Ranted about that porn work prank.

Forgot a joke the senior linux engineer pulled with me.

I came back from the toilet and sat down. Logged in. Cursor was on the left screen. Looked away and then back. Cursor was on the right screen.

*wait what? hmm must be my memory.*
*looks away and turns back*
*wait did that cursor just move.....?*
*damn what's up with me...?!?*
*turns around and looks back VERY quickly*
*cursor moves all over the screen*

*looks at front usb inputs*
*notices a wireless receiver*

*laughing from the corner where the senior linux engineer is sitting*

MOTHERFUCKER.

Real conversation:

Coworker: I'm trying to classify data based on X

Me: Mhh. Seems like a hard task, we don't have data to figure out X

Coworker: I know! That's why I thought about using machine learning!

Me: (Oh, boy)

Coworker: I'm working on training this ML model that will be able to classify based on X

Me: and what are the inputs for your training?

Coworker: The data classified based on X

Me: And where did you get that from?

Coworker: I don't have it! That will be the output of my ML model!

Me: But you just said that was the input!

Coworker: Yes

Me: Don't you see a contradiction here?

Coworker: Yes, it's a pretty complicated problem, that's why I'm stuck. Can you help me with that?

Me: (Looking at my watch) Sorry I'm late for a meeting. Catch up later, bye!

A new entry for bad phone numer inputs

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I was mad with thought working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI that were being built at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision in Computer Programming at all.

A big FUCK YOU to all those sites that disable paste on text inputs

I like my inputs. Buttons are fun! Guess that's why I ended up here.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

Client: Please remove the address inputs from the inquiry form. Our marketing strategist said that more people will fill out the form if there are less input fields.

Me: But you are required by law to include the address in the generated inquiry PDFs!

Client: Can you remove the fields and still include the address in the PDF somehow?

Me: No. How would the website know the users address without asking for it.

Client: Okay. Wait! Can we change the form to just one large input where the user has to enter everything at once? That is even less inputs so more users would do it, right?

Me:...

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.

All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.

I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.

For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".

I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear "managers,"

Stealing credit for something you have not done is real theft.

When I come up with an idea and a detailed outline of how to build and deliver it, you do not get to say "oh I also had this idea." You did not. How could you? It uses tech you don't even know exists.

When I then proceed to build the whole thing on my own without any of your inputs (then again, you have no idea of how it works, what would you bring to the table), you don't get to parade my project in front of the board not even mentioning my name.

You see, it's not the first time you pull that off, you have taken full credit for every thing.

it's not just my wee feelings getting hurt for lack of recognition: it has real world consequences.

You get the promotion, you get the salary raise and you now live in a flat with a balcony and a view, while my wife and I share a studio as my salary has not budged.

You're a cunting thief, I hope your mom dies.

Best,

X

Dear Customer,

I think you misunderstand the reason I sent you some documents for review.

I sent the examples to you so that you could see what your inputs produced.

I didn't send them to you so that you could fart out your mouth and about what you want like a little kid.

If there's shit on the page it is because you put that shit in the system ....

Please have someone else who is going to put a little bit of effort into this 'super important project' contact me.

Also bullet points don't work like this:

- Here I talk about a thing but
- and here I continue that thought with no context and incomplete sentences
- Also this is unrelated.
- But this is about the first bullet point again.
- Here I repeat another bullet point but I say it in a completely different way.

VueJS FTW!

Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.

All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.

I WAS AN IDIOT.

The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.

If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.

I have been gone a while. Sorry. Workplace no longer allows phones on the lab and I work exclusively in the lab. Anyway here is a thing that pissed me off:

Systems Engineer (SE) 1 : 😐 So we have this file from the customer.
Me: 😑 Neat.
SE1: 😐 It passes on our system.
Me: 😑 *see prior*
Inner Me (IM): 🙄 is it taught in systems engineer school to talk one sentence at a time? It sounds exhausting.
SE1: but when we test it on your system, it fails. And we share the same algorithms.
Me: 😮 neat.
IM: 😮neat, 😥 wait what the fuck?
Me: 😎 I will totally look into that . . .
IM: 😨 . . . Thing that is absolutely not supposed to happen.

*Le me tracking down the thing and fixing it. Total work time 30 hours*

Me: 😃 So I found the problem and fixed it. All that needs to happen is for review board to approve the issue ticket.
SE1: 😀 cool. What was the problem?
Me: 😌 simple. See, if the user kicked off a rerun of the algorithm, we took your inputs, processed them, and put them in the algorithm. However, we erroneously subtracted 1 twice, where you only subtract 1 once.
SE1: 🙂 makes sense to me, since an erroneous minus 1 only effects 0.0001% of cases.

*le into review board*

Me: 😐 . . . so in conclusion this only happens in 0.0001% of cases. It has never affected a field test and if this user had followed the user training this would never have been revealed.
SE2: 🤨 So you're saying this has been in the software for how long?
Me: 😐 6 years. Literally the lifespan of this product.
SE2: 🤨 How do you know it's not fielded?
Me: 😐 It is fielded.
SE2: 🤨 how do you know that this problem hasn't been seen in the field?
Me: 😐 it hasn't been seen in 6 years?
IM: 😡 see literally all of the goddamn words I have said this entire fucking meeting!!!
SE2: 😐 I would like to see an analysis of this to see if it is getting sent to the final files.
Me: 🙄 it is if they rerun the algorithm from our product. It's a total rerun, output included. It's just never been a problem til this one super edge case that should have been thrown out anyway.
SE2: 🤨 I would still like to have SE3 run an analysis.
Me: 🙄 k.
IM: 😡 FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU

*SE3 run analysis*

SE3: 😐 getting the same results that Me is seeing.
Me: 😒 see? I do my due diligence.
SE2: 😐 Can you run that analysis on this file again that is somehow different, plus these 5 unrelated files?
SE3: 😎 sure. What's your program's account so I can bill it?
IM: 😍 did you ever knooooow that your my heeeerooooooo.

*SE3 runs analysis*

SE3: 😐 only the case that was broken is breaking.
SE2: 😐 Good.
IM: 🤬🤬🤬🤐 . . . 🤯WHY!?!?
Me: 😠 Why?
SE2: 😑 Because it confirms my thoughts. Me, I am inviting you to this algorithm meeting we have.
Me/IM: 😑/😡 what . . . the fuck?

*in algorithm meeting*

Me: 😑 *recaps all of the above* we subtract 1 one too many times from a number that spans from 10000 to -10000.
Software people/my boss/SE1/SE3: 🤔 makes sense.
SE2:🤨 I have slides that have an analysis of what Me just said. They will only take an hour to get through.
Me: 😑 that's cool but you need to give me your program's account number, because this has been fixed in our baseline for a week and at this point you're the only program that still cares. Actually I need the account to charge for the last couple times you interrupted me for some bullshit.

*we are let go.*

And this is how I spent 40+ useless hours against a program that is currently overrunning for no reason 🤣🤣🤣

Moral: never involve math guys in arithmetic situations. And if you ever feel like you're wasting your time, at least waste someone else's money.

Job interview..
Interviewer: gave me a question
Me: (took 40 mins to solve it)
Interviewer: Ok. 2nd question... Asks the ques..
Me: (relieved that 1st ques got over) Took some time 5 mins to come up with solution..
Interviewer: ok. 3rd question..
Me: ( feeling so happy that I solved 2 questions and reached the 3rd question)
Interviewer: Let's go back to first question and tell me a scenario that will fail in ur logic..( yes this is the 3rd question)
Me: Damnnn.. My heart stopped.. It took me 40 mins to figure out the logic that worked with different inputs I tried n now, I have to find some scenario that won't work...

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I really couldn't stop thinking about my program and working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI progrmas that were being made at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision to enter into Computer Science at all.

Jr. Dev: We got an issue in prod.
Sr. dev: Okay, what is the issue?
Jr. dev: Don't know, just got an email.
Sr. dev: Did you check the service?
Jr. dev: Which service?
Sr. dev: What have you debugged so far?
Jr. dev: I explained you the issue and waiting for your inputs.

😑😑😑😑😑

So today, I managed to make one of my colleagues feel like an idiot. In this contract, I work mostly for ui integration, while he build the pages with angular before I add all the html structure and fancy css.

We are building the front-end/ui for an industrial device with a touch screen. For that last 2 days he was blocked on a bug that when you click the confirm button on a delete popup, it would somehow select an input in the page before it was deleted and would lock the ui when showing the virtual keyboard (the poor thing didn't know what to do and wouldn't close).

During those two days, he asked all the other devs for help, trying to find a pattern or anything that could help, while I was focused on writing my css and stuff since it was my priority and I was hired specifically for that (I was aware of the bug and gave my input but I never saw it being reproduced)

So today, he start his new routine of raging at his desk and he decides to show me on my device for some reason. I immediately notice a pattern. It would always select one of the two fields behind the popup, in the click area of the button (it's a big button). Then, I noticed that I could press a random spot on the screen, drag my finger on the button and let go and nothing would happen.

It's at this moment I knew I had found the bug. The button was set to emit an event on mousedown while the inputs behind it were set to emit an event on mouseup (like it should be everywhere). So the popup closed when you placed your finger on the screen and the input was selected immediately after when you removed your finger (which was usually faster than the page code which was not yet optimized)

After that, it was just an easy fix to change the listener and I had a free beer.

When you just program in the top 10 inputs your boss is likely to put:

Business User: Hey can we get a sample output you plan to send us?

Me: yes heres a mock

BU: This doesn't look right, can you use real values?

Me (said nicely): WELL IF WHEN YOU WROTE THE FCKIN REQUIREMENTS WEREN'T SO VAGUE AND ACTUALLY PROVIDED REAL VALUES FOR THE INPUTS WE WOULD GET AND WHAT WE SHOULD OUTPUT USING THEM MAYBE I COULD GIVE YOU A BETTER SAMPLE... AND DO LESS GUESSING ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK YOU ACTUALLY WANT...

BU: Oh I forwarded some data

Me: *looks at input data*

(thoughts) THIS FUCKING MAKES NO SENSE!! NOWHERE DOES ANYTHING LOOK LIKE WHAT YOU WANTED.... HOW ABOUT I PULL MAGIC VALUES OUT OF MY ASS?

On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.

Manager walks in.

Here's the context.

We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.

I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.

My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.

He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.

We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"

That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.

So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.

As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.

The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

There is a function for creating random numbers.
So with the same inputs , I must get the same output.
So it is somewhat predictable.
So it is not actually random!

Am I tight?

Alright, question about graphics cards:

I want to get a six-monitor graphics card.
Currently looking at one but there's a thing:

The visiontek radeon 7750 seems great, manufacturer is AMD.

When searching for images of the *visiontek* radeon 7750 vs the AMD radeon 7750, I get different pictures, according to some product pages the visiontek amd radeon is produced by amd though....

They both have six inputs..

Point is: I'm going to run Linux on it (i refuse to install malware/spyware on my system for obvious reasons) and AMD has native Linux drivers for the radeon 7750: are those also for the visiontek radeon 7750?

I'm lost here. Help!

Which one do you prefer?

Programming lesson #5
When logic becomes too complex to solve mentally while coding, writing the requirements and inputs on paper and coming up with pseudocode is a good approach.

Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.

Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

Beginning Open Beta testing for a chatbot in a thursday

Friend: What the fuck are these inputs?

Me: just filter them out

Friend: Good fucking lord I was right to disable unsupervised learning

Me:Now you know

Inappropriate experience at work: One of our project managers got arrested one day for fraud. Apparently an employee had been in the middle of an online purchase and walked away from their desk. He happened to see the unmasked entry of the CC info (this was before websites cared about masking sensitive form inputs). I guess the temptation was too great…and he was too stupid to realize he’d get caught…and he jotted it all down. He made thousands of dollars in purchases which, naturally, eventually led back to him.

The same guy, before he got arrested, had made a joke when someone in an office team email said “Feel free to have some cake in the break room.” He replied “No need to do anything to me for the cake.” His first name was “Free”.

Some people tape up inputs like camera and mic to keep gov and hackers out of their private lives.

Me, I'm an exhibitionist.

That moment when... something finally works.

But you don't trust it.

So you pass it bad inputs to see if it's failing as it should.

>be me
>join new firm
>only developer
>Task : Migrate our PHP based website to reactjs
>okay not bad, I can do this
>*Completes in 2 days*
>get inputs from boss and he gives
>go back again to inform we're now SASS integrated
>asks for new wireframes
>wtf lol.exe
>wants new design for the same website like of the parent company which is WordPress template
>*Internally : I'm a developer, I don't do wireframes*
>okay no problem

Seriously, if you wanted a new design in the first place why didn't you said so?

fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUCCCKKK FUCKING FUUUCKKKBKB

if you gave me a feature that has 2^5 posible output, but didn't give me all the possible inputs AND expect me to finish it for this thursday, THEN DONT GIVE ME EXTRA JOB ON A DRIVER THAT DOESNT WORK. FUCK

Once in university I needed to write a simple program in c++ and upload it to online complier which would pass test inputs. It was homework, but I was bored during the next lecture, so I wrote the program.
On my phone.
Directly into the "paste" window in browser.
It wasn't comfortable at all, so I wrote everything in one line.
And got bonus points from lecturer later.
After some questions, ofc, like "wtf why everything is in one line"

Does anyone know an extension or library that helps determine if a co-worker is into me?

Or how to handle such inputs

I keep getting a fatal error: call to undefined function

Hosting a PHP/MySQL application for a really wealthy NGO that must have paid thousands of dollars for the app, and everything works fine but no sanitised inputs and direct SQL statement execution. Just waiting for little Bobby Tables so I can charge them a fortune for recovery 😊

ffmpeg...

I FUCKING LOVE YOU!!

I CAN JUST STACK THOSE FILTERS WITH NO RESTRICTIONS OVER AND OVER WITH DIFFERENT INPUTS AND OUTPUTS!!

Also: it fucking works with still images, AND IT’S FUCKING FAST!!

It’s around FOUR (4, DO YOU REALISE THE IMPROVEMENT) times faster to GAUSSIAN blur an image and then composite an image over it with ffmpeg, than to composite the image with imagemagick (no blurring)!!

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

Client wants a webapp where every label on all form inputs are configurable, even the fucking login form ("Login" and "Password" text)

They also want it to send emails where the message is configurable too (they can insert your own HTML)

so basically they want the entire fucking webapp to be configurable, all without requiring any code change.

I could use a "configurable" torture device right now.

So I am conducting an introductory seminar on git and GitHub for juniors and as per my knowledge I've drafted this outline, please add your inputs..

The seminar will be of 1 day only

1. Install and configure Git and Github

2. Digital Signature mapping

3. Git init

4. New Project with HTML

5. Configure remote (git remote add <origin> <url>) ends with .git

6. Git commit (git commit –m “Title” –m “commit message”)

7. Pushing git push (git remote push origin master)

8. Git commit –amend

9. Git pull (git pull origin master)

10. Git checkout (git checkout –b new_branch_name)

11. Do some changes

12. Git push new branch (git remote push origin new_branch_name)

13. Git switch branch (git checkout <name_of_existing_branch>)

14. Pull requests

15. Git log (git log –oneline –graph)

HTML quick maffs
If you want to have a placeholder for native <select> element, just do the following:
<option value="" selected disabled hidden>Choose...</option>

It will make a native placeholder that:
- is accessible and readable by screen reader
- doesn't show up in options list
- allows native validation with "required" attribute (note the empty value attribute in the placeholder option).

It's unfortunate that we don't have it the way we have placeholder in inputs, but this is the next best thing.

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

My mom woke me up at 6am because the tv sound was not working..
I tried almost everything, use the tv control, mute button, menu tv configuration..
even checked different inputs using my Nintendo switch and super Nintendo's and it didn't work..
Couldnt do shit.. so I had to use the old reliable!
turned off the tv and then turned on ..
It was like magic! fuck everything!

Oh, $work.

Ticket: Support <shiny new feature> in <seriously dated code> to allow better “searching” (actually: generating reports, not searching)

UI: “Filter on” inputs above a dynamic JS table don’t update said table; they trigger generating a new report.

Seriously dated code: 12 years old. Rails v3-isms. Blocks access without appropriate role; role name buried in secrets configuration files. Code passes data round-trip between server/client/server/model that isn’t ever used. Has two identical reports with slightly different names, used interchangeably. Uh, I guess I’ll update both?

Reports: Heavily, heavily abstracted; zero visibility.

Shiny new feature: Some new magical abstraction layer with no documentation nor comments. Nobody in my team knows how it works. The author… won’t explain, but sent me her .ppt presentation on it (the .ppt, not a recording).

Useless specs for seriously dated code: Tests exclusively factory-generated data; not the controller, filters/lookups, UI, table data, etc.

Seriously dated code and useless spec author: the CISO.

The worst part: I’m not even surprised at any of this.

I never understood why designers design radio and checkbox inputs like that. I guess the standard design is too much accessible.

For the love of good, dear web devs. Please trim your user inputs before validating them. Thanks!

The Linux sound system scene looks like it was deliberately designed to be useless.

ALSA sees all my inputs and outputs, but it can't be used to learn (or control) anything about software and where their sound goes. Plus it's near impossible to identify inputs and outputs.

PulseAudio does all sorts of things automatically, but it's hard to configure and has high latency.

JACK is very convenient to configure, has great command line tools (like you'd expect from Linux), is scriptable, but it doesn't see things.

Generally, all of these see the others as a single output and a single input, which none of them are.

Man....I keep up with this strange love hate relationship I have with Python....

Last night it was python that literally wrote my homework: define all possible equivalent partition tables with cause and effect analysis and boundary value checks for a program. The whole thing wrote itself and all I had to do was verify the inputs. Something that I was able to do using jupyter with pandas and numpy. On one hand, I despise the lack of static typing and use of whitespace as a block delimiter. On the other I cannot but help feeling a high level of gratitude over the language and its high availability and ease of use for this.

Sure, I could have used other tools, but this language has dominated hardcore in this regard enough to the point of not considering it being a crime against humanity.

I am stuck with another Postman.

Attrition in my current org is way to high in product teams and we have only one designer shared between ~100 people (10 product lines).

My ex-lead (a genius) and my skip level manager (very smart chap), both keep saying that my manager is a very good manager.

However, in reality, I don't find so.

- Only responds to my questions
- Ignores any other form of communication
- No help on any front
- No support or validation on my tasks (hence, I have to actively keep asking for feedback)
- Regularly cancels 1:1
- Involves other team members in 1:1 and cancels theirs as well
- Says I am doing well but keeps nitpicking in my work
- Hardly reviews anything

My company is amazing, pay is good, perks and opportunities are wonderful, kickass learning but my direct manager isn't making me feel comfortable working here.

Maybe she is too cramped with responsibilities but again, I have never seen her deliver anything and all she does is a postman job of taking inputs from her manager and pass on to me and coordinates until me and her manager decide to jump on a call and figure things out ourselves.

It's just been 3 months and I feel more annoyed than worried about being here.

I'M A SENIOR DEVELOPER NOT A BUSINESS ANALYST...

IF YOU GIVE ME SOME CRAPPY LEGACY CODE THAT SOMEONE RANDOMLY DECIDED TO USE, THE ONLY WAY I CAN UNDERSTAND IT IS BY RUNNING IT AND REVERSE ENGINEERING THE "BUSINESS LOGIC".

ADD THAT WITH BAD INPUTS... THE ONLY THING YOUR DOING IS WASTING MY TIME..

JUST BURN THE WHOLE THING AND GIVE ME THE REQUIREMENTS OF WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WANT....

It feels like I've been fucking a pig all week...

Oh and now my team agrees and will look to get the actual requirements from the business...

This feels like a hallow victory.... As that was the first thing I told them to do....

I hate hate hate React! Sorry but to me it's just such a bloated pos of a framework. I realize it was pretty revolutionary at first, the idea of having everything "reactive" and all of that - but newer things like Svelte.js are a dream to work with, whereas trudging through the poorly coded React app I'm supposed to be testing for work is making me want to pull my hair out! I installed a vscode tool so everybody could see what the import "cost" is on everything - a simple INPUT is 50KB of pure BLOAT for something that should and can be way simpler.

I realize there are probably better coded apps out there that wouldn't drive me so crazy, but anybody importing hundreds of KB of 3rd party crap just to get a select box, some inputs, and a date picker are really out of their mind.

Not being able to directly read in inputs as any data type rather than string and thus having to convert it and check for Exceptions if users enter bullshit

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

Designer made the layouts reading only half the requirements. We have stuff such as "3 email inputs" where he just stuck one and told us to eyeball it if we needed something else.

Plot Twist: everyobody sucks designing stuff on the dev team, so after explaining that we needed more input from him, he sent us the psds and told us to change them as we saw fit.

Went thru some code today, found this...

WHY WOULD I EVER DO THAT?!
(It's fixed now, and yes, I still have all my tables in my db.)

I hate HTML forms. Fucking hate them.

They're semantic so folk use them to group related inputs.

But they're also functional if you're not just typing something in and pushing enter to send it to a server, you have to override every. fucking. event.

Semantic _or_ functional is fine, but for the love of all that is holy, not both. I hate this.

I am working with a team that's producing tons of new services..
And me being a fresher, reading new designs every other day with God knows complex implementations and business requirements and attending design review meetings(where I can barely understand anything)
having a great learning curve..
Hopefully, I survive this period and cope up with the inputs...
Note: Just don't ask what's my contribution.. I am gearing up for the D-Day to make my impact(not a negative one).. 😎

Seeing some jokes about AI and deterministic if/else sort of logic... in a really sleep deprived state I start to wonder - if we are able to make AI that REALLY begins to pass as intelligent / self aware / sentient and imitates us.... and it spawns from deterministic lower level logic that has just grown from an uncontrollably large amount of inputs and complications... will we just end up convincing ourselves that we don't actually have free will either? Maybe we just have an amazing natural data lake. :-/

Well, throughout my life I've never really thought about programming. Then one day during some downtime on a backpacking trip with a friend, while I had nothing to do my friend sat there with his computer with the screen all dark, filled with funny colourful text in lines of different length, with some lines even starting more towards the middle of the page than to the left, almost following a vertical wave pattern. He said he was writing a program to control his home remotly as well as working as a security feature that could unlock his home automatically when he got home. I was amazed by the colorful text as well as the fact that he could just create this crazy program out of nothing.
Half a year later I attended my first lecture at the computer science programme. My first program was a command line tool used for baking bread. It asked you how much flour you'd use and how many eggs, then it'd tell you wether or not you'd got the correct ratio. I was blown away by the intuitive nature of programming. I could imagine the control flow as a tree or flow chart in my head. I mean the whole program was only a couple of user inputs followed by an if-statement and a print-statement, but for me it was awe inspiring. I knew then that I'd probably chosen the right path in education.

In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.

I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.

I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."

I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.

I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.

I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.

This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).

All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.

Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.

And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.

I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...

Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.

p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.

In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.

FUCK EVERY PAGE THAT DOES NOT STRIP CLEAR TEXT INPUTS LIKE EMAIL AND USERNAME.

FFS WE LIVE IN A TIME WHERE YOU JUST HAVE TO APPEND ".strip()" TO ACHIEVE THAT

First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.

Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.

Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS

Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS

From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

So me and some colleagues joined a hackathon. We already agreed on our project architecture, UI design, and features to build and showcase. Halfway through development new features kept getting added without my inputs, I said to myself it's ok maybe they're just small insertions. But nope, they kept breaking my CSS and UI design and kept causing merge issues on our repo because, well, no one could seem to agree on the project scope. The last straw was, with a couple of hours left, someone went and added new screens and changed the application flow entirely, which entailed some rather nasty rework of my code to fix. Fuck that, I decided to just stop and let them sort the mess.

When it was our turn to present our project, the fucking cunts assumed I would do all the talking - even if they never sent over the slides they put together. Why the fuck am I going to present something drastically different from the initial, agreed-upon scope? I told them to do it themselves and I remained silent throughout the entire debacle.

Of course, we lost. But I wasn't surprised. The guys who presented kept on contradicting each other and were not unified in their vision. I'm never teaming up with them ever again. Fucking asshole douchebag fucks.

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

This is actually a question about the devRant app.

I’ve noticed this a few times. When I click a rant repeatedly (say x times), from the front page or from the notifications pane, multiple layers of that rant open up. And I have to hit the back button x amount of times to go back to where I initially was (again, front page or notification pane).

Now, I understand an app capturing multiple user inputs on the same object but shouldn’t it also account for this by only considering those taps as one input, especially if the object is lagging and hadn’t been loaded? Why is devRant implemented this way?

I would consider it undesirable to have Gmail open the same email in multiple layers when you click the same email repeatedly. So, is devRant’s a feature or a bug?

I’m not a web (app) developer. I’d just like some knowledge on how user input might be captured and why repeated inputs aren’t screened out?

If anyone could page the two awesome doods who work on devRant, that would be awesome! I hope I didn’t just wrongly assume their genders.

I made a web app where I can build any kind of form, with sections, validations, multiple type of inputs (even coordinates or polygons, photos, etc.) while allowing to see a preview of how that would look in a mobile app. That preview is because when you're done building the form and saved it to the DB, then in a mobile app (which I made as well) you can choose that form and use it.

Everything is beautiful, but after 3 sections with 25 questions each, everything becomes really slow because of the insane amount of actions that redux-form fires on every character type 😢

Today I made a public demonstration, and despite my code is very clean and well made, I think, that slowness made me look like a shitty developer, even thought I know what I made is like a 1000 times better than what I was asked to develop.

I had debug my perfectly working program.
Let me explain.
I wrote a python perform some calculations and return the result. In case the calculations were not successful, it would raise an error.
For some reason, it worked on all test cases: gave correct output with correct inputs and raised errors on non correct inputs but when I used it with another function, it just failed.
Turns out I had written 'return myExcetion' instead of 'raise my exception'.
Lol, I was almost gonna give up programming

@Gilles had a similar rant and reminded me of a story...

As a kid I learned QBasic. Moved to VB5 and later VB6. Because of this 'knowledge', I was the one who had to maintain legacy applications at my previous job. All of those applications were in use at various banks. On first work day in 2011 all hell broke loose - no date input control would accept the date anymore. I quickly discovered that the max year on date inputs was set to 2010. Later, I was told that nobody expected these applications would still be used in 2010 so they entered it as a distant future number. The funny part was that one bank was still running apps written in VB3 and I had to go back to basics. Didn't even know how to edit basic controls in that interface :D

Good times :)

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

If you think parametised queries will save the day think again.

I occasionally test sites I visit throwing a few quotes at inputs and query params.

I also always test logging in as % with user or pass.

Not only are plaintext passwords a thing but so is this:

WHERE username LIKE ? AND password LIKE ?.

Once I saw an OR.

Interview scheduled : 11.30 am
Reached venue: 11.15 am
Waiting for my turn : 2.30 pm
How much time should I wait: some one who is part of team, give me two minutes let me check
Me still waiting for info/my turn: 3.00pm
Chuck this, left venue: 3.00pm

Why do they schedule interviews if they cant manage or provide proper inputs.😤😤

Angular material is shit.

Angular material has literally no documentation. There is no search on their shit docs. And there is absolutely no info in their docs about some shit they use.
So when you need to know what the fuck does smth like MatOption mean (what inputs does this piece of fuck takes?) you will need to dig into the code.

Holy shit! I have not programmed a Teensy micro in a while. So I was looking at what they offer and saw they now have a 600Mhz version that is the same size/pinout as their 72MHz version. I am just amazed by how much micros have changed. I love the embedded wifi chips that are out there too. I guess I am going to be playing with the Teensy the next few weeks. I love playing around with embedded audio processing. Lately I have been playing with bluetooth wireless audio. So this will fit nicely. The chip has 2 AD and assorted digital audio inputs/outputs.

I dunno, I was excited and this seems like a nice new years present.

when you build the whole landing page, forms, php mail sender, SMTP, marketing integrations, analytics and all of that from scratch, and 1 hour before it goes live your boss tells you to change some inputs on the form.

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

I forgot my password to my mindfactory account, one of Germany's biggest online vendor for computer components. So I go through the resetting process, which is:

- apply for password reset
- get a mail
- confirm the mail
(So far, so good)

- get a mail with a new CLEAR TEXT PASSWORD

Is this the stone age!?

You never send an email containing the cleartext! You never even store the password as is!
You, as the provider, should never be able to know what the actual password was.

All you are supposed to do is to generate a random salt, and hash the user's password with the salt, and then you only store the salt and the hash. And whenever a user inputs their password, all you do is to check if the you can recreate the hash with the help of the salt and your hash algorithm. (There are libraries for that!)

If a user wants to reset their password? Send them to a mail with link on where they can assign a new password.

At no point should the password ever be stored or transmitted in any other medium.

Cape Town wind is insane today. Blew so hard my phone registered inputs from it!

Is this how i should sanitize my inputs?

Ok ok ok, I will preface this by saying I am still a student so you can assume my complete and utter lack of experience.

There is all this fuss about unit testing and TDD but i still have my doubts about it. How is it that if your code works for certain inputs you can be sure that it will work for whatever can happen after deployment?

I mean, to my understanding testing can assure that some business requirements are cared for but as far as actual code correctness goes I don't see how that is achieved.

As far as i am concerned the closest it comes to complete code correctness is a mathematical type of proof but that should be impossible to be done effectively in an OO language.

How can you be sure that your code is what you think?

(If i have this all wrong please correct me)

So a few weeks ago my colleague needed to generate some self signed certificates for our web application, we're working on.
I've sent him some instructions on how to do that. No big deal, few terminal commands.
The only trick was the commands were written for linux and we're using windows.
So... my colleague calls me, having some issues with certificates. He explains to me what commands he managed to execute, etc. There was also command "sudo" included.
He inputs the command to terminal and... terminal eats it?! Wtf?
So long story short he managed to install "sudo" for windows powershell terminal :D. It basically just gives you some UAC popup confirmation dialog and then executes the command.

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

pandas can suck my balls.

N
I
H

I'd rather roll my own.

edit: but also xgboost can suck my balls.

Treating every OBVIOUSLY continuous-valued entry as a 'category'.
All searches for this problem turn up tutorials and documentation on how to CONVERT continuous and numeric values into classes or categories.

Not a single fucking document addresses the problem of when pandas or xgboost refuses to treat numeric inputs as numerics and insists on pushing an error that your data is categorical when every fucking inspection shows the type as numeric.

Taking an online test to practise programming. They give me code that takes two 3x3 matrices as inputs and outputs a third. I have to multiply them together and ouput results.

Within minutes I've worked my head around it, got four lines of code to do it all. Output fails.

Twenty minutes later, nearly failing the time limit I find out that they couldn't output the array proplerly in C++

Are3[I, j];

;( What a hair puller.

Man, I sure am glad that FUCKING MOBILE SAFARI no longer obeys my viewport scale rules. It's really awesome how ALL of my projects now focus in on text inputs and then zoom so that the site feels broken after that when the user scrolls away. This was the last little bit of control we had to make our websites feel like apps. FUCK

Since gitkraken is turning into such a bitch, I've searched for alternatives once again, as usual none of the competitors still implemented a fraction of it, after so much time.

Sublime Merge looked promising, but then half the time fucks the history graph, fails to remove remotes and more funny stuff I don't want to mess with.

Github Desktop I didn't even try because it didn't seem to have any proper history graph to begin with.

For now ended up on sourcetree, though I really do miss having commit message and description be two separate inputs, have done the most basic merge for now, so it's a to be continued experience.

Mostly afraid of how it'll show merge conflicts and commit view, as from what I gathered it doesn't fullscreen when you click a commit, but instead shows an awkward small screen at the bottom of the graph split further in half with the avatar and commit message.

Edit: oh for fucks sake, just noticed it doesn't even have linux support, god damn it.

So we have this administration page in the clients app that has tables of data.

The user can click on a row to edit or click "Add' to create a new one, doing so pops up a modal with a form full of inputs and a save button at the bottom.

The other day our client told me he was concerned that users would not understand how to edit data and that I should add some text below the first input field of each modal that says "Type in a new value and click 'SAVE' to change the [field name]"

As I implimented this crap, I took a few minutes to come up with a nice way of saying that his idea made no sense, added unnecessary clutter to the UI, and proposed some alternatives.

He essentially said, "Thanks for your much better ideas, for now let's just stick with what we've got and we can revisit this later."

Everytime I open that UI, I physically feel pain and get a little sick.

Fucking fuck !
I work with a senior Dev,
It’s pretty much like am working under him....
He’s like a great Dev no doubt about it

But !!!!

He’s a fucking dumbass when it comes to working in a team. He makes changes in my code without telling me. He says He forgot to tell me , every single time

When I ask him how a piece of code works , he says it’s pretty much obvious and acts like even a 6 year old kid Would know this ,
He doesn’t think 2 steps ahead before solving a problem usually creating another problem !

We were once working on a language which we weren’t very good at , so I suggested him to ask another Dev in our company about inputs on our code structure to which he completely Disagreed saying they really won’t know much and that he knows more than them..
Fucking dumbass thinks he knows more than most ...

I have tried confronting him multiple times but he feels but he just won’t listen...

I’ve been bashing my head against a project for the past 8 weeks. The project creates a PDF pulling data from multiple APIs, scrapes and private DBs and plots charts using Plotly. We built it with Python, wkhtmltopdf and Celery+Redis. The input is an excel with a list of up to 5 influencers to analyse and compare. Runs on demand on a Linux machine and each report takes around 20 mins to generate. The project has no unittests so the only way I can check everything works is by running a bunch of different inputs. Even though you test 10 inputs (taking you more than a day), there is a high chance something goes wrong on the 11th input. I’m thinking that the only way to fix this mess is to go back to the drawing board and plan yet another refactoring to add unittests everywhere. What do you guys think?

At my workplace a while back we got some new interns.
I had been explaining how to use the commands on our Linux server. While I was in mid-sentence talking about what shutdown does, the intern inputs the shutdown command; shutting down everything... not shortly after, I start getting bombarded with emails and calls...

ESSO Password Manager.
Prepare to cry after ESSO inputs your password in the username-field instead of the password-field the third time while your colleagues are watching...

Getting started with MEAN stack(finally) after lot of thinking (and a year of android dev). Wish me luck and provide your inputs about my decision.

I like to say programming is the art of "creative logic". Much like architecture has an aesthetic to consider or cooking has well-defined procedures with greatly varying inputs and outputs, there has to be room for creativity, be it at the planning stage or during wild improvisation sessions.

Without that creative aspect, software development sounds dreary to me.

Where science meets art is where the magic happens.

If only the artists shared this view and actually took an interest in the technical side...

!rant

I love that you can type the word "test" with one hand. Makes testing form inputs a lot faster.

FML. Tomorrow I have a demo, and I hardly have things in place. The demo depends on inputs from a lot of people. Why the fuck am I the only one responsible!

I could write a book on this (and I am) but long story short: contracts people that have no tech know how, don't get tech inputs, then get mad and convince managers it's all the tech people's fault when the contract bombs.

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Finally finished an algo to check an image for grouping of pixels that will form a rectangular area. I got the grouping to work on one image, but found it was utterly failing on another. I went through every step of the algo and still could not find the solution. The 128x128 image was working, but the 128x16 image was not. I knew it had something to do with the dimensions. Started thinking it was overflowing a buffer somewhere. So I started putting asserts in the functions that abstracted the buffer access. None of the numbers exceeded the proper bounds. It was close to bedtime so I finally gave up. I was tired. Then I realized it wouldn't be until the next evening when I could look at this again. So I got up again and started looking at the code again. I had a loop to check the output of my algo that I did the memory access of the buffer. It too was not fully filling my temp image to show how the algo was working. WTF!

Then I finally realized the flaw:
buffer[x+y*height]

And my test loop to test the algo:
buffer[x+y*ymax]

I kept overlooking the error because I was sure it was right. Also my asserts for the functions to access the buffers? They only checked the inputs x and y. So it didn't help that the math was wrong for reading and writing the buffers. It also worked fine on 128x128 images because the width and height were the same.

It is funny that I struggled with this part. The algo was actually surprisingly easy to formulate. I just looked through every point and checked a buffer to see if that point was used. If not then I would attempt to grow in the x and y direction the shaped of that point based upon pixel color. This was saved in a structure while growing that point. Then when that rectangle could not be grown further the inner loop would continue checking used points again.

I still have work to do to use the data this algo produces. I need to now figure out how to parent the rectangular areas to each other. I will probably use my check buffer to keep track of these rects by an index. Then do adjacent checks to determine parenting. Eventually I will have to extend this algo to 3 dimensions, but that should not be difficult.

So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.

Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.

Once I helped one of my friends writing a coding project for an interview for him.

We worked out a solution in C++. I showed him all the class hierarchies, how the flow worked and so on.

The day after he told me he re-wrote it in C# as he was more confident with it. Fair enough.

He changed most of the names using camel + underscore notation, sometimes starting with a capital letter, sometimes not!

But the best (or, rather, worst) was to convert the class hierarchy in a big class with all stuff in it, called "CMother". That got me. This class had a couple of static methods that took a lot (if not all) inputs that somehow coincided with the member variables of another class and did some work with them (like a constructor of that class would do).

Needless to say, he didn't got the job

Let me just say that I've been playing whack a mole with a new feature for while now. And it's becoming very tiring.

TLDR; CTO is changing the way we're going to implement this, every other day.

June 1st,
CEO: let's implement feature AAA,
CTO: we're going to have a call with Andy to tell us all about his product that will make this super easy, call will be June 4th.

Days before June 4th,
Me: Researchs product X, makes demo works flawlessly.

June 4th,
Call all good, few tips from Andy. We come to the pricing section of Product X

CTO: this will not work, pricing doesn't fit on our budget, fair enough.

June 7th -11th
Me: research altenative approach. Makes second demo.

CTO: Works good, seems to have too many moving parts, let's have call with Bob to check Product Y. It should make our lifes easier.

ME: Geee, ok let's check it out.

June 14th,

Call with Bob, all good, product has a fair price, stuff is experimental.

CTO: let's use Product Y, and just use what we get from their api now, and worry about changes later.

Me: Hmmm, that's a bit risky, but ok, you the boss, right?, starts again new demo. API doesn't work as documented.

Lots of trial and error to figure out how the api is working now, finally demo works well,

June 17th,

API changed, now it works as documented, (expected as it is experimental), previous demo doesn't work anymore.

June 18th,

Redoing research. inputs are completely different from Product Y now, need to redo all that is working and do and a lot more of research.

Go live is scheduled for end of next week, I hope that the API is stable now, and that I get to go live on schedule.

It is funny to see, that it would probably been the same if we just waited on the API to stabilize, and check the pricing section before choosing a product? Who knows.

Anyways, I actually feel happy that over the years I developed the patience to work with ever changing situations like this one.

Can somebody explain to me why developers (especially web) have to micromanage every single thing into it's own f*ing component.

Story time: I have an input form with some tabs. I discovered that the UI Library (Devextreme) has a nice little component that handles forms, (including tabs, groups, etc.). So I make a page, configure tabs, inputs and whatnot.

Now, I already knew that my coworkers can't handle html that is bigger than a page. So instead of putting the configs in the frontend, I made nice files where I store those, to keep them nicely clean and seperated.

Me feeling very good, went off to have a nice lunch break.

I come back read the message from my coworker, asking me to make every tab it's own component and form and load them into a separate Tab-Component, instead of using the built in configuration

......

WHAT?

Like seriously. I have a f*ing library that handles that, why the f*ck do I need to reinvent the wheel here!?

Supposedly it's to make it more maintainable, easier to find bugs, flatten the hierarchy.

Here's a little wake up call you morons: Nesting hundreds of components into each other does *not* help you with that.
It just creates a rabbit-hole of confusing containers that you have to navigate and dissect every time you try to find something.

"Can I fix the bug in the detail Page? Sure I'll tell you tomorrow when I find out which fucking component the bug results from".

Components are there to be *reused*. It's using inheritance for reusing code all over again, but worse.

But maybe I'm just old fashioned, and conservative. Maybe I'm just a really bad software engineer, because nowadays everything seems to result in architectures spreading hundreds of folders, thousands of files with nothing but arbitrary cut-offs with no real benefit, that I don't see the value in.

Today I wanted to automate checking the status of running jobs. There's a UI but navigating it is tedious and I sort of wanted a Dashboard.

So I started writing a Selenium app to automate it. I'm writing the code, inspecting all the inputs. And I'm looking "woah, all of them have nice ids... This should be easy"

Login is ok, but then run into IFrames (can't find the input elements on the page itself).

Fine Google... find the answer and so try again. But wait... It doesn't work???

There's apparently 9 of them on the page. And there's no easy way to identify the correct one...

Spent an hr trying different ways of locating the right one... eventually settling on very complex XPath...

All in all though it took 2 hours... And still not done...

How do you switch from testing while debugging (functional) to TDD unit tests?

Usually I test while coding by just running the use case and making sure while coding, bad inputs are caught/handled.

But most times I start with a general idea of the structure and what the about should be (which essentially would be the functional test case?)

I don't think about how you can break each part or the functions I need until I need them. Then usually start simple and then refactor. And until I'm sure each time I refactor would require changing the tests?

"Guys best idea to fuc... help the javascript developers. We make a framework with its own events/states and it will not change inputs or anything unless specified in state. Clearly easier to test... I mean how hard can it be?

Even better our framework will be so fuc... Helpfull that they will put an plugin so they can make it work... I mean improve...

Did i say we just throw the html and put everything in our own butchered way? Even better remember that easy
, Style= ? Hahaha we will make it an object...

O yeah and the state must be immutable objects... What immutable means? Who the fu... I mean its easy...

And we make our own virtual dom because... Fu browsers"
-Facebook developer who hates javascript probably

P.S: thanks vue for keeping the double binding.

The frontend developers in my company are the reason why I have anxiety. Here are few things that grinds my knees:
1) for a long time in projects, they deleted the auth token from their storage without integrating the logout api. They thought why use an API for that. :)
2) most of them had no clue that form fields could accept javascript as inputs and work as XSS vulnerabilities. This actually happened with a client, he got so fucking pissed.
3) One of them asked me to convert a PATCH request to DELETE cos fuck REST and HTTP methods.

For fuck’s sake. I need to get out of this place.

Test inputs while debugging an app 😐😐

Isn’t the usage of environment variables common for golang apps?

I interviewed for a company which made me develop a golang backend service and I used environment variables for sql connection strings and client and secret IDs and all.

When I submitted them the project, the feedback was that the tech person isn’t familiar with dotenv configuration.

Any inputs about any other way this could’ve gone?

All day I wrote pretty error mesages for all sorts of nonsensical inputs to a program that only I will ever use.

But now I still need exceptions for the typos in my exceptions for the typos in my code for... what am I trying to do?

The project I took over from another developer had a contact form with 27 inputs named as this:

form1, form2, form3, form4, form5, form6...

The PM asked me to make the form more "accessible" somehow.

Note: The inputs were not ordered by their numeric names, the first input was named form16 and second was form9.

I'm less familiar with JavaScript, and by extension, I'm less familiar with JS Frameworks. So I needed to add inputs from three <input/> and show addition in fourth <input/>

So ripped off a SO answer, didn't work, though his JSFiddle is working perfectly.

Ripped off another SO answer, but this time jQuery, but that didn't work too.

the cycle continues till I find that I do not have a id="" in my code and I'm trying to use getElementById.

I just came with a problem trying to get the value of an HTML input of type date and trying to throw it into a Javascript Date object... After about an hour of searching (Google, Stackoverflow) I realized HTML5 date inputs use UTC timezone (defined by W3C) and Javascript uses your local timezone and this difference is messing with my code giving me a JS obvject 1 day before the HTML date...
Why they do this kind of thing?

I have to build a webapp in a month that parses through PDFs and inputs data into the right places for at least 3 different PDF documents. We would have had more time but so many delays in the class has led to this shit show being accelerated. I'm not ready.

I’m trying to update a job posting so that it’s not complete BS and deters juniors from applying... but honestly this is so tough... no wonder these posting get so much bs in them...

Maybe devRant community can help be tackle this conundrum.

I am looking for a junior ml engineer. Basically somebody I can offload a bunch of easy menial tasks like “helping data scientists debug their docker containers”, “integrating with 3rd party REST APIs some of our models for governance”, “extend/debug our ci”, “write some preprocessing functions for raw data”. I’m not expecting the person to know any of the tech we are using, but they should at least be competent enough to google what “docker is” or how GitHub actions work. I’ll be reviewing their work anyhow. Also the person should be able to speak to data scientists on topics relating to accuracy metrics and mode inputs/outputs (not so much the deep-end of how the models work).

In my opinion i need either a “mathy person who loves to code” (like me) or a “techy person who’s interested in data science”.

What do you think is a reasonable request for credentials/experience?

How do you implement TDD in reality?

Say you have a system that is TDD ready, not too sure what that means exactly but you can go write and run any unit tests.

And for example, you need to generate a report that uses 2 database tables so:

1. Read/Query
2. Processor logic
3. Output to file

So 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward, they don't change much, just mock the inputs.

But what about #2. There's going to be a lot of functions doing calculations, grouping/merging the data. And from my experience the code gets refactored a lot. Changing requirements, optimization (first round is somewhat just make it work) so entire functions and classes maybe deleted. Even the input data may change. So with TDD wouldn't you end up writing a lot of throwaway code?

A lot of times I don't know exactly what I want or need other than I need a class that can do something like this... but then I might end up throwing the whole thing out and writing a new one one I get a clearer idea of what i or the user wants or needs.

Last week I was building a new REST API, the parameters and usage changed like 3 times. And even now the code is in feasibility/POC testing just to figure out what needs to be used. Do I need more, less parameters, what should they be. I've moved and rewritten a lot of code because "oh this way won't work, need to try this way instead"

All I start with is my boss telling me I need an API that lets users to ... (Very general requirements).

Hey guys, I'm planning to rewrite multiple asp.net applications in my company using Angular 4 & WebAPI/Node APIs. Do you have any suggestions?
We have around 20+ small to medium size applications which I'm planning to rewrite. Since these applications can be run in different machines I'm thinking of integrating them in a electron app and sharing the desktop app to the users.

What do you guys think?
Do you think it's a good idea? How do I proceed with this ? Any inputs are welcome.

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

Make your code available for your team members, please.

So we're working on this robotics project using ROS, a framework that enables multiple nodes in a network exchange their functionality among each other through tcp connections. Each node can be implemented and executed on your own machine, and tested with dummy inputs, but in collaboration they make a robot do fancy stuff.

The knowledgebase needs data from the image processing unit, providing this data to others with semantic context to high level planning, which uses this semantic data for decision making and calling the robot manipulation node with meaningful input, to navigate the robot's components in the environment. We use a dedicated machine, which pulls the corresponding repositories and is always kept configured correctly, to run each node, such that everybody has access to each other's work when needed.

So far so good. We tried to convince the manipulation guy (let's call him John) to run his code on our central machine, not a week, but since the first day, 5 months ago. Our cluster classification has been unavailable for 2 months, but my collegue fixed that. We still can't run the whole project without John's computer. If his machine blows up we're fucked.

Each milestone feels like a big-bang-test, fixing issues in interfaces last-minute. We see the whole demo just moments before our supervisors arrive at the door.

I just hope he doesn't get hit by a truck.

Lessons from a really big project I will almost certainly finish:

When specifying a program, a lot of inputs become valid which have few to no real use cases, simply because they logically follow from the requirements.
When implementing a specification, some narrow use cases become unexpectedly difficult to handle.

It's important to recognize the intersection and reject it.

You know what's terrifying? When you hear a contracts person say "we already know what we're going to bid, so we don't need engineering inputs."

So I'm currently working on a chat app that deals with astrology..dealing in the sense we are building an AI which gives prediction based on ones date of birth, time of birth and place of birth, you can ask it questions (currently only career related) and you get some prediction..it's an in-house project, we have a client who is an astrologer who gives us the logic to compute the predictions ..it's still a long way from being an AI ...so our CEO walks in one day with his huge plans for the product...decides to ditch the app completely, on which we have invested 4 months of our time and instead make an appointment scheduling webapp for our client as he felt that would fetch us some green stuff..so I was like why ditch the app when we can have the same module in the app itself and ask the astrologer to make his clients install if they want to book future appointments, he completely disregarded my idea and said that is bad marketing and all other shit and he went on to explain his other ideas ...I didn't think much of it at that time , then the CEO and the director of technology had a separate meeting where the director has made the same points which I had told him(ceo) that it is a bad idea to ditch the app (I wasn't aware of this meeting untill later)...so after a week we have a team meeting with the CEO, director of technology ...where he starts telling how it is not so wise to Chuck the existing application and build a new one which is totally unnecessary and we can have it as a module in the existing one...and I'm like sitting there thinking to myself da fck is he talking about...so i decided to stay silent and listen to his bs...my marketing lead leans over and ask y so silent ....I tell her whatever he is talking now is the same thing I told last week which he rejected blatantly... And then he had the nerve to ask me any inputs to this plan...I couldn't hold back ...I told him that this is the exact same thing I told u last week , to which his reply was focus on the future and forget the past ....I was like mother fckr woooooot ...I realised the power of position !! Fuckol man

>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met

I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?

What the fuck is going on with elementary OS 0.4 Loki?!
Its the worst performing OS I have ever used:
* login ==> just shows desktop wallpaper, no icons, no dock, no keyboard inputs, no shit!
* installs updates in background ==> ne keyboard inputs, no reaction at all

Wtf did you guys do, when changing to unbuntu?!

I've been programming for quite a while. I know Java and C#, but I decided to pick up another language, C++, so enrolled in a class at my college. My professor is GOD AWFUL. 4 weeks in and WE DIDNT EVEN TOUCH THE #$@&% KEYBOARD. You'd think that we would at least learn inputs or outputs, right? Instead we've been busting ass learning how to format our homework. What a waste of time.

On that note, if there are any good C++ classes on Udemy, and if you've had a good experience I would love your advice since theres many choices to choose from. I'm gonna learn this one way or another, and it seems the latter looks more useful than that person I'm obligated to call "professor".

Excellent documentation of other people's inputs so I know where they are coming from to minimize surprises and miscommunications.

Has anyone else found that not all USB C inputs are the same? You can't just buy an cable and expect it to plug into any socket.

1. I replaced the cable for a power pack, but the new one didn't fit my OP6 socket well, no clicking and have to push it in very hard to get it to charge, and still eat to fall out
2. The pixel 2 cable fits it nicely and all cables are ready to plugin and work
3. I tried charging my new Pixel 4a with ur though but very hard to plug in. Had to install the charger and cable that came with.
4. Amazon Fire takes all of them nicely and send all the others can use the cable that came with it too

I wrote my first proper promise today

I'm building a State-driven, ajax fed Order/Invoice creation UI which Sales Reps use to place purchases for customers over the phone. The backend is a mutated PHP OSCommerce catalog which I've been making strides in refactoring towards OOP/eliminating spahgetti code and the need for a massive bootstrapper file which includes a ton of nonsense (I started by isolating the session and several crucial classes dealing with currency, language and the cart)

I'm using raw JS and jquery with copious reorganization.

I like state driven design, so I write all my data objects as classes using a base class with a simple attribute setter, and then extend the class and define it's attributes as an array which is passed to the parent setter in the construct.

I have also populateFromJson method in the parent class which allows me to match the attribute names to database fields in the backend which returns via ajax.

I achieve the state tracking by placing these objects into an array which underscore.js Observe watches, and that triggers methods to update the DOM or other objects.

Sure, I could do this in react but
1) It's in an admin area where the sales reps using it have to use edge/chrome/Firefox
2) I'm still climbing the react learning curve, so I can rapid prototype in jquery faster instead of getting hung up on something I don't understand
3) said admin area already uses jquery anyway
4) I like a challenge

Implementing promises is quickly turning messy jquery ajax calls into neat organized promise based operations that fit into my state tracking paradigm, so all jquery is responsible for is user interaction events.

The big flaw I want to address is that I'm still making html elements as JS strings to generate inputs/fields into the pseudo-forms.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a library or practice that allows me to generate Dom elements in a template-style manner.

!Rant
#serious inputs needed

I need help identifying that one big problem that all devs face. Irrespective of the language, domain, etc.. And I wanna solve it. I need your inputs on what bothers you the most, and what tech you work with.. Then we can upvote the comments that are applicable to all of us.. I'll setup a github once we come to a conclusion

Oh... I dont know what to pick...
So i will pick 3 projects from my 3 stages of my dev "carrier"

1.Right after i discovered programing and learned how ,if, while and similar structures worked. The launguage was object pascal with delphi 2007
That was a "safe" with a stupidly complicated lock (text inputs, sliders, ect) it opened a secret folder in the end.

2. It was a embedded code for a Atmega8 AVR, Atmel studio, pure C but without memory managment (i didnt even know that it even existed)
It was a Pip boy knockoff, 16x2 display and a small keyboard connected to the arduino like board that i made on a proto board.
It wasnt that much of a pipboy, it was more of a showoff of atmega8 internal systems, (ADC, timers, interrupts and such)

3.DataLab, after helping my friend with his master thesis, (we meet on discord long story, i was in high school) i decided that mathlab is shit and i created a visual scripting enviroment, launguage C# .net 4 (in the latest version)
I remade the whole program from scrach 1 time, significantly improving everything (code reuse, better algorithms, data processing, code redability and edge cases) I have learned good practises from everywhere. I learned how to use git.

DataLab project looks just like LabViev (i didnt notice that it even existed...), it is frozen now because of my mental status but im planning on using it on my CV when i will be looking for jobs on holidays. There are many things that i can improve in that program but ... first i have to fix myself.

My coworkers get annoyed at my insistence that we stress test our inputs. Today, whilst doing just that, I tried to put a big ass integer into an environment variable in Postman. It’s been frozen for 10 minutes. 🤣🤣 THIS is why we test our inputs!!!! 😫

<script>
alert('Always escape and encode your inputs to avoid XSS attacks');
</script>

Hi, what are some good practice programs to make when learning a new language?

For example you learn all of prints, inputs, variables, methods, functions, classes and what have you. Now how do you put it to use?

Basically what is the final beginner program to be considered an intermediate?

If anyone has a moment.

curious if i'm fucking something up.

model:

self.linear_relu_stack = nn.Sequential(
nn.Linear(11, 13),
nn.ReLU(),
# nn.Linear(20, 20),
# nn.ReLU(),
nn.Linear(13,13),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.Linear(13,8),
nn.Sigmoid()
)

Inputs:

def __init__(self, targetx, targety, velocityx, velocityy, reloadtime, theta, phi, exitvelocity, maxtrackx, maxtracky,splashradius) -> None:

# map to 1 and 2
self.Target: XY = XY(targetx, targety)
# map to 3 and 4
self.TargetVel: XY = XY(velocityx, velocityy)
# TODO: this may never be necessary as targeting and firing is the primary objective
# map to 5, probably not yet needed may never be.
self.ReloadTime:float = reloadtime
# map to 6 and 7
self.TurretOrientation: Orientation = Orientation(theta, phi)
# map tp 8
self.MuzzleVelocity:float = exitvelocity
# map to 9 and 10, see i don't remember the outcome of this
# but i feel it should work. after countless bits of training data added.
# i can see how this would fuck up if exact values were off or there was a precision error
# maybe firing should be controlled by something else ?
self.MaxTrackSpeed: Orientation = Orientation(maxtrackx, maxtracky)

# these are for sigmoid output, any positive value of x will produce between 0.5 and 1.0 as return value
# from the sigmoid function.
self.OutMin = 0.5
self.OutMax = 1.0

# this is the number of meters radius that damage still occurs when a projectile lands.
# to be used for calculating where a hit will occur.
self.SplashRadius:float = splashradius

Outputs:
def __init__(self, firenow, clockwise,cclockwise,up,down,oor, hspeed, vspeed) -> None:
self.FireNow = float(firenow)
self.RotateClockWise = float(clockwise)
self.RotateCClockWise = float(cclockwise)
self.MoveUp = float(up)
self.Down = float(down)
self.OutOfRange = float(oor)
self.vspeed = float(vspeed)
self.hspeed = float(hspeed)

I now approach all new situations as though they were a 'black box'

Carefully choose inputs
Examine and analyze output
Iterate

Socially awkward? Nope, just charting your I/O.

Any cool buttons and inputs CSS library?
I just need cool / elegant / nice buttons and inputs. If it has some image niceties or something else it's ok.
I did little Googling, ngl; I'll look a bit more later in the day, but I figured maybe someone here may have something interesting to comment.

Got a weird bug today...

A new feature I just implemented works but outputs nothing.
So I start printing its inputs early in the code, fine no problem here. Then I print out the supposed results a little bit later, fine too. But now the full program work perfectly.
I find out that if I remove one of those two prints then suddenly my function start outputing empty arrays! WTF?

I think I find a quantum bug, you can observe the bug or the internal values but not both!

**18 fuckin hours with full concentration on this Friday starting from 9:30 AM**

I'd developed a big feature for this release and it was being tested by QA guys.

There was this fuckin QA who raised a bug on Friday morning saying that one of the work flow is not working as expected. I debugged it in various scenarios including the one suggested by that dick head but I couldn't reproduce it.

On stating that, QA got pissed and told me that I've not developed it correctly. *Yeah fuck head now you are telling me*

My lead asked me to make some changes in the flow and then check. Did that but no luck.

Finally at 3AM on Saturday, this fuckin nut job QA mails me saying that he was giving in WRONG Inputs 😡

Yeah. It was that bad!

I have to choose to accept an internship offer for dev role between company A and company B (potential PPO at both).

Company A: Unicorn startup ~3000 employees. A disruptor.
Company B: Early stage startup ~30 employees but has funding and all. Also, sounds promising. Loved their interview process.

Both are interesting to me and pay almost equally. Any inputs ranters?

I finally created a kotlin android app for a simple project idea, just personal usage. Beginner level. Quite a good and bad experience.
Functionality is done, just sucks with UI, as I'm not proficient enough with styling on android.
The result is a predefined purple action bar at the top, an almost white text section right below it with *very* light-grey textview descriptions (you can guess how visible they are on my phone...). Center is a big recyclerview, which in android studio has white background with dark grey text items, yet is black on my phone with white text items. At the bottom 3 text inputs and a centered purple "add" button.
... It's a mess as long as you don't know how to design and style on android studio.

Since the 3rd day, I have been telling y'all but none of you listened to me.

I kept repeating that I am the dumbest person I know. Why didn't you believe me when I said it?

Remember, Booking feedback? They sent me another official rejection with additional feedback. Mind blown.

That feedback really helped me understand what was going wrong. And now today in an interview, I was asked a question and the interviewer said, "I am looking for a specific details like xyz for why you should be a Sr PM".

That's when it clicked me, that I have done stuff and I know things. It's just that I didn't understand the question and wasn't able to articulate and communicate well.

My dumbass just needs constant feedback to learn. How much I love feedback more than ever.

The feedback cycle is interesting too. When I was new, I hated it. Then started to realise the value of it.

Then it did felt bad in the very instance whenever I got one, but quickly I used to incorporate the changes.

And now, I am crave and desperately seek feedback. It only helps me improve.

Funnily, everyone gave inputs when I didn't want it. And now when I am hunting for it, no one is giving inputs. This is how life is.

Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with Booking. Good people, nice vibes, and kickass culture for sure.

Why does it feel like they don't teach anything useful in university every time I interact with an intern. Barebones understanding of how HTT works, but not quite enough to work on a rest API on their own and an absolute lack of inspecting inputs/outputs. Especially nice today when the intern mixes browser requests and app requests to make it seem like he properly configured the test endpoint correctly and leaving me to guess wtf is going on in the logs

I was a frontend developer, and I am new to hadoop or anything related to big data.
I am currently working as a Hadoop developer and I get to work on one of existing codebase also I am trying to recollect Java which I learnt during college.

Can u please provide me any inputs on how to get started with Hadoop, a personal view point on scope and future of Hadoop. A rough time span of how long it took for you to get out of the noob zone.

If you could provide me with a good tutorial or blog that would be awesome.

Thanks in advance

I came across this logical bug today and realised that you never train your Neural Network with data that is in order. Always train it with randomized inputs. I spent like 4 hours trying to figure why my neural net wouldn't work since all I was classifying was Iris data.

P.S.: I'm an ML newbie :P

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

My task is to create a form for posting customer details to the server.

I've spent almost 2 days on the UI.

I mean, it doesn't look like I've been doing much if you consider the UI only, but I've been testing many scenarios of what works best, but unfortunately, the boss only cares about the code, and not how many concepts that have been tested.

So what the form basically does is if you click on the edit button, the inputs field will occur, and if you click on it again it will remove the lines around the input field for better presentation of the data.

How do you show to someone the work you've done, do you write notes or show them the code?

About to go through the recruitment process for AWS cloud support engineer. Any inputs on what I should expect?

I need to solve 4x4 tic tac toe using alpha beta pruning, I have solved 3x3 tic tac toe using minimax, and it works very well, but in 4x4 minimax takes lot of time as search space is too big, so I am applying alpha beta pruning but I am not getting clear idea, that upto what depth I should go and what evaluation function should I write in order to give perfect game play, heuristic may also lead to false results and not perfect game play, so how do I ensure perfect game play for 4x4 using fast approach?? Any suggestions or approach will help me a lot. Looking forward to get some inputs.

There's been a fad in the company where the managers ask for the opinions of other departments to "get different perspectives".

On one hand, we get feedback by non-experts, which is obviously bad because they're not in their field. "Feature X is kinda complicated. We could simplify it by doing A." and the manager goes "that's a brilliant idea! Let's do that!" and the devs go "we did consider that, but it has drawback N. And perhaps you wanna do B, but that has drawback M..."

And then they were asking for us programmers for inputs on their designs for logos, etc. Naturally, as programmers, we wanted quick access to many functionalities. But marketing wants a simpler and more intuitive design, even if it involves more clicks. This wasn't in my job description! I just wanna code! Thinking is your job!

From my big black book of ai notes back when I was into that:

Dendritic spines - a 'battery' (?) And probably what the dendrite uses to maxpool/softmax or perform 'temporal summation' over its inputs.

So I have a client project that needs to be delivered in 3 months. The project size is significantly huge, so a lot of devs will work with me. Our seniors have its architecture defined in micro services but we have no clue how they work. I would really appreciate some community inputs on how can we scalable-ly use micro services.

let's say i want to host my own local search engine, i have the application ready.
now i want to activate my crawlers to scrap and index the web.
would i be in hot water for doing this? is there any implementation level rule that i can check other than robots.txt?
any thoughts or inputs on the subject other than it being a huge waste of time and resources :D.

because bluetooth isn't designed for ultra-high-gaming-inputs. and you don't need higher polling rates unless you're a very competetive gamer. in which case you're using wired, anyway, because latency.