A rare bug appeared. It was my duty to finish it.

SH = Manager

SH: So when do you think you can finish the task?
Me: I still have to analyze the problem. Give me a moment and I'll get back to you.
SH: Alright.

*An hour later*

SH: *Approaches my desk* Have you found the source of the problem?
Me: Not yet. Please give me some more time.
SH: Ok.

*An hour later*

SH: *the approach* You found it yet?
Me: Yes, I've found the the source of the problem, But... *explains the problem and thus concluding that it's a complicated bug*
SH: Can you finish it by tomorrow?
Me: I'll do the best I can but I am not entirely sure if I can finish it by tomorrow.
SH: OK great!

*The next day*

SH: *Le approach* Hey I have a colleague here that may be able to solve the problem, he has skills with XYZ. Ok, I will leave you two at it then. *the leave*
Helper: So can you tell me about the issue here?
Me: *explains the bug and the source of the problem*
Helper: Have you tried solution A?
Me: Yes sir, but it yields a different output... *explains what happened with solution A*
Helper: Well, that won't work. What about solution B?
Me: I've tried that, too. *Another lengthy explanation*
Helper: Welp, ok. I'll get back to you on that.

(...But he never came.)

*A few hours later*

SH: *A.P.P.R.O.A.C.H.* Hey I have this team lead from another department. I think he can help you out on this one. *L.E.A.V.E.*
Helper 2: What seems to be the problem?
Me: *Explains again with all the solutions I tried but failed*
Helper 2: Wow. That really seems to be a complicated problem.
~~
Me (In my head): -_-
~~
Helper 2: Listen, I need to get back to my team. I'll keep you posted if I happen to find a solution for your problem alright?
Me: Alright thanks.

*Towards the end of the day*

SH: *APPROACHHHH* Have you resolved the bug yet?
~~
Me (In my head): You made me spend half the FUCKING day explaining to these people who didn't even give a piece of FUCKING SHIT to contribute to the problem and you are asking me if I am done with this FUCKING BUG? FUCK YOU, YOU SON OF A -
~~
Me: No, it is not finished yet..
SH: You have to finish this because we don't have tomorrow.
~~
Me (In my head): SHDIFHWISGSIFGSISBAUDBEIQBDIWGFIEBWIDHWIQBDOSBCISBDOSHDIAGSUSVDIFBDKDJWIQKDBDIDGSUWVDIABDIXBSIDBDIDBWUWGUSVDUWVDJQBDUDVWISHDUWVFG
~~

I went home for the day.

A tcp packet walks in to a bar and says “I want a beer”, barman says “you want a beer?” and tcp packet says “yes, a beer” .

In high society, TCP is more welcome than UDP. At least it knows a proper handshake.

A bunch of TCP packets go into a bar, until it’s overcrowded. The next day, half as many go in.

A bunch of TCP packets walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hang on just a second, I need to close the window.”

When I try to send SYNs to chicks, I don’t get any ACKs. Just FINs and RSTs.

IP packet with TTL=1 arrives at bar. Bartender: “Sorry, can’t let you leave…and you don’t get any beer either…” 

The worst part about token ring jokes is that if someone starts telling one while you are telling yours, all joking stops.

The great thing about TCP jokes is that you always get them.

The problem with TCP jokes is that people keep retelling them slower until you get them.

I would tell some UDP jokes too but I never know if anyone gets them

The best thing about UDP jokes is that I don’t care if you get them or not.

I had a funny UDP joke to tell, but I lost it somewhere...

The sad thing about IPv6 jokes is that almost no one understands them and no one is using them yet.

I tried to come up with an IPv4 joke, but the good ones were all already exhausted.

A DHCP packet walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Bartender says: “here, but I’ll need that back in an hour!

DHCP jokes only work when there is only one person telling them

The worst part of SSH jokes is that, even when they're not funny, you suck it up and just pretend they were anyway.

The problem with token ring jokes is you need to wait your turn to laugh

I’d make a joke about UDP, but I don’t know if anyone’s actually listening…

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

I have this old lady that I help from time to time with her computer issues.

She is nice, so I feel compelled to help her.

Get a call one day.

Lady : "hello, my internet and email isn't working, I've tried everything, could you maybe help me?"

Me : "Sure, ill come over after work and check it out"

*arrive at her house*

Lady : "you see, none of the web pages load, and my email refuses to sync. Should I call (insert isp name), or can you fix it?"

Me : I'm sure I can get it, gimme a sec.

*find the issue in a sec or two, dunno how to tell her about it, she isn't totally stupid*

Me : "Uhh, I don't know if you checked, but the ether.. internet cable isn't plugged in"

Lady : *realizes the wtf moment I'm having, obviously feeling very stupid*

Me : "Don't worry, happens to the best of us"

Obviously I lied a little, most of us would probably check the damn cable. Sometimes is just better to make people not feel like its their fault. People learn better when they don't feel like something is making a fool of them.

I have helped this lady with so many things that are just straight out of this world.

The one time she tried emailing 37mb tiff files over her 315kbps network.

Another time she said her email was not syncing, so I went to her house and clicked the "sync" button.

She even once phoned me to get their wifi password.

I just like helping her, somehow it makes me feel as if we all have something to learn.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

Hi there fellas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for reading 😊

!rant

New job (first CS job).

Day 1: Install Ubuntu
Day 2: Dev said "it was so cute when he asked if he could uninstall windows." Also, first pair programming with engineer of 12 years. First commit (he did all the work, I just tried keeping up."
Day 3: "Here, try this bug " nearly get there. Have to leave early. Team event (Group VR experience, was wicked fun with drinks afterwards. Turns out boss man is a total bad ass. Swam with sharks and giant Wales)
Day 4: Fix bug. Notice odd behaviour. Fix that too. (All on my own). Code review: "This, that but works and is good." Get asked if I want to go to customer to do A, B and C. Tell Boss I only know B. He said "Tell me what you need for A and C."

I'm so God damn happy.

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?

Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!

Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?

GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!

I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.

it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google

THANK YOU FOR NOTHING

A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.

also, whats up with

AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);

ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????

WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?

Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!

Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!

Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!

THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!

thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.

If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!

fuckers.

!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Me: Hi Guys, theres no docs on our custom push notification / deeplinking implementation. I've tried to work backwards from a QA testing doc to add new links. Can someone tell me if this is all ok? It seems to behave a little weird.

Dev: Looks ok, but we've moved to the braze platform for sending notifications. You'll need to trigger braze notifications now. Test that it works ok with that <confluence-link>

*hour later*

Me: I've tried the debugging tool, both with my payload and one of the samples from the link. It displays on the phone, but tapping it doesn't trigger the deeplinking.

Dev: No it works, try one of these <screenshot of samples I used>

*hour later*

Me: Tried it again on the real device to make sure, as well as on develop and master. Not working with those samples or mine.

Dev: No it does. It comes in here in this library <github link to line of code>

Me: ... Nope, debugged it, it doesn't get passed the next 'if' check on the next line as its missing a key/value. The whole function does nothing.

Dev: Oh do you want to send a braze notification?

Me: ..... you told me I had too .... yes I guess.

Dev: ok for a braze notification it works different, send this <entirely different sample no where on the link>

Me: ...... but ..... this is only for braze notifications ..... why .... all the samples have deeplink url's .... but they don't ....... are you ..... FFS!!!!! !@#?!

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Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Just learned that my employer withhold part of my salary every month the past 5 months! I did not notice it as it was overtime compensation.

I first thought maybe it was a mistake so I asked, the reply I got was: Oh you know that compensation we agreed upon? I wasn't having it anymore so I decided to half it and been since then editing the hours you billed every week to reflect that and accedently forget to tell you.

Accedently?! My ass! One week is believable but not 20 weeks. The only reason I found out is that they tried to lower the compensation even further which caused these hours to show up differently in the hour declaration software we use.

So currently on my way to return company's property and quit.

So I'm on stack overflow trying to give back to the community that has helped me so much yanno.

So I see a question and decide to answer it but I'm on my mobile and trying to write a well formatted etc. answer is a bit tricky so instead I thought I would answer it as best I could on the phone so at least the OP would be going in the right direction and then when I got back to my computer, I would expand on the answer.

But before I had a chance (within 10 minutes of answering) some 200k+ rep dickhead decided it was his job to tell me how bad I was for not giving a proper answer and i have enough rep to comment and I should know better.

So I responded to him (my first mistake) and told him that my answer was intended to get him going and most likely he wouldn't need any more help but that I was going to update it when I got back to my computer.

Well he didn't like that and continued to berate me for my unbelievable behavior.

I then said that if he was that upset, then report me, or even better how about he actually answer the question instead of being a fuckwit to others that have tried.

I also said that I thought that SO and development in general was not about being given the answer but by finding it yourself and actually learning something and that sometimes you need to be pushed it the right direction to find the answer which is what I did here.

Well he disagreed with that too and downvoted my answer which by that point had been updated (like I said I would).

I just don't get it, what is wrong with these people and why has SO become such a toxic place?

I want to give back to the community and help others like people have done for me over the years, but then fuckheads like this just ruin it and make you not want to be a part of it anymore.

Then I come here to devRant and everyone is so nice to each other, you can see the respect.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:

Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"

Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".

*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.

Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.

Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".

Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"

*At this point he was really pissed

Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"

Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."

Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"

*Guy ironically laughs

When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

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>

Let me tell you a story:
One upon a time poor lil PonySlaystation received a call. It was a nice guy who cried about his WordPress website had been hacked. So the clusterfuck began...

He gave me the login credentials for the hosting back-end, DB, FTP and CMS.
A hacked WP site was not new for me. It was probably the 6th of maybe 10 I had to do with.
What I didn't expect was the hosting back-end.
Imagine yourself back in 1999 when you tried to learn PHP and MySQL and all was so interesting and cool and you had infinite possibilities! Now forget all these great feelings and just take that ancient technology to 2018 and apply it to a PAID FUCKING HOSTING PROVIDER!
HOLY FUCKING ASSRAPE!
Wanna know what PHP version?
5.3.11, released the day before gomorrah was wiped.
The passwords? Stored in fucking plaintext. Shown right next to the table name and DB user name in the back-end. Same with FTP users.
EXCUSE ME, WHAT THE FUCK?!

I have to call Elon Musk and order some Boring Company Flame Throwers to get rid of this.

Long story long, I set up a new WP, changed all passwords and told the nice guy to get a decent hoster.

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.

Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.

I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.

The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...

About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...

I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.

Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.

Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."

That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.

PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.

Windows troubleshooting:
- Works on my system, therefore it's not an issue.
- Must be a hardware error.
- Obviously it's just cheap hardware.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Here's some obscure error code that leads nowhere.
- Have you tried "sfc /scannow"?
AS IF SFC IS A FUCKING SILVER BULLET!!!
- Our Indian support chap from answers.microsoft.com will help you.

RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Solution: quietly weep and reinstall your system.

Linux troubleshooting:
- There are good quality log files.
- You can run the program from the command-line and read both stdout and stderr from it.
- You can usually run the program with high verbosity options to help you track down the error.
- Even daemons can have their commands spawned from a dedicated shell, to see why they failed.
- Usually it's a configuration error and you can easily edit the configuration file.
- More often than not, the program will tell you why it failed.

Solution: usually easy to find.

I fucking love Windows. Because you know, it's so easy to troubleshoot and the support is so great!!!

I was contacted by a college senior guy (he was part of the core team of the club that I recently joined in my college).

Him: Do you want to launch your own startup?

Me: Yeah, I would love to.

Him: Nice, Listen. Even I want to start my own company. If you don't know, the current trend is ML and AI . So, I would like to base my startup on an AI application.( He was in his final year )

Me: I haven't tried any ML or AI stuff before.Sorry.

Him: Take 2 months time to study the AI concepts and do the app.

Me: But first, tell me what the AI app is supposed to do?

Him: It can be anything I have to think, you take the AI part and the UI and integration; with your skills and my idea let's build a startup and I will appoint you as the head of Application Development in my company.

*wtf, seriously dude? you want me to build the whole app for you and all you will do is put your fucking startup's name on it. I am building an application all by myself why the f would I ask you to publish it for me*

Me: Okay, I am getting late, I have to leave..

Made sure I didn't meet him again

and I have also came out of that stupid club..

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Just got a call from an Indian scammer. He did the whole press Win + R shabang and I did what he said but the run box didn't appear (maybe cause I'm on a mac) I tried a few more times and then had a moment of enlightenment, I have a mac so that must be why the shortcut isn't working. He then goes on a rant saying everything is fine because he is the best technician and he can fix my mac too. He threatens to hack me and get my name and hack my computer but then goes straight back to his script and asks me to open my browser. I'm asked to go to a website which he mumbles so I don't understand and ask him to spell it for me. This of course is unacceptable and he goes no just type whatever you feel like typing, immediately changing his mind to xvideos.com instead. I say I can't visit the site since I am at work and he goes straight into trying to recruit me. Promises of infinite money and all I could ever wish for. Then he says I should work for him and he would pay me to watch porn which I politely decline. The final interaction was me letting him know I need to get back to work and to tell his call center buddies to never call me. He got super mad at me for accusing him of working at a call center whilst you can hear other calls in the background. 10/10 interaction.

Had to setup 7 HP laptops today for a small hackathon.
Install windows 10...
just shout in the room and hope all cortanas hear the same answer.
done after a couple minutes.
Windows 10 rules.

...

This story could be over but no, have a plot twist.
All pcs connected to our wifi network as we tried to install Chrome ( cause edge sucks), realized it takes hours to install.
someone drawing internet over here?!
our network wasn't that bad usually.
opens windows store on one laptop by accident.
42 downloads running.
Yep on all of them.
what were they downloading?
candy crush... bubble witch saga...mcaffee.
spent about 4h uninstalling bloatware and teaching windows not to reinstall it over and over again...

Microsoft sucks...

and I didn't even mention the "tell us why you think you don't need McAfee premium protection pl0x" and "you really sure you don't want to try edge as default browser? is really fast and stuff" dialog fields...

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Im going to fucking murder the QA team if they don't stop sender bullshit issues!

QA: hey dev, there is an error with attached files.
Me: okay what's the issue?
QA: it's just a random file that gets attached. Can you fix it by the end of the sprint(tomorrow)?
Me: I need to investigate it a bit before I can tell you how long it will take, how can I reproduce it?
QA: idk, it was just there.
*several hours of testing later*
Me: I've tried to cause the 'issue' on my local server, the test server and the live server. But I haven't seen it and I have no clue what could cause it.
*30min. before I go home*
QA: dev you have to fix it before you go home! Because we have some other important issues you have to fix tomorrow!

FUCK YOU AND YOUR IMAGINARY ISSUES I'M GOING HOME

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

HAVE YOU JUST TRIED TO BARGAIN ON MY ESTIMATE?!

I really hate when people try to bargain on my estimates. It's done when I say so. I really think it through before I tell you the deadline, so GO FUCK YOURSELF PLEASE AND SHUT THE FUCK UP. NEVER EVER BARGAIN ON THAT AGAIN.

If you do, it will take one week longer for every time you try it.

the fuck kind of manager are you that you tell your leads not to fucking answer their damn phones when services need restoring????? If your fucking team member can do his damn job like a grown ass adult, but sees that you (his lead) made a change and has questions, your ass better answer the phone, or i will rocket launch it up your ass, straight into your brain so it's the newest, latest, fucking hippest trend and hooked into your system so you answer every fucking call hands-free. Even when fucking "Windows Tech Support" calls you every 30 minutes because your keep expired.

There are people counting on you, worthless fuckwipe. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself. And do your fucking job.

Edit: phone tried to censor me

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

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.

!rant
I would like to ask you guys for advice.

I am a content manager who is gradually given more and more dev tasks. That is great because I want to become a webdev. However I have one big issue. Whenever I write code (any code) I feel ashamed because I know that anyone else could do better. I am also ashamed to show my work to my colleagues because I am afraid of what they might think of me. I know that they are good people and they would probably help me out but still...

Someone once tried to explain to me that I am not my code and whenever my code is being evaluated I am not the one who is being judged, it is my code, my current knowledge. I understand conceptually what he was trying to tell me but I just can't feel it.

Did you have similar feelings when you started out?
Thanks in advance.

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

Listening to professor tell stories about when he used to develop, is like listening old war stories.

Back when I was in university, this teacher would tell us different stories about his days as a developer. This was one of the last ones, and I think it has not changed much since then.

*Phone rings*
Professor: Hello?

Client: I don't know what the fuck you take me for!

Professor: Oh, hello Client_Name. What seems to be the problem.

Client: This doesn't work! There's nothing here!

Professor: Ok, do you see the program file?

Client: No. I just said that there's nothing here.

They proceed to go over the issue and how to get the program to run. Or at least show up on the PC. This goes on for about 30 minutes.

Suddenly my professor has a thought.

Professor: Have you tried inserting the Floppy disk from the other side? Try flipping it.

Client: ...

Motherfucking website style JavaScript rant ahead.

Just tried to register some travel tickets, at FlixBus. Of course alternatively I could go for a train but those would be more expensive. So yeah.

Turns out that the website loads JavaScript from 20 domains including 3 required CloudFront ones (those are the most annoying because it's not possible to tell by the domain what it would be doing). But alright, I'll take it. Web 3.0 amirite?

So I go and find myself a nice bus, add it to my cart.. oh shit it's the wrong one. Change some parameters, hit return.. well guess what. Turns out that in all their JavaScript glory they couldn't implement that much. Awesome!

Go to another site to get another ticket for my travel back, only to find out that while they couldn't implement return, their webdevs are apparently skilled enough to get a giant boner on blinking "(1) Almost ready!" in the site's title, when changing to another tab and there happens to be stuff in the cart. Do you really think I care about that shit! Don't distract me and let me get my shit done!!!

So, to all you webdevs who would pull something like this and wank on it too. Guess what motherfucker. That purchase got cancelled through the power of JavaScript wank, because there's no way I'm supporting that dystopian junk. Guess what, when people shell out money at your shitty online shop, they may want a quarter-ass decent UX too. And no notifications or any of that wank, you hear me?

But yeah fucking Web 3.0!!! Give me a fucking break.

What do you guys tell your friends when they ask what you're doing on the computer? My wife asks all the time and I usually give a generic answer like "writing code" but lately that's not good enough. Today I had browser dev tools open along with vim because I was building a web scraper in python and I needed the structure of a certain site. I tried actually explaining it but got nowhere so I ended saying I was just downloading content from a site. Do you just give generic answers to people or try to get more technical? She seems unhappy with both approaches but maybe I'm just bad at explaining.

Adobe is predatory. I bought a subscription to Adobe Premier four months ago. After using it a little, I found Davinci Resolve (it's free) and decided it was just as capable for my needs. Upon trying to cancel Adobe, it offered me 3 more months at a good price and I thought, well, maybe I could still use it for some other things. But that didn't turn out to be true or necessary. I went to cancel today at the end of the 3 months and it said I would have to pay $94 for cancelation. I guess the fine print was too fine for my 49-year-old eyes or I wouldn't have signed up for that 3-month extension. I got on live chat with their AI, figured out how to get a real person, and began negotiating. They tried to sell me a lower cancelation fee. No. I don't want any fee. They tried to sell me other products at a lower price. I didn't need any other products. Finally, I used a little reverse psychology and said "Fine, I'll keep it. You win, I guess. Just tell me when I can cancel something I'm not using and won't be using and without being punished with a fee."

Apparently, that unlocked something in the Indian guy's call flow script and he offered to waive the fee. Just needed a moment to converse with his manager and get approval. That's 20 minutes of my life and billable time I'll never get back.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Story when I worked as a 1st line technician:

Customer: "Yes hello, I'm trying to install Windows as instructed, but the installer is not starting"

Me: "Ok, have you tried pressing [button] at the bootscreen?"

C: "Yes, over and over, still nothing happens"

This was actually one of my first calls, so my co-worker stepped in to help while I listened.

Co-worker: "okay, so when you rebooted the computer, press [button] and tell me what happens"

C: "....okay, I think it's starting"

Co-w: "Great! I'll just wait until it's running"

A minute goes by, installer seems to be running, but then we hear a loud BEEP. It's so loud another coworker hears it from his desk, through our headsets. A moment goes by, and it BEEPS again. Then the sound begins again, but doesn't stop. It's like an air horn at full blow. We ask the customer what he's doing, but he cannot hear us over the constant beep. We're brainstorming what it could be, when he finally says something:

"CAN.. LET.. OF.."

Co-w: "WHAT???"

"CAN I LET GO OF THE BUTTON??"

-----
I think we laughed the whole day

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

Some time ago a salesman tried to sell me a super revolutionary solution. He introduced it with "today everyone will tell you that in order to save money you must move your servers and IT infrastructure on the CLOUD (big emphasis on the word) but we offer you a different approach: 'the on premise cloud'"
😶"so, you're basically telling me to replace my local machines with other local machines?"
😎"you don't see the whole picture: It's the cloud but INSIDE your company"

Am I dumb and I didn't see the obvious technology leap he was offering me?

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

Hi every developer! My name is Allen. English is not my native language so forgive me if I say something that does not make any sense. Let me tell you my story how I become a programmer. (I am still learning) My first computer was a DELL OptiPlex GX 720 desktop. My father bought it for our self-employee job. Before he allow me to use the computer, I used to sit next to him and watching what he do, what he click and what he gets. When he allow me to use the computer, I was slow at typing. One or 2 WPM (word per minute) my father taught me how to use the computer. Very slowly, my typing speed improves. I understand how to use the computer. but one day, I do what make me regret. I was playing with some executables, when I double clicking it, it does not work I used to associate files with apps. I associate music files with every player I want. So, I did what I used to, I associate exe files with windows media center! The computer started to open hundreds of windows media center (WMC for short) whenever an app is clicked, it opens windows media center. Today, I realized that windows were trying to open every app and every process that regularly run. However, since I associate it with WMC, instead of the app itself, it opens WMC some days after the mistake, I wonder how apps work and how I can create my own. My father  told me before that a program is simply a binary file that the computer can read. However, it was too advanced to me at the time.I begin my search with google. Everytime I search, it says "learn to code" or something like that. I see some C++ code but, it was disgusting. when I read just a few lines of a hello world code in java. it was too complex

What I seen

#$$#% $%&$%&*#!@

~

(&*%&$ (_(*^% #&&* (^^$(&^$%^( %^*$())

~

^$70^(`*#%`*#&%^)*!"   Hello world   "#@

~

~

The actual code:

class helloworld

{

    public static void main(String args[])

    {

         System.out.println("Hello World!");

     }

}

I look for an easy way but my attempts fail. then. I push

I to learn how to code.I try learning java. but it still

Very complex. i tried LibertyBASIC. from LibertyBASIC to

Java. after learning LibertyBASIC, it was easy!

LibertyBASIC -> Java -> Ruby -> NOW, C# and XAML

Today, I am learning C# and XAML.

My first OS                         :  Windows 7

My first Computer             :  DELL OptiPlex GX 720

My first successful click  :  The Start menu

My first used App              : Microsoft Encarta 2009

My first created App         : Hi-Lo(number-guessing game. written in LibertyBASIC)

Thankyou for reading this Long story.

 

The pay was good. The perks were good too. Then why the hell did I resign? Because of my manager. You won't believe he never contributed to anything. In the past two months, he didn't write a single line of code.

You may say, "he is a manager. His work is to manage people". But what?? He never allows us to talk to anyone. Sets unexpected reality in the meeting. And our CEO (a good-hearted man and good software engineer, but does not know much about ML/AI) believes in him. We are working on a product which is a piece of shit. I tried to tell everyone the reality. He stopped me. Says since I don't have experience, I don't know what is possible.

What the hell??? With current talent and resources, you are saying AI will replace humans in call centers by the end of 2019. What the FUCK!!!! I tried to write a mail to the CEO, explaining him things. He threatened me. Said he will make me lose my job. So FUCK YOU!!!! FUCK YOU!!!!!

That is the reason I am resigning. He has another 11 months to fuck the company. But I am going to a place where things are real. People know the potential and challenges of AI and are doing their best. I know, eventually, everyone will know that he is a liar. A big fucking LIAR. And he will lose his job. Not because machines will take over. But good, talented human beings will replace him.

So I wanted to update my visual studio. Turns out I cant because WPF (Apparently the Installers uses it) has a problem with broken fonts.
Okay. No problem I thought. I uninstalled all 720 fonts and re-registered them, filtering out the 3 broken ones. Checked the time-stamp as suggested. Everything fine. Had to reboot. (Of curse.)
Rechecked the fonts, reports as okay. Tried to start the installer BUT THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE CRASHES ON ME AGAIN WITH THE SAME FOCKING ERROR. IT DOESN'T EVENT WANT TO FUCKING TELL ME WHICH FUCKING FONT IS THE PROBLEM. I CHECKED EVERYYYY SINGLE FUCKING FONT. NOT THAT THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY TO FUCKING CATCH A FUCKING FUCKER EXCEPTION IN THIS FUCKING WORLD. I mean seriously. Why would you crash on a font THAT YOU DON'T EVEN USE IN YOUR FUCKING FUCK PROGRAMM TO INSTALL YOUR FUCKING PICE OF SHIT SOFTWARE.
But, IT GETS WORSE. TURNS OUT MICKY FUCKING SOFT KNOWS ABOUT THIS FUCKING BUG SINCE TWO-FUCKING-THOUSAND-FOURTEEN.
And they didn't fixed it. Nooooooooo. THEY FUCKING WROTE A FUCKING WORKAROUND THAT DOES NOT FUCKING WORKKKKKK AND KEEP PUTTING THIS FUCKING BUG IN EVERY FUCKING INSTALLER SINCE THEN.
Can you tell I'm pissed? YES? GOOOOOOD. BECAUSE I FUCKING AM.
MICKYSOFT CAN GO AND SUCK A FUCKING APPROPRIATE THING TO SUCK IN THIS FUCKING SITUATION.
THE BEST? THEY EVEN FUCKING DARE TO ASK ABOUT MY FUCKING FEEDBACK. YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU GET MY FUCKING FEEDBACK. TOGETHER WITH A FUCKING BAG FULL OF FUCKING SHIT TO YOUR FUCKING HQ
CAN I HAVE A FUCKING STRESSBALL NOW
</rant>

What I don't understand is why it is so hard for some seniors to just let me jot my notes down, I get it you're busy but if you just let me write down certain key words, I will never ask you this question again, I am nervous cause I had to bug you for help so my mind is not taking anything in, its freaking out cause you're making it so clear I am a bother! So I'm gonna go back to my desk without notes and no idea of what you just tried to tell me.... It was never a problem for my first senior, and he even became my mentor! In a question of 6 months he could go on holiday cause I could handle all his responsibilities until he came back with my trusty note book in hand... So why are you telling me to stop making notes!! It works for me so leave me be!! - sits at desk, pondering why I exist - 😖

ALMOST HALF AN HOUR SPENT TRYING TO LOG INTO MY FUCKING RASPBERRY PI OVER SSH.

you know what the problem is?

I’m not gonna tell you because I want you to feel the agony too.

> be me
> want to set up a nextcloud instance on pi to play with
> boot up
> ssh pi
*enter password*
*password incorrect*
^tries like 60 more times with different things
> pulls HDMI out of PC
> connect to pi direct
*please login*
*enter password*
Hackerman_voice_im_in.mp3
Wtf.xml
> check the logs
>try login from phone
Fuckyou.jpg
>Tries resetting password
Fuckyou-final.jpg
>tried logging into other pi
Fuckyou-final2.jpg
>*wtf’s harder*
Andthenithitme.png
>type @ sign
Pi: “
> OHHHHHHH

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

Get a call from a customer asking if I can come check out her “printer”. Okay...
Get there and it’s not just a printer but an embroidery machine - never worked on them in my life and I’m not embarrassed to admit that.
I express that to her but tell her that I’ll definitely check it out and I get the reply - “you own a repair shop and have never worked on one of these, I don’t feel comfortable with you working on it.” - even though she had tried “fixing it” and completely fucked up the application and printer moreso than when it had originally stopped working.

Alright, bitch... I’m sorry that I haven’t worked on every fucking embroidery machine that’s ever been made. I apologize that I’m not familiar with your fucking machine, but if you would give me some time I assure you I can resolve your fucking problem; I imagine it’s (l)user error anyway. But no, you go ahead and send it off to the company that made it with a minimal charge of XXX$ and let them resolve your problem.

Yes, I run a computer/printer/phone repair shop, but that doesn’t automatically mean that I specialize in your FUCKING problem, but I can assure you I’d handle it.

Her - “You’re going to charge me when you didn’t even work on it?!”

Me - “I’m sorry, but I drove out here expecting to work, you declined the work; but there’s still a charge for having me come out here. Yes, you will be getting a bill. If you’d like me to work on it and help you resolve the problem, I’d be more than happy to.”

Her - *rolls eyes*

FUCK YOU!!!!

Ndjehwizoofjdnahsicofjrbwbajncncjsjwnbsb

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

My busdriver today must have had thorough training in trobleshooting it-systems.. nothing on the bus was working, Doors, card reader, and it baerly moved forward. So trying to solve this problem he stoped at every busstop, turned the engine off and by this powered off all systems. Felt like the Classic solution people tell others, "have you tried turning it off and then on". So all other passengers were pissed because the bus was running late, and I felt kind of sorry for him..

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

Dear Client,

You said it was of paramount importance that this software work flawlessly. I've worked hard to make it so, even when your indecision and lack of attention to detail indicate you don't care as much as you say and have made the project late.

Yesterday when I handed you a step-by-step user acceptance test plan, you delegated it to someone not as familiar with your specific requirements. You said you don't have time for such things.

I will remind you of those words when the project launches and you find something you dislike.

Sincerely,
Me

when I was a newbie I was given a task to upload a site.
I had done that many times before so I thought it wont be a big deal so I thought I never gave a try uploading through ftp.
Okay I began work on it the server was of godaddy and credentials I got were of delegate access.
right I tried connecting through ftp but it wasn't working thought there's some problem with user settings why shouldn't I create my own user to stay away from mess.
Now I creater my own user and could easily login but there were no files in it saw that by creating user my folder is different and I dont have access to server files I wanted to take backup before I do upload.
now I was thinking to give my user access to all files so I changed the access directory to "/" checked ftp again there was still no file.
don't know what happened to me I thought ahh its waste of time for creating ftp user it does nothing and I deleted my ftp account.
now I went through web browser to download data and earth skids beneath my foots. Holy fuck I lost all the data, all were deleted with that account it scared the shit out of me.
There were two sites running which were now gone.
Tried every bit to bring them back but couldn't do so. i contact support of godaddy they said you haven't enabled auto backup so you can't have them for free however they can provide their service in $150. Which is 15k in my country.
I decided to tell my boss about what happened and he got us away :p I wasn't fired gladly

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The fact that I have to convert a 90s-ish design into a WordPress theme despite the boss trying to convince our client that WP's shit and we should do it in something else doesn't tilt me as much as it should.

But what DOES tilt me and piss me off is the fact that the shitheads told us to 'make the design better', and so I tried; I made one of their graphics responsive by only designing it with CSS (and for once, I even made it work right) because they wanted a mobile-friendly version but failed to supply a mobile-version PSD so I had to improvise and they had the balls to tell my boss that they're 'disappointed that we failed to follow the guidelines'.

Did you bitchsicles even bother to hire a proper fucking designer who would know how to fucking design a PSD to convert into HTML? There's no fucking grid, the design's all over the fucking place like your mother after a Viagra-fueled Friday night bukakke party at an old home and the colors are an eyesore like your own fucking selves if you ever bothered looking in the fucking mirror. Fuck you all to hell.

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

This is a controversial topic and I tell you about this how I perceive it.

There are a lot of women in tech/IT groups with really interesting topics and discussions I'd like to join ... you know ... because I don't want to pay a lot of money to a course or read a book about it and be with the topic myself (or in online forums) ... I want to be in a cool offline community that shares the love about developing.

But I can't. Because they do not allow men. With the reason that women are not respected in tech/IT and therefore men are not allowed to join.

This is just racist and this policy makes no difference between them and those guys who really are just assholes. Even if I tried to discuss this, it was instantly shut down with "this is our rule and we do not discuss this" or "you just don't understand this". That is right. I can't understand it if I never get a reasonable explanation.

I can understand that they want to build a nice community but this is just a stupid limitation and a huge loss to get other perspectives of things.

In my studies and career I had never seen the problem where things escaleted that seperation was needed. If somebody feeled attacked about something, they said it and we stopped doing or changed it. It's not easy but it helps. Communication is key.

What is your opinion about it? Do you see it the way I see or can you help me see this from another perspective?

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

I gave this so called web developer username and password to ssh into our server. This is his reply:

"Hey we tried to log into your server. We are getting permission error. Please fix that"

Me: Sure, can you tell me how are you trying to connect?

"We tried to ssh like this: ssh root@xxx.com"

Me (in my mind): WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU USING ROOT FOR!?!

Thanks to McDonald's for such a wonderful morning... And this may explain why a busy store is now empty...

-Order mobile deal at home
-Walk 15mins to the restaurant
-Opens app, get message "your account has been deleted"

*WTF!!!!!*

-Tried to sign up with Google, error
-Sign up with Facebook, OK!!

(btw I got a privacy message from Google this morning... Haven't got one from FB yet... hmm...)

-tried to redeem again. All coupons are like "not available at this location"

Well since I'm here anyway...

-Walks to machines and enters the codes, it works!!!!

FFS MCD JUST TELL PPL THESE COUPONS CAN BE REDEEMED IN STORE ONLY!!!! AND DON'T RANDOMLY DELETE ACCOUNT BC YOU CAN'T SUPPORT GPDR OR UR SYSTEM CRASHES FROM AN INTERNAL BUG

Lucky I redeemed my free coffee last week...

For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.

That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.

I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.

Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.

However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.

And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.

When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?

Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.

I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more

Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.

They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.

They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).

I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.

Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.

I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.

Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands

I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.

I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk

During a design meeting, our boss tells me that Vertx's MySQL drivers don't have prepared statements, and that in the past, he's used a library or his own functions to do all the escaping.

"Are you kidding me? Are you insane?"

I insisted that surely he must be wrong; that no one would release a database library without built in support for query arguments. Escaping things by hand is just asinine and a security risk. You should always use the tools in the database drivers, as new security vulnerabilities in SQL drivers can be found and fixed so long as you keep your dependencies up to date.

He told me escaping wasn't as tricky as I made it out to be, that there were some good libraries for it, and insisted Vertx didn't have any built in support for "prepared statements." He also tried to tell us that prepared statements had performance issues.

He searched specifically for "prepared statements" and I was like, "You know they don't have to be called that. They have different names in different frameworks."

Sure enough, a short search and we discovered a function in the Vertx base database classes to allow SQL queries with parameters.

Everyone here deserves the worst.

No, really, you all deserve those dark juicy stories. So here's why I hate password systems that don't have the user experience in mind.

Recently my university went under a huge update, most of it good, but this is DevRant, so let me tell you what's just the worst.

They asked me to change my password, they do this every month or two. So I did it, but as I clicked "Ok" a wild error appeared! It told me I had to use a password that was not one of the FIFTEEN that I'd used previously...

I tried everything, and despite everything else being poorly programmed, or what not, I thought it would be easy to spoof. Nope. Unfortunately this seems to be the ONE thing they did right. Looks like I'll have to go back to basics. Just add a number on the end of my previous password, up to fifteen, and reset :]

I think this rant needs to turn into an email headed straight to them :)

So I recently returned from university and was catching up with people. Then this guy(childhood friend) who is in EE was "asking" me about how my academics were going. So I was describing my cs classes to him until he suddenly interrupted me saying he knows "how algorithms work" and also that IT == CS. I tried my best to explain to him that it is not the same thing, but his ego just couldn't allow me to talk. He continued on forcefully about how he did a project in java that used SQL and blahblahblah. After he was done exhibiting himself, he asked me what languages do you know(LOL)? When I tried to explain to him that cs is not about learning languages, the guy proceeded to interrupt me again and tell me how his curriculum is hard so as to imply that mine is shit. Finally, this human waste told me to "open java" so that he could code, I opened up my terminal, which he responded to by asking me "What is that?"

Let me tell you why I feel like a shit right now. I work as sw dev in a country worse than Germany and company I interviewed is located in Germany. So this is kinda big deal for me.

I interviewed with the company last year, interview went really well. They told me during interview that they would return in 2 weeks tops. It took 2 months for them tor return. For some reason, I was not hired for that position. Later I learned that the division i was gonna work defunded/separated. After learning that the guy I interviewed really tried hard to give me good news but failed-therefore had to delay bad news, I was not sad for not being able to be accepted for that position or delayed response.

Fast forward to this year, I interviewed with the same company for a position as subcontractor employee on another company. Interview took just before Coronavirus situation started to blow up(mid March), I had to return to my home country when the borders were closed asap, 2 day after interview. Fast forward to May I got the job offer and contract with a good salary, July as starting date. But I have no Visa and you apply for visa with a valid contract. German embassies work at minimum capacity, no new applications for any type of visa including work/residence visa. After my serious research I found a crack, emailed the embassy and they finally agreed to give me a special appointment on the start of July. The company I interviewed sent me new contract(August starting date) automatically.

On mid July, I told the company that visa might not come soon enough, I might not make it to August to start to job. We both agreed to replan starting date once i got the Visa.

On August 6, my visa came. I informed them asap, and they told me the other company will return in 3 weeks with new starting date. I was like WTF we were waiting for this visa for months, why do you need 3 weeks. Anyways, 3 weeks past and the other company still did not give any new starting date. I really feel like shit right now. Last week I asked to the "my" company if there is a problem with my employment(the other company might change plans after all) and they said only starting date is the problem, don't worry. On 3 occasions, they reassured me there was no problem(no, I was not asking them like paranoiac obsessive person, they were preemptively saying it in some cases). They say other company employees were really asking about when I was coming frequently.

What should one do in such situation. Do I even have legal rights? Maybe I will look back at this post and laugh at my paranoia, but I would you random internet citizens' ideas on this situation. They say lightning does not strike twice to same point but living same disappointment with the same company would really hurt. rant over, mamba out.

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.

Well what an adventure with this SSD...😑
my sis' laptop is from 2013-ish(?) and has/had a slow HDD in it. I wanted to speed it up, before her study, so I bought a new internal SSD (no new laptop wanted).
Created a bootable USB, exchanged the hard drives and install the OS on it. Seems easy enough...
The laptop restarts to finish its process ... laptop shuts down immediately, no warning whatsoever. 😳🤨
Start it up, loading screen, fan gets louder and louder ... instant shut down.😳🤨🤨.
Redo process, this time landing on blue-screen, error code critical process died? ... instant shut down again.🤔
Restart from old HDD, normal.😐
Retry with boot USB and reinstall SSD. Setup process copying files, meanwhile instant shut down.😳 Please don't tell me!😩 Since every part of the laptop was working, except the new inserted SSD, I thought "FUCK not a broken SSD!😣"
I had my own PC with internal SSD slot, so tried to find out, whether it would be broken...
All starting up fine??🤨🤨
Ok then? Finish the setup for the third time now ... everything up and running.😐🤷
Normal shut down, unplug, plug back onto laptop, it works. HOW?? WHY?? 😕
Why the fuck are you suddenly working? 😐🤷🤷🤷
That's some magic...

Oh boy I got a few. I could tell you stories about very stupid xss vectors like tracking IDs that get properly sanitized when they come through the url but as soon as you go to the next page and the backend returns them they are trusted and put into the Dom unsanitized or an error page for a wrong token / transaction id combo that accidentally set the same auth cookie as the valid combination but I guess the title "dumbest" would go to another one, if only for the management response to it.

Without being to precise let's just say our website contained a service to send a formally correct email or fax to your provider to cancel your mobile contract, nice thing really. You put in all your personal information and then you could hit a button to send your cancelation and get redirected to a page that also allows you to download a pdf with the sent cancelation (including all your personal data). That page was secured by a cancelation id and a (totally save) 16 characters long security token.

Now, a few months ago I tested a small change on the cancelation service and noticed a rather interesting detail : The same email always results in the same (totally save) security token...
So I tried again and sure, the token seemed to be generated from the email, well so much about "totally save". Of course this was a minor problem since our cancelation ids were strong uuids that would be incredibly hard to brute force, right? Well of course they weren't, they counted up. So at that point you could take an email, send a cancelation, get the token and just count down from your id until you hit a 200 and download the pdf with all that juicy user data, nice.

Well, of course now I raised a critical ticket and the issue was fixed as soon as possible, right?
Of course not. Well I raised the ticket, I made it critical and personally went to the ceo to make sure its prioritized. The next day I get an email from jira that the issue now was minor because "its in the code since 2017 and wasn't exploited".

Well, long story short, I argued a lot and in the end it came to the point where I, as QA, wrote a fix to create a proper token because management just "didn't see the need" to secure such a "hard to find problem". Well, before that I sent them a zip file containing 84 pdfs I scrapped in a night and the message that they can be happy I signed an NDA.

I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *

After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...

I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges.

HOLY CRAP STACKOVERFLOW! I get that you're trying to make it easier for people to get their questions answered by structuring question-asking into a multi-form wizard with guides and problem-checking along the way. But when you block my question from being submitted AT ALL after I've done _absolutely everything_ you've asked and then you tell me that my question isn't valid simply because someone HAPPENED to mention in THEIR question A SINGLE KEYWORD I've included in my question? Like the word "What" or "How" or "img srcset" even though I've ALREADY READ THOSE AND THEY DON'T ANSWER MY QUESTION? That seems to be a bit of a jerk move, doncha think?

(Yes, I know the question showing in the screenshot isn't relevant to my question. I was just being a smart aleck at this point because NONE of the relevant questions I tried would unblock me.)

I guess all questions ever asked or that will ever be asked are already answered on StackOverflow.

You know, I really like my Redmi 4x. It's a nice and inexpensive phone and perfect for me. Now I wanted to get the most out of my phone by rooting it, which was going to be easy.

I thought. And lord almighty was I wrong.

First of all, to even get to root it you have to unlock the bootloader. To do that you have to use a tool that they've made. Good! An official way to do so would surely be good, I thought. But to actually use the tool you have to be logged in to their service on both the tool and your phone. Then, and get this, you have to submit a written application as to why you would want to unluck the bootloader.

Ohh but it didn't stop there. I did so and months passed without me getting any info from them what so ever. When trying the tool it would just tell me that they hadn't reviewed my application.

Today I tried again, and something new happened. It told me that I hadn't synced my accounts. Which I promptly did because it's progress.

I tried for what should be the final time, aaaand I get this. This according to the forums means I have to wait 72 hours to be able to do it.

But it's progress, right?

Uuugggghhhh

This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month

Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..

The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)

During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.

During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.

The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.

Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.

Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..

Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..

An old client came back to me stating that I didn't fix the last change he requested a month ago. I went in old emails, found out what he needed, tried the website, it was doing exactly what he wanted.

I wrote to him with confusion asking what was he wanted me to fix.

"It's not working"
"It is"
"No, it's not. Can't you see?"

I attached old email conversations and sent him to see for himself.

"I am not talking about that." I want it to work like this, like that, blah blah blah.

-------------

Fucking asshole. Tell me you wanted new feature in the website.

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Proxmox team, go fuck yourselves.

Now I'm sure that I'll receive a lot of flack for this, but hear me out.

I've tried Proxmox and was quite pleased with its web UI. But I hate how much it locks me into their own little ecosystem.

I want to use btrfs on my drives. Why is this impossible, yet the hack that is ZoL is your obvious alternative? An alternative wherein I can't even compile and run my own kernel, because then ZoL suddenly fails? And don't you tell me to compile your stock config, when it's well over 15GB large in your source tree.

Proxmox is literally the MacOS of Linux distributions. Which was even more so made clear by me being called an idiot by possibly wanting to run Same on the PVE host. Because why on Earth would sysadmins want to?! Why on Earth would sysadmins be competent for wanting to?!!

You know what? I'll just convert those Proxmox servers to Arch and say fuck you to all the bells and whistles that's Proxmox' web UI. Because at least Arch allows me to make my own fucking choices, limited only by what's supported by the Linux operating system.

Perhaps Proxmox will consider btrfs stable in 2021. Because you know, despite it being stable today in 2018, Debian and Proxmox alike live 3 years in the past, i.e. 2015. I hate the Debian ecosystem because of that, but boy do I hate Proxmox even more so. Bloody fucking piece of shit it is!!! 😡

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

RANT

We use Exact for our time sheets/hour tracking. How it's supposed to work:
-Manager plans my hours in Exact.
- I work those hours on the given projects
== All fine till here ==
But then ... there is a button (don't know the correct translation) "realise" which books the planned hours for me. So I don't have to do it manually.

This simply didn't work!! No one seem to know why not... Not even the guys at Exact.

Since it's web based I opened the developers window and looked for the call behind the button. You would think it would be at least an Ajax call thingy (I'm not completely into JS)
Turns out it's a readable JS function!

It doesn't stop there... It first makes all calculations on what to display, at last, at the fucking end, it checks a setting whether to proceed the booking or not!!!!

So I found and switched the setting and tried the button again.... Now it fucking works...

No fucking way I am going to tell Exact what the problem is 😫

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit

Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.

I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.

I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:

- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10

uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.

So here's where the story becomes a rant.

In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.

And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.

So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.

The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?

gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3

(:

guy shows up at the end of workday to tell me something i did last week changed yesterday and has to be redone, and asks if i can do it today. my boy, i tried, but 20 minutes is 20 minutes, idk what you expected

An intern made a very bad impression on the first day.

This was before I become a developer. I was working in commercial art sales. One day, I had an appointment to onboard two new interns together.

Intern 1 shows up and I ask her for her signed confidentiality agreement. The boss had sent it out a week before and told me the interns were bringing the signed paperwork on their first day. I see the surprised look on her face and she says she forgot. She’s lucky I had access to another copy. If I didn’t, things could have gotten pretty awkward if I had to contact my boss, who was out of office. If there’s no signed agreement, I can’t onboard her and I’d have to send her home. The appointment was made with intern 1’s availability in mind, so intern 1 could have spent her time coming to the office for nothing and being turned away because of a stupid mistake she made.

While we wait for intern 2 to arrive, I try to engage in small talk with intern 1. I try to get to know her a little better and I ask “are you still in college/university?” She word vomits that she thought she had graduated, but six months later she hadn’t received her diploma and she called the school and they told her her pre-college credits had not transferred, so she’s finishing those credits now.

Oh, intern, you should have just simplified all this to “I’m finishing up my degree” or “yes, I’m still in college.” This is TMI. You don’t want to give out information about yourself that could put you in a bad light. You need to know to be discreet about yourself. You’re 22 years old. It’s really bad judgement to say this to your supervisor (me) and we’ve only known each other for ten minutes. I’m not your friend, I’m your supervisor. Honestly, I thought the explanation didn’t make sense because she would have found out about the credits when she tried to transfer them and when she applied for graduation. I didn’t prod for more details.

I did have to tell my boss about intern 1 forgetting the paperwork. It’s not something the intern would be reprimanded for, but it is something that’s not a good sign. The paperwork had been sent by the boss a week prior. It’s troublesome that an intern would forget to complete an important task that was sent by the boss. This was never a problem with prior interns.

Boss did freak out because boss thought I onboarded intern 1 without intern agreeing to the confidentiality agreement. Boss hadn’t considered an intern would forget the paperwork and didn’t tell me what to do if this did happen. I reassured boss that I had printed a new copy and had intern 1 sign the agreement.

I didn’t say anything about the word vomit. The content was troubling, but I was concerned this would be gossip and I wasn’t out to sabotage the intern.

Forgetting the paperwork and the word vomit were signs the intern wasn’t reliable. Intern had trouble taking direction even when it was written down. She’d do stupid things like invite her boyfriend to the office for hours and let BF sit at the boss’s desk—boss caught her and boss’s office is visible from our public viewing floor, so visitor did see this too. I suspected she might have an diagnosed learning disability.

In the end, intern didn’t ask for a reference letter. Boss said that if intern asked for one in the future, the answer would be no.

Intern 1 is the reason why I don’t want to be in change of interns ever again even though I’m not in art sales anymore.

FUCK YOU NODE JS AND FUCL YOU SYNOLOGY

Decided to give an old Synology DiskStation that sits at home slme new life besides just sharing files. Since Synology has SSH but not a full Linux OS, installed DebianChroot (so far so good). At one point I needed Node JS, so installed NVM and tried to install Node. Well guess what didn't work. Tried a few more things including directly downlosding node from the official node website. Trying different versions, the whole drill.

After about 5 hours of installing and errors, well really usfull errors like "There where 2 errors during installation" WELL HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING TELL ME WHAT THE ERROR IS YOU FUCKING FUCK!

I found a formum wkith a guy haveing similar problems. Able to install legacy 0.10.x versions but not 4.x.x. Or 6.x.x oder whatever. He found that you have to have at least an ARMv6 compatible processor, otherwise it won't run. Checked it and well, that old fuck of mine only has ARMv5. FUCK! But honestly. You detect it's an ARM architecture. You detect it's not one of the v6 or v7, you try to install the general arm version, BUT YOU DON'T GET THE FUCKING IDEA TO MENTION TO CHECK WAHAT VERSION YOU HAVE AND IF THAT IS SUPORTED BY FUCKING NODE!

One afternoon wasted, at least I got a little more wisdom. Fuck do I hate Node now. On the bright side, I've ordered a Raspberry Pi and two cases for Harddisks, I'll create my own diskstation with blackjack and hookers (I realy hope you get that reference)! Fuck you Synology and Node JS (yeah yeah, it's not Synologies fault, but I'm mad anyways!)

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

Fucking hell, I can't even cook in piece without my mother constantly shouting shit, because the phone doesn't make beautiful selfies anymore. hint: there's a fucking crack over the lense,because you dropped it and no changing all possible settings while throwing out all patience, common sense and ability to read will not improve this situation

i tried to tell her that she could still try to make do with her main camera and when she switches she asked me: "But why does it still make normal photos when I rotate the thing?!" Because unlike your mind this camera isn't damage now fuck off, with all your nervousity I tried to relax and cook us something, but that was more stressful than all the work I did today.

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

First time me ranting about PHP.

First time. I still really like the language.

But what the fuck.
I am debugging, I narrowed down bug to my validator.
I played with php console and debugger and narrowed down to that one offending line.

Narrowing down to smaller and smaller examples when it dosent work, confusion and tension grows in me.

And then it hit me.
Confusion got to apogeum.

Anyone, if you know the anwser, please tell me.
WHAT THE FUCK?

maybe thats task for stack overflow? Hrm...
No, I dont have time to explicitly tell what I tried to google and spend 4 hours to have all checkmarks ticked before asking lol

iiiii fffffuckingg hate articles that just explain something

put a piece of code

that piece of code uses X amount of classes/models

they never mention what structure are those models/classes made of

what is inside them

i cant continue following the article because i dont know what is inside them

they just put it in ur face and say Fuck you

no

Fuck YOU

<font size="1000000px;">FUCK</font>

<font size="10000000000000000em;">YYYYYYYOOOKUUUUUUUUUUU</font>

U MOTHFFFFFUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

USELESSS ARTICLE

zzzzz

frustratioms

my nerves are torn

broken

disabled

demented

day

in life

obsession

hell

unreal

what is life
q

what are doing

why are doing this

what is the point of living

how long does it take for a man to die

why are some people blessed with luck and some are not

zzzz

u know what is even more frustrating

girls

yes

ohdont get me started on this topic

well i warned u

the path towards abundance lies upon the few; thou who shalt not risk high; shalt always stay thus low

girls also frustrate me bc

i always do every thing nice and im always nice

so i realized

being nice is fake as fuck and doesnt fuckin work

being urself doesn't do a Fckimg tHING

hhh

frustrations

.

breathe

.

in this hardlife

only the strong survive in this world
- tupac shakur

zzzz

so yes bavk where i was saying girls frustrate me because i always do what im supposed to

so

i tried being thou who shalt i am not

guess what mothrfucker

it works when u be a gofdamn fkig low mothfckr a u know a goddmn fkig punk then they respect u and want u

back i fckked up

i turned back to my real me, the nice me

and then they left me

they think being nice = means being weak

FUCCKK YOUU

ssss

zzzf

kindness != weakness

U FCKING WHORES

UNDERSTAND THAT

zzzzz

breathe

i just wanted to have a walk outside and thenit started raining

so i had to stay inside bc of the rain

m

i am very lonely

u know i was very fine when i was lonely at a very young age but now i need a living entity beside me

with me

i fking need

wait i will cuddle my fluffy dog rn maybe i will feel better

br b wait for me ok

i feel better now

fck

i remembered that goddamn girl again

man i feel so heart broken

srsly

i have sunk into the deepest depths of endless depression I think

it doesnt feel nice

it feels very lonely and depressing down here

but i thimk tjat is be because i care too much

some people say i overthink

I dont overthink

i am like the stealth people
the shadow people

i stay quiet and observe

everything

i always know what is happening but i rarely speak about it

and people dont realize

so they think they can fool me

no

everything has its limits

so much lies that im sick of it

i always tell it how it is

i always reward those who help me

i always help those who help me

i never forget those people

zzzZZ

why is it that people who dont give a single fucking Fffffficxkkckck about me

are the ssame people i almost care the MOST?

i cross hundreds and thousands of miles to visit a person, invest hours of my time to do that

i do that....

and they wouldnt even step 1 foot in front to see me....

what kind of life is this

vv

feel like cryin rn

.

zzzzz

.

i dont understand what one must do

what is the point

all i want is to be happy

that is it

but being happy is.... i wanted to say the hardest part of life but now my voice told me being happy is a state of mind

myself answered me that being happy ? is a state of mind?

so that means if i want to be happy even if everything around me is falling apart

in my mind i can create a psychological world that would make me.... happy ....?

or what

i dont understand what did myself tell me

why do i care so much if im lonely

u know my friend from college we go to same computer science college

hes a very smart man but a fake FUCKING friend, plastic as fuck

he reads philosophy booms and told me

"when a man is lonely for long enough, he will slowly start to fall apart"

that is me...... that is ...truth......

he quoted a philosopher from some book

zzzz

he also said a quote he read about the meaning of life

"this life is endless pain and the only purpose of life is to reduce this pain as much as possible so we can be happy"

what the fck that is incredibly depressing

what the fuck im actually crying rn

i feel stabbed in the back and left behind and cheated on, all of those happened and some of them are happening right now

dont know what to think about the reasons

all of this causes me such huge anger and depression and that is whT keeps me going

going by working harder than i am supposed to

without all this hurt there would be no glory

all this effort..... it better pay off at the end...... please God..... i beg you....

i have completed 50% of my life purpose, let me do the rest so i can die in peace...

Met one of my friends after almost three months. (He was out on vacation)
We randomly start talking about life and what we aspire to be.
He's doing Business Management Studies, so naturally, he wants to be some sort of manager.
He then asks about me. I tell him how I'm learning and aspiring to be a Web dev and do a little bit of ML on the side.
And following conversation ensues:

Him- Dude, what's the use of learning web development? Anyone can make a website today. Haven't you seen those ads?
Me- *Knowing he's talking about WIX* Yeah I've seen em. But it mostly generates dumb templates. If you need something custom, you gotta take help from a professional.
Him - Nah dude, you can get custom made stuff from them too. Web developers will soon lose their jobs. Learn something else.
Me - *Trying to control the urge to punch, I tried to explain that a website is more than HTML and CSS*
He - *Doesn't want to understand what I'm saying and says I should do something else, since automation will take away developer jobs *

WHAT THE FLYING SPAGHETTI FUCK!?
Why don't these people FUCKING UNDERSTAND (even after telling again and again) that there's more to a website THAN JUST FUCKING STATIC TEMPLATES
EAT SHIT AND DIE YOU FUCKING BASTARDS
And what's with claiming to know more about someone's profession than the person himself who's spending his days and nights dealing with problems your fucking zombie brains can't even fathom.
This was literally the third guy I met this month who said something similar. Are these people so common now?

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

Yeah, handouts create lazy people I'm not impressed with
You want something in life, then why don't you go and get it?
Actions speak louder than words do, it's pretty quiet, isn't it?
Look at the world we live in, defined by comment sections
Surround yourself with people that challenge how you think
Not people that nod their head and act like they agree
Those people will cut you open just to watch you bleed
Always be yourself, not the person that you pretend to be, no!
These people gon' tell you that you will never make it
Then when you do, they gon' say they knew you were goin' places
That's just how it works, next thing you know you'll be overrated
Hearing people say they miss the "old you, " it's crazy, ain't it?
And perfect people don't exist, so don't pretend to be one
I don't need pats on the back from people for my achievements
When I die I wanna know that I lived for a reason
Anyone can take your life, but not what you believe in, no

Just remember this

Yeah, don't take opinions from people that won't listen to yours
If money's where you find happiness, you'll always be poor
If you don't like the job you have, then what do you do it for?
The cure to pain isn't something you buy at liquor stores, nah
The real you is not defined by the size of your office
The real you is who you are when ain't nobody watchin'
You spend your whole life worried about what's in your wallet
For what? That money won't show up in your coffin, woo!
Yeah, anger's a liar, he ain't got no respect
I fell in love with my pain and I slept with my regrets
Happiness saw it happen, maybe that's why she up and left
Joy called me a cheater, said she ain't coming back
I've always had a problem with relationships
But that's what happens when you see the world through a broken lens
Mistakes can make you grow, that doesn't mean you're friends
Who you are is up to you, don't leave it up to them, no

Just remember this

Yeah, they say you got into music, you signed up to be hated
That's kinda weird cause I don't remember signing my name up
Coming from people that give advice but never take none
I like my privacy, but, lately, I feel it's invaded
I heard that life's too short, don't let it pass you by
We waste a lot of time crying over wasted time
It's not about what people think, it's how you feel inside
My biggest failures in life are knowing I never tried, woo!
I look at the world from a different angle
People change, even Satan used to be an angel
Think twice before you're bitin' on the hand that made you
Don't believe what you believe just 'cause that's how they raised you
Think your own thoughts, don't let them do it for you
Say you want a drink, don't wait for people to pour it on you
Cut out the liars, stay close to the people you know are loyal
Grab your own glass and fill it, don't let your fear destroy you, woo!

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

Ticket: User says thing don't work.

Me: Hey can you tell me who tried to do the thing / give me their email?

User: Isn't it in the system somewhere?

Me: MAYBE BUT I KNOW IT IS IN YOUR FUCKING EMAIL SO FUCKING GET ME THAT EMAIL ADDRESS!

Requests to a soap server were failing randomly. In order to contact the API provider, I tried to provide an curl example with the same payload and the error response. Yet when sending the payload over curl, the request worked just fine. When my application was building the request, it failed.

What. The. Fuck.

I checked and double-checked the request body and headers. They were identical.

Of course, no error response was returned by the API provider and, of course, they could not tell me how what error I caused in my request.

So I created a basic dummy server, installed wireshark and compared the payload when sending a request from my application and from curl to my dummy server.

It turns out: curl, if called in a certain way, automagically strips out newlines. The soap client kept them.

So that that shitty soap server crashed due to newlines in the message body!

Stripping out the newlines was rather easy.

Shame on you, your house, and entire family for letting it crash due to them!

!rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Summarize a bit.

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

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

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

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

Why the fuck open source solutions need to be such a load of bullcrap? I've spent a week trying to set up every single self-hosted video conference software, and the only thing I've got is a shorter lifespan.

How the fuck does your (judging by GitHub, well maintained) software only support Ubuntu 16.04? And I mean ONLY, there's no support for docker, or any other distro either, and we're only weeks from getting the second LTS since 16.04. And why the fuck does documentation tell me to manually go through 20 different config files just to enable SSL?

Why the fuck doesn't your official AWS cloudformation template include VPC or other required parameters? I've had to rewrite the whole thing just to get a valid stack you dipshit!

And how fucking hard is to make your software look decent, I can't expect clients to chat with me using something that looks like an incest child of 2003 MSN and eDonkey?

Oh, and it'd be fucking dandy if your documentation wouldn't return 404, maybe I'd be even able to test what your product has to offer?

I guess after everything I've tried I'll go with Jitsi; it seems the most decent, although it lacks some pretty basic features like limiting chat features for guests.