably leave in the next two months, in her resume she wrote that she know php, well i know php you know php we all know php (the syntax) kind of like mr. shit who passed the sololearn php CERTIFICATE and couldn't stop telling his boss and his boss a.k.a my ex-boss goes "sweet!". going back to the punchline of this rant: she told us that he came to her and asked her to finish the project with php.

This female collegue whom I used to hangout during tea and lunch has suddenly started hanging out with another female collegue.

I'm alone, sad and overthinking is killing me. I asked her if there is something I said or did that made her hang out with someone else.

She said it's not a big deal and I should stop creating drama. I think I lost my self-respect while facing her about this.

Here's a real tip for people new to the industry.

It's one of those things that's been said over and over again but very few can really seem to employ. I suggest you learn it /well/.

You are not your code. Criticisms of your code, ideas, or your thought processes, is not a criticism of YOU. You absolutely cannot take criticisms of your work personally.

We are engineers. We strive to seek the best solution at all times.

If someone has found a problem with your code or with an idea or whatnot, it is coming from a place of "this is not the best solution", NOT "you're an idiot".

It's coming from a place of "I'm closing this PR because it is not a change I feel suits this project", NOT "I'm closing this PR because it's coming from a woman".

It's coming from a place of "This feature request is ridiculous/this bug is not actually a bug", NOT "you're a fucking idiot, fuck you".

It's coming from a place of "I've already had to address this in a number of issues before and it's eaten up a considerable amount of my time already", NOT "I don't even know you and this I don't have time for a nobody".

You do not get to be bitchy to maintainers because they denied your request. It's not a reflection of you at all. But if you're arguing with someone who has maintained a piece of code for almost a decade, and they're telling you something authoritative, believe them. They're probably smarter than you on this subject. They've probably thought about it more. They've probably seen their code used in many different places. They have more experience than you with that codebase in almost all cases.

Believe me, if we cared about who was behind all of the issues, pull requests, etc. we get, we'd get NOTHING done. Stop taking shit personally. It's a skill, not a defense mechanism. Nobody has the time to sugar coat every little thing.

Let's normalize directness and stop wasting time during technical discussions into opportunities for ego-stroking and circle-jerking and back-patting.

"This pub is famous for its pork dishes. And I usually buy liquor from that stop, quality approved."

- one dev friend

// said "best advice"
// not "best dev advice"

Positive internship update :)
I have asked the store department chief if I can stop working with heavy objects.
He said "of course".

I will just do light tasks. I am fine with that :)

I was just a junior developer, and the senior interviewer had just left for a quick break.

And, I had to interview one dude for the post of Web Designer (we were not asking for experienced devs). And, then he comes up, opens his laptop, goes to a folder and opens an html file that turns out nothing but a "Save Page as.." of one News Website. Seriously, I just said nothing, asked him a bunch of questions and off he goes. I could not stop laughing later.

!dev

I come from a small shitty valley where all that people want to achieve is getting approved for loans to buy more cows and shit.. My only friend comes from there as well but he’s different, more like me.. build a life, get out and pursuit something better and bigger..
We grew up smoking everything we could and drinking everything we got because what else are we gonna do, put shit on fire? Been there, done that.. it sucks growing up on the poop hole of the world.
We both left that shithole and started careers but he’s throwing it all out the window.. he’s getting caught with weed, DUI and shit. just a few years ago he got off of more serious drugs.. He built a career and shit for about 10 years but right now he’s just throwing it all away because drugs are in his comfort zone. But he has to go give Pias samples for a while now and if he doesn’t stop he is not getting his license back and the unemployment insurance won’t even pay him because (although he lost the job because of Covid) they said it’s because he smokes weed.
Without the license goes his career as he’s a service electrician.

So fucking hurtful to see, man.
And so hard to accept that he won’t listen and than I’m not his dad who can tell him what to do..

90% of the kids I grew up with who managed to leave that shit hole ended up as homeless junkies.. I guess I’m happy to have the mindset to not end up like them.. and that’s really all it is, the mindset is the only difference (which is complex in itself of course like parenting and stuff)

Me: Asking a lot of junior questions
Dev: Stop! Before you ask another question - think for 10 minutes, google another 15 minutes and if you don't find anything - ask me.

^ This was the best thing he said, after that I can google pretty much anything, and hell, I even go to 5-th page of the google from time to time!

So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.

It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.

I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.

4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.

Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊

Not exactly a dev story, but an annoying experience overall. So, I was going to a Starbucks near me, I was too lazy to drive to the nearest shop that sells coffee, so I just went here. I was beginning my work (updating one of my old programs to a usable level). I was downloading some libraries from github for the project, as a middle-aged woman walks behind me. She looks at my laptop, and sees a terminal screen with git clone running. Now, I can understand, that if you aren't proficient at technology, a terminal can look suspicious. But she straight up said: "Stop hacking our passwords, it's illegal!". At this point, she walks over and asks the manager to come look. The manager comes, and calls their "IT guy". The supposed IT guy comes over, chuckles a bit and walks away. The manager proceeds to kick me out, and give me a warning to not come again.

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!

Really getting tired of these web design ads. I would turn on Adblock but I want to support YouTubers that are actually interesting to watch. I saw this ad today, Divi. A plugin of some sort for WordPress and the lady in the video is talking about how building a website is like painting a master piece but not​ really. And then goes on about "creating" a website with their tool on the page itself. (Like a Wix or Weebly but on the actual page and live). I watch the video to the end and decide to check the comments and someone said "or you know, learn HTML and stop being lazy" *liked* then one smart ass replied, "or use Wix, or use Weebly, or use any other thing online that lets you design a website without typing code". It annoys me how ignorant people can be about designing, but I don't blame them. People are lazy in general and would want to do things the easy way even though it's not the best way. You know the saying, give a man a CMS or WYSIWYG builder and he'll make a website, but teach a man to code and he'll make more, improved websites.

During my first year of working, I was offered to work part-time at another company. I actually took it to my supervisor and asked for his advice.

He began with a sigh, he knows that I like programming so much and wants the job because I wanna do more programmings. He gathered his thoughts and said calmly, "Look, I cannot stop you if you want to, but think about this, you already are doing programming for five days a week here. Take those extra times you have to develop other parts of yourself. Go learn public speaking or something" or something along that line.

I gave it a deep thought, took the advice, and rejected the offer. I eventually went on to commit myself on volunteering for the next two and a half years, and secured a promotion about a year from that conversation because my supervisor sees improvements in my communications with others and my soft skills in general (unlike programming, you can't volunteer in an organisation without speaking to people).

Sometimes we programmers only wanna code that we forget that what we're building are for humans and involves other humans. You wanna be the best at work? Try to grow on your horizontal axis, too.

Allright, this is my first rant here, but I just couldn't hold it anymore. Today our teacher had us enumerate the computer hardware components and describe their function. So I got to describe RAM and I said that RAM is used to hold data temporarily. The moment I said that, the teacher yelled that it is totally wrong and RAM doesn't contain any data. I really got pissed off, because this is a type of arrogant teacher who always knows everything better than anyone else. How this kind of people even get to teach others?! I swear that if she wasn't a teacher I would tell her she is dumb. If it is not data in RAM, then am I holding 8GB of air in my RAM sticks or what? I am so outraged right now that I cannot stop telling everyone about it...

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Blabbering co-worker rant.

So this bonker who speaks non-stop for 15 minutes without even a breather break is more annoying than I thought.

1. She used to work for a project A and then they moved her to my project. She kept cribbing she wants to continue working on A because that's where her expertise are. So management hired a new team member so she can continue on A and new member can work with me.

Now next week, the new member is joining us. As we prepare the onboarding plan, bonker comes crying that she wants to work on my project and NOT on Project A. She is forcing us to give Project A to new team member.

Manager upfront rejected her proposal and told her that she'd be working on A.

2. She literally gives orders. Her tone is rude and blunt. The other day ordered me to review her presentation and kept following up even when I said I was busy. Same tone and attitude with manager.

Then she complained about my behaviour saying I was a bossy person even when I used the most polite tone (because I have actively worked on and built my social skills).

3. Knows shit about the product, has no skill set, asks the same question 10 times, and isn't able to deliver bare minimum.

And then evidently everyone follows up with me because I am on top of everything (because I have to as bonker can't function).

4. She lied to me that company gives good hikes and easy promotions.

She was kicked out of her previous project because of her incompetency.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my manager saved her ass. But she literally is the most stupid person I have worked with me in my entire career.

5. She has no communication skills, something that is highest valued skill in my profession. And when I do my normal, it pisses her off. She keeps complaining that I am overstepping.

If I don't then product will just fall apart and everyone might get fired because of no work.

And that is causing her insecurities and she starts fear mongering about both of us being fired.

I told our manager upfront that I want to lead the product and she was more than happy about the proposal. What sucks is that my manager is leaving this month end and I'll have to build trust with my new line manager.

Ugh!! She is annoying..

Just started a new job yesterday in Software Config. I mentioned automating something that could be easily automated, and my coworker looked up and said "You're trying to automate 80% of my job. Stop."... This is my life now.

I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.

Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.

However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.

Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!

My wife is sick, my infant daughter is teething, and my toddler son won't stop begging for fruit snacks. I haven't slept more than 4 hours in the last 48 hours.

And now, I have to work on my weekend, since our division refuses to say "No, that wasn't in the scope of work" to another business unit and put them in their place. They're lucky they're getting the feature they requested 6 weeks from launch _at all_, let alone with the extras that they requested 4 weeks from launch. Now it's on my shoulders to fix this bullshit because they won't pony up extra budget to pay the external dev shop we used (who failed to implement said features in a timely fashion) to fix this shit.

I really need to get my business shit together and start consulting on my terms. Working for other people can suck a fuck.

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

My client thinks Internet Explorer is the only Internet Browser in the world. I argued with her for 10 minutes then I noticed she felt a bit stupid. I was afraid she might stop further payment so I said "I was just joking, you can chill now".

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

I really hate the childish corporate culture at some tech companies. Today I received my Christmas "gift" from my employer. It was a branded chocolate bar and a sticker pack. The stickers were designed by our UX designers, and the stickers look like they are made for little toddlers at kindergarten. The stickers said things like "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!". Jesus Christ, are we little kids? The average age of an employee at my company is around 30 years old, and those are the stickers you give us? Stickers are childish anyways, but it seems like 50% of my autistic colleagues seem to like putting those ugly things on their laptops to lick the boots of upper management.

The office itself literally looks like a kindergarten. There's LEGO artwork on the walls and the "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!" nonsense and similar motivational bullshit is plastered on all the walls. Seriously, who ever thought it's a good idea to tell 30 year old adults to "make friends!". I already have my friends, I don't need to be friends with anyone at work, and I definitely don't need to be told to do so!

Even funnier than that is the fact that the whole "To The Moon!" bullshit is a phrase introduced by upper management to symbolize their effort and wish to make our company bigger and stronger by having a bigger market share. Basically it's the rich peeps from upper management telling us to work harder and make them more successful. Today I had a meeting in which they told me they wouldn't increase my salary because they have a tight budget this year because of the economic problems we're currently facing. But that doesn't stop them from childishly motivating us with bullshit like "To The Moon!" so they can become richer themselves, while the little people at the bottom of the pyramid need to work harder without extra pay.

The most annoying part of this is that many employees lick the boots of upper management and go along with all this bullshit. God I hate cringy childish corporate culture so much.

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

FUUUUuuuuuuu....
No, just no! I said I don't want you restart right now! Or ever! Dafaq duuude!? I thought we had a deal?! You don't update, I don't rant about you!? Well fuck you too!! Deal's off! I hate you, Loki, I hate you!! Stop restarting & updating when I'm tryin to relax & watch series!!

I don't need you to reiterate what the problem is. I am aware. I was the one who told you what the problem is. Via email and Slack. Why do you keep restating it to me like you are the one who figured out? I know the table isn't syncing with the third party object. I'm trying to figure out WHY. No amount of "I'm pretty sure the sync process is broken" will trigger a solution. Stop coming into my office every 5 minutes with a new "revelation" that wasn't even your own. This isn't my code, and since the owner of said code is not here to fix it, I have to spend some time figuring out how this damn thing works. SO PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME WORK SO I CAN FIX THIS

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

Write a piece of code that works just fine and it's fairly extensible in 20 minutes.

Then proceed to spend the rest of your night rethinking and replacing said piece of code numerous times, with slightly more elegant code.

7 hours later and I'm still not done. Although a fine way to improve your skills, I seriously need to stop doing that for every single thing I write and start managing my time better. Got lots of other stuff I need to be working on...

Surely I can't be the only one doing this

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

(in 2008)
my boss in my first job. in general every time when he randomly burst into office. one specific time when he burst i to office and INSISTED that we've got to go to a parking lot to see something.

that something was a remote-controlled helicopter he just bought. (this was before the age of drones).

oh, and he was a chain smoker, always had a cigarette behind his ear (wat), and was dragging me out to have a smoke (i was the only other programmer smoker, but not as heavy as him) every 10-15 minutes under the implied pretense of needing to discuss something about the code, and frowned heavily when i refused (because i was actually in the middle of actual work), because he took it as me refusing to have a work meeting with him.

no, we almost never talked about anything work-related, while on that smoke "work meeting".

also, my boss' boss in my first job, when she entered the office asking "we need a clickable map of our country where clicking each region brings you to a search page with filter set to results from that region. how would we do that?"

i answered "html imagemap linking to the right search url for each region, or embedded flash doing the same, if you want the region buttons to be animated", and turned back to my work.

upon which she proceeded to talk about it with the second programmer, both pretending they're solving some aspects that my answer didn't already solve, INSISTING that i stop doing "whatever nonsense you're doing" and pretend that i'm paying attention as if anything they said was in any way relevant or important. i kept returning to my work because i was solving an annoying bug and their talk was empty and useless.

this second incident was then cited as one of the reasons i was let go, because "he ignores important conversations with his superiors about upcoming tasks"

in general, my first job was a shitshow where nobody had any time or energy to do actual work because they all expended all of it to PRETEND for their superiors that they're working, since the superiors had no clue how it looks when we actually do our actual jobs.

(one month after i was let go (because, in my boss' words, yes, the one with the helicopter, "the IT productivity is very low and I have to hold someone responsible") , the second programmer was let go as well, and one month after that, our boss (head of IT) was let go too. to this day I keep being fascinated how did the company manage to survive long enough for me to even be there, let alone how it STILL manages to survive. i guess being part of a nation-wide conglomerate is very effective in covering your company's losses and uselessness)

Note to self: never EVER buy iPhone again. “It won’t stutter after a year”, they’ve said.
Right now my 6s is just one big overheating piece of mess. Right now I have to charge it 3 times a day. Resprings randomly. Very often discharges 2% per minute. All the time lacks memory. iCloud picture syncing SUCKS. The Lightning cable is the worst excuse for buying overpriced cables which will break after a half of year. The only plus is a camera, how easy it is to update the iOS, included earbuds, iMesssage (but I use WhatsApp nonetheless) and battery widget.

And that’s it.

If someone says ever again that “iOS is the best operating system, it doesn’t have any issues whatsoever”, I would say “stop doping”, because I don’t see why it’s so great. Just while typing this rant my battery decreased from 25% to 15%

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

!dev

Just wanna share yesterday nights story because I really really enjoyed it..

Have been to Galway with a friend.
Went to the pubs and 2 Irish girls tried to speak French - just for fun. A French guy wanted to flirt with them and said: “you British girls are so cute when you try to talk French.”
The girl completely freaked out and screamed at him: “ DONT YOU FUCKING DARE TO CALL AS BRITISH..” and the second girl started singing in the middle of all the people: “Come out ya Black and Tans, come out and fight us like a man”..

Ended with those girls trying to stop other Irish guys from beating up that French guy.

Few pubs later at 2:30am walking to the car (driver didn’t drink) when the “irish Jesus” (YouTuber) walks by and asks us if we have “something”, he really needs to get stoned 😂

Best night ever..

No offense to the British here, I assume you’re familiar with your shared history;)

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

I have an Android phone. Pixel 2 to be exact, and I love it. Many family members and friends of mine have iPhones. To each their own.

Having said that, I absolutely HAAAATE the stupid iPhone feature that lets users react to text messages. Today all those iPhone users added me to literally 5 different SMS groups (which by themselves are their own sin), chatting up a storm all evening. I already hate group texts, please, leave me alone. But it gets so much worse when my phone blows up with twice as many messages because so-and-so "liked" this message, and so-and-so "laughed" at that message. It sends you their chosen verb alongside the ENTIRE original text AGAIN.

Such a stupid feature, leave Facebook on Facebook, why the hell do text messages need reactions? I don't give a shit that you liked or laughed or loved that so and so said they will be there at 9 o clock.

At least i have the ability to mute notifications for each group otherwise I'd be replying to every group text I get with a trolling big trigger item or something super inappropriate until they stop. Don't want this to continue? Stop group texting me, stop reacting to texts, and don't do it again.

Amazon's AWS support sent me an email about a request to support that I sent to billing, saying they sent it to billing. They then said they couldn't help.

I just need them to stop billing me for things I no longer use!

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

// My First Rant

We have a developer that almost everyone adjust to what he want to avoid talking or working with him.

I have office mates that doesn't want to give tasks to him just to avoid working with him.

Even our devOps guy just did what he want so he would stop talking.

One bad experience of our devOps guy with him is that his infrastructure or other AWS stuff was blame why his APIs is not working. It turns our that his url for the database has FUCKING SPACES.

Not sure if a good practice but he wants the base url of our Endpoint to be set in environment variables instead of having DEV/PROD/TESTING and base the endpoint from there.

He said that he was given permission to study a language but he doesn't even ask for permission.

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

It’s time for me to thank people who, through their work, defined me as a person.

Thank you Terry A. Davis. You completely obliterated my whole narrative of “being incapable because of mental state”. Your example is the reason I’m privileged enough to type this right now, you’re the reason I survived depression. You showed me how to overcome FOMO once and for all by just doing what I’m supposed to as good as I can. Fame will come. And indeed, it came.

You’re not the smartest programmer who ever lived. Only humans can be programmers. You’re a superhuman. You’re not the smartest programmer. You’re just the smartest.

May you rest in peace.

——

Thank you Richard Matthew Stallman. You showed me that the good which also can fight is a thing. You taught me to be afraid of nothing. You taught me how to be an immovable object, no matter the unstoppable force opposing. Because of you I can freely interact with people and my illness has no influence on who I am.

——

Thank you Håkon Wium Lie. You showed me that the ways of overcoming and suffering aren’t the only ones. You’re charming yet uncompromising, empowering yet never reckless. Since we met, in any troubling social interaction my brain automatically thinks “What would Håkon do?”, and somehow it’s always able to find a solution that doesn’t involve the cruelty that always dictated what I said and what I did.

You can already stop doing good things because you’re surely going to heaven with other golden retrievers but I know you’ll never stop.

This is kind of personal but wait for the conclusion.

I'm having bad migraines. I used to have them like 10 years ago and recently they came back. The only way to stop an attack is to lie down in a dark room for a few hours and then it's back the next day. CT scan shows nothing. My neurologist shrugged and prescribed some meds. They sometimes take the pain from 8 to 6 on a 0-10 scale, sometimes they do nothing. I stopped working on the weekends and it got better, no more migraines on Saturday morning. So I took few weeks of time off and not a single migraine until the last day.

My shrink said I'm allergic to work.

I fucked up.

I shared information that should have never been said with my wife.

Now she knows and she won't leave it alone.

It's changed her perception of me, clearly, and she's made several comments that have bothered me for a couple reasons.

In either case, the damage is done and there's nothing I can do to stop this shit train from rolling me over.

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

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.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

Ah transports

Minding my own business in a crowded train, listening to full blast music. As the song changes I sort of heard an announcement but didn't get the subject.

Guy in front of me does a 180° and starts talking to me. I thought he wanted some guidance, so I removed my headset and never did I regret more doing that, that guy just went on and on about his life and stuff that I don't care about, until he got off his stop. Ironically, before he left off he said "you know my mama always told me that you should ignore people you're not interested in" (Forest Gump Swiss edition? He didn't have a box of chocolates though)

I was like "yes, fuck off, not interested in your bullshit", but well, noticed he might be sensitive.

After he left some teens just came and pretended I didn't exist as they invaded my corporal space. Pushed one gently as he was leaning on to me a bit too much.

People must see me as a help point, you know those terminals where you can browse stuff... That's me. The Father of them all.

30hr non stop programming during university. Self proclaimed "best programmer" did not have shit the day before the deadline while he said he was done 2 weeks before that.
He also proclaimed being the "best leader" and kept trying to take that role from the one we decided on before he joined the group.
He also proclaimed amd lied about making all the documentation to save his own ass and trowing us under the bus while we did not even mention saving his ass.
And much more.

My blood still starts to boil when i see the guy.

I'm fucking tired of putting my efforts into bug fixes.

5 years of web. I never had a client that likes to keep it's crappy slow piece of shit product on the market in the exact same way it is.

If they didn't sell it to state employees (and good luck for them if they do not use it) their product would be dead.

That's the only way they get money: bids. And the minimum a state pays is 15 MILLION.

And they don't have 90K to pay another dev to help creating a new product.

Their CEO fucking REJECTS anything that's not a bug fix. Once he said to our PM:

"It's pretty and more fast, but wasn't this way that made me rich"

I'm thinking I'm getting another client, seriously. Everyday the same thing breaks and they already know the fucking answer:

WE NEED TO FUCKING REFACT

CREATE A NEW FUCKING PROJECT

This shit is making crazy. I can't sleep. I can't eat and I'm always fucking tired, no matter what I do.

I need to stop working for Brazilians.
I'll try US, Canada or somewhere in Europe.

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...

TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it

FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.

I hate those persons...

*sigh*

Don't do this.

Person does it.

Don't do it. We are currently overworked and this _must_ be a project every team agrees on. Otherwise it will end exactly like it is currently - a big mess that every team implemented differently.

2 hours later....

Person books time for said project.

Other team lead: Stop working on it. This makes no sense.

Person: yeah... But I needed to clean it up anyways, so I just started cause why not.

--

Me and the other team lead had a 5 min discussion about it shortly after...

Wasn't the first time said person has gone solo rogue *sigh*

Despite that this is driving me (and the other team lead) nuts...

WHY THE FRIGGING FUCK DOES HE ALWAYS DO IT WHEN WE ARE SO FUCKING OVERWORKED....

Really. Every fucking time this mother tugging bullshit kindergarten play.

I think it's the first time that I said: I don't care - I'll just trash his work when we start on the project as a team in 2 months (Yeah... That's realistic. 2 months minimum...).

The universe really has it's way to make me angry.

I hope he stops tomorrow, we really cannot deal with emotional bullshit at the moment.

*gooozfraba*

How can such fuckwads exist....

Three things for me:

- when the mentor whom I admire said that I've kept growing non-stop and would have some discussions about how to execute things as an equal.

- when I more than doubled my salary in less than a year

- when I started to recognize code smell and bad code practices on the PRs