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This story is 100% true.
I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.
The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”
So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”
So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.
Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…
After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.
Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.
It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.
The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.
I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.7 -
I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)
Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"
For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.
What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.16 -
Me and my love-hate Linux.
I lost virginity really early. In the age of 5 it was my first time with windows 95. I spend almost 10 years with Windows before something happened that would change everything. I met Linux. Her forename was Arch. I had a crush on her right from the beginning. It didn't take long for me to abandon windows. Arch had everything I wanted. She had latex which was pretty hot and looked simply and elegant on her. Sometimes she was really hard to deal with and almost drove me crazy, but I knew I fell in love.
Until that day. I had to write a short paper which was quite fun and Linux helped me alot. It was a breeze to work with her. The evening before the deadline she was quite thoughtful. She sometimes was, so I thought it'll be alright, but this time was different. She struggled a bit, so I put her to sleep and she never woke up. I brought her to the emergency lab which was open 24/7. Since no one was there I had todo the surgery myself. After 5 hours I was almost to tired to continue when she finally woke up. I asked her about the things she should remember for me - then I killed her. I started to hate Linux for what she had done to me. The unbelievable stress and horror.
I returned to Windows. Besides that she got a bit more curious what I was doing when and where nothing really changed and she was glad to have me back. I just was happy how simple our relationship was.
One day then, I couldn't believe it at first, I met Archs sister. Manjaro. No matter how strange that is, but it was as if I would meet Linux again for the first time. She was just a bit simpler but as flexible as arch. Since then we are happy together. It seems that we both just grew up a little.
And with Windows? She got even more curious! Actually I have the feeling she is stalking me now, but I don't regret anything!15 -
I used to do some freelancing and one of the main clients I worked with had a project they hired me for that used Drupal. I fucking hated it. I thought it was bloated (and slow as fuck), unnecessarily complex, and just all around a horror to work with.
Even though that was many years ago, from other devs I've met, it seems like Drupal never really got much better. One devops guy who worked at the previous company I was at told me about some benchmarks he had done on Drupal in his previous work. The performance results he got were an absolute joke - awful concurrent performance and just a brutally slow CMS.
Needless to say, since that freelance project, I've never used Drupal again and never will.17 -
Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.6 -
This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
So a user reported they couldn't login to our site, so I reset their password to:
uI+ffRT7M2NAzo8uOqzf4QxO3I9tj8PJ4TS0n8zDV7I
And sent them back an email with the updated password. A few minutes later, they replied and said that password didn't work. They even tried a different web browser, etc. I tried it myself, and sure enough, it didn't work.
I spent the next several hours trying to figure out why the password didn't save properly, or why the logic didn't compare them correctly. Perhaps it was some sort of caching issue? Oh the horror.
As it turns out, the problem was a maxlength of 28 on the login form field:
<input type="password" name="password" value="" maxlength="28"/>
I don't know who wrote that code, but it sure wasn't me.21 -
One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.
We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.
Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.
This is where the horror began.
I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.
It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.
"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."
Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.
The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:
"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."
Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!
I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.
Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.
"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."
Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"
"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"
What. The. Fuck.14 -
Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.
Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.
Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.
Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.
Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.
NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!
Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.
Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.
So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.
FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE9 -
My freelancing horror story?
I remember like it was yesterday. It was late at night and I was doing some freelancing. (You know... the good stuff...)
All of a sudden the light began flickering, it got really cold and I felt like something was watching me!
OMG! SOMETHING JUST TOUCHED MY SHOULDER! I TURN AROUND AND...
...nothing. Nobody was there.
"I really need some sleep", I think to myself and turn back to my monitor.
Wait a second, what's that?
"10%..."
"20%..."
"60%..."
Oh my god...
How could this happen to me?
Those bastards got me after all!
I just witnessed...
A WINDOWS UPDATE!!!
The end~
______________________________
I don't feel responsible for pants that need to be washed now.25 -
At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!
A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.
He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."
And that was it.4 -
When I interviewed with for an EA internship, they gave me a coding challenge after on GitHub. I tried it out and when I asked politely over email on the status of the challenge a week after, they rejected me with literally I shit you not "no :)". It wasn't even a answer to my question that makes sense. I was an underclassman so they probably didn't think it mattered that they were disrespectful to me. The lack of empathy and professionalism that truly proved to me what a toxic company they are. Any one have any horror stories like this?
I've fancied the thought of being petty enough to try for their interview again now that I've graduated and have more under my belt just to reject them with a :) but I'm not going to get down their level enough to do so5 -
Office prank time! It was some years ago when the horror movie "The Grudge" came out, with that creepy Japanese dead girl who made that horrible "aaahhhhhh" sound. A coworker, who was just as shocked by the movie as I was, would occasionally send me emails with sceenshots from that movie.
One day, I upped it. I knew he was the first in the office in the morning, so I arrived even before him. It was still dark. I put a walkie-talkie under his desk, set it to "no beep", switched off the lights again and hid two rooms away.
Sure enough, he arrived. I waited for about 10 minutes to be sure he was sitting at his desk. Then I used my walkie-talkie and "aahhhhh".
WOAH, his scream was loud even two rooms away!3 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
Hello again, everyone. As Sunday comes to a close, and Monday is fast approaching, I'll share with you the likely cause of my death by stroke and/or heart attack:
MONDAY MORNING COFFEE OF HORROR
Disclaimer: Do NOT try this. I am a professional addict. I am not responsible for anything this brew from hell causes to you and/or those around you.
So, I wake up, feeling like I haven't slept for days, or just notice the fucking alarm clock shrieking because I pulled an all-nighter.
Step 1: Silence alarm clock via mild violence.
Step 2: Get the coffee machine to brew some filter coffee (espresso works too)
Step 3: Get milk and ice cubes from the fridge (both are needed, I don't care if you don't like milk, trust me)
Step 4: Get 2 spoonfuls (not tea spoon, and actually FULL spoonfuls) into the biggest glass you have
Step 5: Pour just a little of the warm filter coffee into the glass, just to get the instant coffee wet enough, and start mixing, until the result looks like the horror you unleashed in your toilet a few minutes ago (and will do so again in a few)
Step 6: Mix in 25-50 ml milk, just for the aesthetic change of colour of the devil-brew, and to add the necessary amount of lactic acid to react with the coffee to produce chemical X
Step 7: Add ice cubes to taste (if you are new to this, add a lot)
Step 8. Slowly add the filter coffee while mixing furiously, so that the light brown paste at the bottom get dissolved (it's harder than it sounds)
Now, take a deep breath. Before you is a disgusting brew undergoing a chemical reaction, and your moves need to be precise otherwise it will explode. Note that sugar or any other form of sweetener is FORBIDDEN, as it will block the reaction chain and the result won't be as potent.
Take a straw (a big one, not those needle-like ones that some cafeterias give to fool you into believing that the coffee is more than 150ml). Put it inside the mix, and check that the route to the bathroom is free of obstacles.
Now, clench your abs, close your nose if you are new to this, grab the straw and DRINK!
DRINK LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW!
THAT BROWN DEVIL'S BILE WILL HAVE YOUR INTESTINES SPASM AND DANCE THE MACARENA WHILE TWIRLING A HULA HOOP!
YOUR HEART WILL GO OVERDRIVE HARDER THAN YOUR PC'S CPU WHEN COMPILING ON ECLIPSE AND BROWSING WITH IE AT THE SAME TIME.
The combination of caffeine and lactic acid will bring out the perfectly disgusting combination of sour and bitter usually expected in rotting lemons. After you manage to chug it down (DON'T SPILL OR SPIT ANY!) you have 30 - 60 seconds max to run to the porcelain throne, where you will spend the next 30-60 minutes.
After that, nothing can stop you! You will fix bugs, write entire codebases from scratch, punch that annoying coworker, punch that boss! You will be a demigod among mortals for the next 6-8 hours!
Your recipes for Monday morning coffee?15 -
What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/
Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..
I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o
I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o
Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o
C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..
I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..
C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..
Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O
I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!
I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!
I get dressed & go back to my desk..
C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!
I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:
C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..
M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa
Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/7 -
I'll keep it short:
My nastiest freelancing horror stories contain shitty clients who dont pay, the nastiest fucking legacy code you can imagine, and expectations as high as trump thinks of himself.
The lesson is simple: Choose your freelancing clients wisely and always expect partial payment in advance. Even from family or firends!8 -
I was watching this movie's trailer called Let's Be Evil, it did look promising based on the genre (Sci-Fi, Thriller, Horror) and synopsis (includes Augmented Reality (AR) tech) BUT as I soon was on this frame right here, I am not going to watch the movie now. 😂
You are making a high tech movie, at least do intend to add some realistic code snippets or scripts related to AR rather than showing some random plain HTML.
You can watch the trailer here : https://youtu.be/Nsbzf3bL4Qg
Code will appear around 0:15
6 -
did you ever have to maintain a code that is so bad that it makes you physically ill to look at it? i feel like I've seen an eldritch horror16
-
'hey honey look what i made! It works!'
- fiance looks, error messages over error messages, program crashes, files disappear, data loss, pure horror
To this day I don't know what happened. I had to restore my project and re-write the last half hour.4 -
Finally got a new job, but it's already a horror story not even 2 hours in (making this while on break)
Everyone here is an Intern, IT? Interns, Designers? Interns, HR? Interns.
The Person who I should've worked with got fired yesterday, and now I have to work all of his shit up from 0, Documentation? Fragmental, a few things here and there, but nothing really.
IT security also doesn't exist in the slightest, there is an Excel sheet called "Master_Passwords" and every single password is in Plaintext, written out for everyone to see. (at least they used "strong" passwords)
And the place also looks run down, theres PC's, Laptops, Mics, Cables etc. lying literally everywhere no-one knows what works and what doesn't (since everyone is an intern)
Not to mention the "Server Room" is an absolute mess itself, cables hanging from literally anywhere, powerstrips are ontop of servers, each rack has like 2 or 3 2U Servers, (in a 40u Rack) and there are 10 of them!4 -
Instead of just accepting my proposal about upgrading the server - the customer I have ranted about earlier decided that it would be a good idea to try to install PHP 7.0 on a Debian 5 machine.
I feel horror when I read the bash_history3 -
So I watched this video that tries to convince people, that the jQuery library isn't really best practice anymore and showed how you can achieve basic tasks with vanilla JS, aswell as some frameworks (Vue, React, Angualar) and how they handle interactions with the DOM.
It also talked about how nearly every JS question on SO has top answers using jQuery, and how that's a bad thing.
But what I found in the comment section of this video was pure horror: So-called "Developers" defending jQuery to the death. Of course there were some people who made some viable arguments (legacy code, quick & dirty projects), but the overwhelming majority were people making absurd claims and they seemed quit self-confident.
GOSH!
Want an example?
Look:
22 -
I love Linux, use it almost daily
, but those windows update horror storys aren't happening when I'm using windows.
I think those days are gone, and people are just hating.27 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.16 -
The fact that this week's rant topic exists is the exact reason I never do freelance work. It always ends in horror.
I don't believe good fullstack devs exist. A good junior will assess their talents/passions and specialize to become a senior. They'll keep checking the rest of the market from the corners of their eyes and start moving when necessary. But eventually, focus and specialization is a must.
If that's true for the field of development... why would I invest time in marketing, support, sales, PR, legal?
Maybe you can earn a bit more gross income in freelance work — but I see my employer as a service provider, I "hire" them so I don't have to manage phone calls, lose sleep over court cases, play product owner or worry about getting paid.9 -
OMG! !rant!!!!
I already ranted about the elevator at home being stoooopid for opening doors on way up when you wanna go down..
But our work elevator is awesome!
I figured today that I can play with the authorisation light with the chip for the home elevator.. so from orange to green (work card) to red (home chip) to green to red... OMG!!! Awesome!!
Also the look of horror on coworker's face was priceless (work elevators have a tendency to malfunction as it is, without me playing with them)!!! xD xD xD16 -
I watched today one of our devs working in Windows with a Docker Environment.
I think I'm pretty insensitive regarding pain, horror and morbid stuff.
But damn. I really needed to turn off the stream or else I'd walk to the company and rip his fucking workstation out of the server rack to put it out of his misery...
Errors? ignore them....
Weird python messages? Ignore them...
wild copy pasta between notepad++ containing shell commands and a git bash... Per mouse context. Yes. Move the cursor, mark the text, right click, copy, go to terminal, right click, paste.
Understanding of whats happening. Zero. Like literal zero.
He was wondering why there were strange characters when he pasted log output in a text file...
My question: How do you think colored text works in a terminal environment?
was answered by : "Don't know, never thought about it. But don't think this has something to do with the weird characters?"
I don't wanna talk about the rest.
Retarded humanity can please kindly kill itself so the intelligent above average nice people can live in peace...
The meeting was 2 hours. I drank 5 bottles of beer after it in1 hour and I'm please to announce I'm forgetting large parts of what has happened.
Cheers.8 -
To my horror I've been asked to cover some small jobs for support whilst he's away.. First tap on my shoulder, can you look at my laptop? it's not charging...
Is it plugged in and switched on at the mains..
Yeah, I'm not silly.
It was neither plugged in or turned on.
I made the long and hard transition to DevOps, I now know it was worth it.
Rant Over1 -
Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.
So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.5 -
There are numerous horror stories about Windows updates, but Mac updates aren't better. Yesterday I updated to Catalina (reluctantly), and when the computer restarted I was silently praying "Please don't fuck up my VMs".
Naturally, it fucked up VMware...8 -
!Rant
Story, only read this if you feel like wasting your time
Ok so I live in a small village and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the next city by car. I can't drive yet because I am 15 and so I would need my parents to drive me there. There are also no buses anymore which drive to the city after 2pm.
Most of my friends live in that city, none of them code. We always meet on a discord server and then play games or do some other shit. Today I got online at around 3pm and when I joined the discord server they asked me if I wanted to go see the movie 'IT' with them tonight, I said yeah of course (I am a huge fan of horror movies), but only if my parents come home early enough to drive me there.
Time passed and then my last friend left the discord server because he had to walk to the cinema.
I was the last one still on the server and also the one with the farest way to the cinema. I already knew that my parents wouldn't come home in time anymore and so I decided to just start coding something. I usually code while listening to some music and so I switched over to spotify to choose a playlist. I just randomly clicked on the first playlist spotify recommended me and the song started playing: 'Sound of silence'.
Fuck you spotify algorithm.
I know that not being able to go to the cinema with your friends is a fucking stupid reason to be sad but I just feel very sad right now. Sitting alone in my dark room staring at my computer screen.
Sorry for wasting your time18 -
Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.
A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.
Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.
A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.
I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.
People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.
Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.
4 -
Sweet baby Jesus the stories are true. I thought this day would never come but yesterday I found a website in production straight out of a horror story.
Inline script tags that contained spaghetti code and static content. And to top it off inline style with position absolute for everything 😰😰
Also worth mentioning a couple of broken pages(404) and a beatufill repeat-y image for the background😳
I lost all hope😂16 -
If you didn't think NodeJS dependency hell was that bad, you should try sequentially parsing a graph that's stored as an array of nodes and their references, where processing of said nodes forces you to use some async functions that depend on other async functions.
What should have been 20 lines of code written in 30 minutes has turned into 3 hours of horror, reading about babel, realizing that it's just adding more problems without solving one, assessing the effort of modification of async libraries to include sync methods as well, trying out asyncwait, async, and everything else there is, trying to rethink the recursive algorithm, rewriting it several times, cursing and hating myself for not choosing to use Python or .NET Core, screaming senselessly at my wife in a language as familiar to her as Klingon, crying in the bathroom, re-assessing my life choices, thinking whether it was a mistake to dedicate 10 years to this career, maybe I'm just not cut out for it since I can't handle this simple task, watching noose tying tutorials on youtube, thinking about my naked empty RPI that won't connect to the server any time soon.
Seriously. Why is it SO BAD?! Or is it just me?5 -
Boi did I forget what a horror is to deal with Wndows...
I just wanted to shutdown a laptop to replace the SSD and a wifi card. Prepared everything, clicked on the [start] and there were only "Update and *" options. Wha the hell I thought, I could spare a few minutes. It's just a software update - should not take long!
Little did I know...
That was 45 minutes ago and It's still shutting down. And I'm just sitting with that screwdrived in my hand, looking at that blue screen and waiting. I feel stupid
UPDATE: I gave up. Long-pressed the POWER button. que sera, sera, right?
Lights go out. I press POWER again to boot it back up (forgot to save smth else). And it boots up back to the "SHUTTING fucking DOWN" AGAIN!!!
23 -
Finished my internship today, turns out I won't be getting hired because upper management is cutting back due to COVID.
Fuck fuck fuckity fuck, compared to the horror stories I've read here, it was beautiful. The work experience was super worth it though, despite the intern pay. Time to start looking for a real job I guess.2 -
If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.
For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.
Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.
its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.
other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.
all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.
this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.8 -
Instructions on how to become suicidal:
- Create an API controller for the /file/ path
- Add an empty endpoint for POST /file/upload (will write it later!)
- Forget about this endpoint at some point
- Later, create a page for /file/upload
- GET /file/upload returns page
- POST /file/upload returns empty 200
Pure psychological horror for like an hour Googling why the fuck my razor page is returning empty responses and my breakpoint on OnPost is not fucking hitting even if I copy and paste example code from the ms website
Oh yeah, that controller.5 -
My freelance horror story just happened a few weeks ago. Programming final project was due and a classmate payed me to make his project. It was something very simple so I was able to make mine and his different and functional. Grades went up yesterday; he got an A and I got a B+ 🙃 #wk861
-
Decided to spend my weekend on a little side project that I thought I could finish quickly.
Not only does my code not work, but what I wrote is so horrible that I'm honestly ashamed. Its like the despicable porn that you sometimes end up watching and the horror of realizing what the hell you just watched after you finish - I thought my code was good, but really, it was trash.
Before I started writing I though to myself, "I'll finish this project and then I'll upload it to my Github to expand my repository", but now I cringe at the thought of someone else reviewing this pile of shit I call my code.
It's 2 am here in Israel. I know I should go to sleep, but I'll just stare at the ceiling, feeling unproductive because everything I did today is literally worthless.
How the fuck do I justify this shit to myself? Calling this a "learning experience" feels like a fucking joke.
Honestly, I don't know why I chose Python to do OOP when Kotlin would have served me much better.
But, there's always tomorrow, isn't there?2 -
So someone posted their btc wallet details (system automated message through a custom tool) to a paste in alternative.
Was the login for an ssh. Wont confirm or deny ssh-ing into it, but another guy who saw the same thing messaged me, sent a screenshot. Account had 127k usd worth of btc in it.
Called the radio station it belonged to and gave them a heads up. Probably should reported it as well but people already seen it so it'll get taken down soon enough.
Here I am broke, busting my ass and reality throws this in my lap. But I ain't never been no god damn thief. Hope the radio station it belongs to doesnt get robbed by someone less honest though.
Honesty is probably half the reason I've spent half my life broke trying to find or make opportunities.
And frankly I've heard real horror stories of good faith reports (whitehat style pentesting, etc) and the people that report it get fucked hard by authorities. What can you do though.
Enough navel gazing though.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who build these sort of account reset tools anyway?12 -
Okay it's FUCKing rant time... FUCK you prestashop!
FUCK your utterly bizarre "coding standard"
Also a big FUCK your config files, since when did config files start to include application logic, multiple includes/requires and modification of super-globals. When did I miss that memo?
This file is full of so much FUCKing horseshit, my FUCKing testicles hurt.
FUCK your "module overrides", yes let's duplicate 20-30MB senseless horror code into another folder, just so we can modify one line, without having future updates breaking our stuff.
And your attempt to migrate to a symphony stucture is FUCKing pathetic, do it properly, or don't do it at all.. FUCKtards..
I know wordpress can be bad, but this...
Prestashop takes FUCKing lousy, headache/cancer- giving, piece of crapware to the next FUCKing level.
I wouldn't even wish this FUCKing upon my worst enemy.
2 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.
4 -
So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).
So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.
Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.
They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.
He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.
The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".
The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.
They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.
This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.
After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.
The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.
Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.
When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.
It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.
It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.
Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.
I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.4 -
In horror movies. Characters do things that they them-self know it could kill them. Like getting in basement.
As a developer we all know to never deploy code on Friday. Here we are taking the wrong turn.2 -
I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:
"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since! -
I would like to rant one more time about my internship.
I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.
To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.
The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.
We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.
Here began the troubles.
We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.
She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.
The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.
To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.
Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.
Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.
Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.
Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.
They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.
Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.
Fucking this shit.
I'm in France.
EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...7 -
!dev
It’s midnight, I’m alone in the big house, it’s pitch black outside, I had a few beers already and I thought it would be a good idea to watch some horror stuff..
I want to go out to have a smoke but I’m scared as fuck now.
There are cats running around in the dark and there are so many great opportunities for some alien zombie monsters to hide and sneak up to me..
Think I became too old for this shit.
HELP!!!7 -
So today it finally happened.
Npm modules broke my system and / or endangered the security of my system.
Installed a global cli utility
That utility depends on package A
That depends on package B
That fucking install a bin called sudo
Yeah.. You heard it right a bin called sudo.
This bin goes in the global module folder that is piped in your path variable.
Now everytime you type sudo you are running somebody else code instead of your system utility.
I am shivering and at loss of swear words.
Opened an issue on the cli that started this matrioska game of horror.
Who the fuck tought that a bin called sudo would be a good fucking idea?
Oh and yes is even an harmless package that try to provide the sudo experience for windows (I went in to check the code of course..)
And I frigging need that cli for work
For now I aliased the sudo in my bashrc still i feel vulnerable and naked now.10 -
*opens the code of an old project still running today*
*see the horror spaghetti code*
*decide to modernize it with good code and practices learned by the years*
*can fucking decide where to start *
*réalise it is impossible *
*rewrite it from scratch in a few hours*
*be proud*
It's really rewarding to go back to old projects and give them a good hug. You réalise then you really got better5 -
When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.2 -
TLDR; Default admin login on WEP encrypted WLAN router for getting free stuff at my hair stylist studio.
Free WLAN in my hair stylist studio: They had their WEP key laying around in the waiting area. Well, I am not very happy with WEP, thought that they never heard of security. Found the default GW address, typed it into my browser and pressed Enter, logged in with admin/1234 and voila, I was root on their ADSL router 😌 Even more annoyed now from such stupidity I decided to tell the manager. All I told him was: You use a default login on your router, you give the WiFi password for free, WEP is very very insecure and can be hacked in seconds, and do you know what criminals will do with your internet access? He really was shocked about that last question, blank horror, got very pale in just one sec. I felt a little bit sorry for my harsh statement, but I think he got the point 😉 Next problem was: he had no clue how to do a proper configuration (he even didn't knew the used ISP username or such things). Telled me that 'his brother' has installed it, and that he will call him as soon as possible. Told him about everything he should reconfigure now, and saw him writing down the stuff on a little post-it.
Well, he then asked me what he can pay me? Told him that I don't want anything, because I would be happy when he changes the security settings and that is pay enough. He still insisted for giving me something, so I agreed on one of a very good and expensive hairwax. Didn't used it once 😁
Some weeks later when I was coming back for another hair cut: Free WLAN, logged in with admin/1234, got access and repeated all I did the last time once more 😎
HOW CAN YOU NOT LEARN FROM FAILS??2 -
I've been reading devRant at work for the past 6 months and it kept me sane through a few moments. Thanks. :)
And now I finally started to feel that maybe even I could have some horror stories to share. (I've been in the company for more than 4 years)
(Sorry for long post.
TL;DR: break time laws suck in my country.)
One example would probably be how our company decided to cut 5 minutes from our lunch time (down to 25 minutes) and add 3 minutes to our 5 minute coffee break(*"gifted" by our CEO) in the afternoon.
You're probably asking yourself, "What happened to the remaining 2 minutes?".
*Well, it's simple. In my country it's somehow still legal to have only 30 minutes of break time for the whole day if working hours don't exceed 10 hours. It's actually written in the law that you CAN divide that lunch break time to be placed at different times. To me that sound like fucking nuts...
Thankfully nobody's taking that time change quite literally and most people still use the full 30 minutes. But some people here have been fired for much less, so I don't play around. I just pretend to work while reading devRant. 😎3 -
Let me tell you a tale, children. Of how one of the mostly ghastly, horrid pieces of software currently on this earth came to be in its current, pitiful state.
It all began on January 28th, 2015.
On that day, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, sat leisurely in his office. He had just finished watching a live stream for a conference held by Facebook.
Minutes after the stream ended, he quietly sat in his chair, pondering over what was just shown.
The whole keynote was well done, he thought. But something about it just didn’t sit right with him. It was one specific line uttered by one of the keynote speaker that bothered him.
“React Native will help developers easily write code that will work on both iOS and Android”.
Out of all the talking done throughout that conference, it was that sentence, in particular, that stuck out like a sore thumb t Cook.
Those words began to echo in his head. “...Android”, Tim muttered to himself, gritting his teeth.
He immediately grabbed his Iphone from his pocket, and called the Technical Director of Xcode.
On the phone, the two discussed Xcode as it pertained to Facebook’s latest tool.
“Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide any support for React Native”, Cook told the director; “Just make it a bit more inconvenient for anyone using React, that’s all”.
The director thought his boss was nuts. Why on earth would you want to intentionally make using an IDE as painful of an experience as possible? But the technical director also knew that, more importantly, he wanted to keep his job.
“...We’ll do our best to make it a total pain in the ass to use React Native in Xcode”, the director told his boss with a shrug.
And so began one of the sickest jokes ever played on developers. A joke so twisted and cruel, it would make even the creator of PHP gasp in abject horror.
Who knew that someone would go out of their way to create an IDE that doesn’t even bloody work half of the time.
And don’t get me started on the absolute piss poor excuse for documentation this thing has.2 -
WHAT THE FUCK!!!
Whoever says that MacOS is superior or at least on par with Linux in terms of ease of maintenance -- feel free to stick a backwards pinecone up your asshole and push it down with a baseball bat with 5" nails.
The FUCK is this nightmare. You can't even start a process w/o logging in via GUI, password changes are another horror story, esp. for users who have never logged in [warning says to change keystore pass separately... Which doesn't exist...], vnc uses some proprietary protocol, ...
Seriously, even SunOS is easier to maintain, not to mention AIX, compared to this BSD nightmare of a UNIXoid....
Wtf....3 -
Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.
I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.4 -
If it's an open source project and it (shock horror) actually gets a decent userbase, expect it to suck up *way* more time than you originally intended.
-
What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.
He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.
A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.
At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.
Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.
He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.
The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.
Really scary. -
So we released to production today (Friday), not my decision.
All pages work fine expect for the one page which I added a new feature.
It worked fine in Chrome and Edge. But after release a customer who requested the feature said it doesn't work for him. Screenshot showed he was using IE.
Horror time.. it was evident that it has to be the changes to the JavaScript I did, but why does the whole page doesn't work.
So I started debugging. Nothing works on that page in IE11, it doesn't even load the fucking script file. Then I dared to change mode to IE10, it actually gave me an error in my script file. The bad IE has actually picked a mistake that other browsers didn't.
So, the mistake is fun part too.
I had the following jQuery (or Jake Weary) call
$.getJSON(
'/url',
{
argA: a, argB, b, argC:c
},
function (){
// did something
}
);
In second argument, I accidentally typed comma instead of colon. Chrome and Edge ran the script perfectly passing all the arguments.IE 11 failed to load script without giving any error and only IE 10 gave an error of expecting a colon.
I do not know which browser to blame.
PS I didn't try in Firefox, safari, etc.2 -
I watched the movie 'happy deathday' today. It really isn't a horror movie but I was thinking of version control the whole time.
The point where she wakes up all the time is the master branch and the different days she experiences are different branches.3 -
worst dev tech ever for me was intel x86 assembler. I developed on motorola 68k before and i loved it. x86 was horror.1
-
So..there is 2 of us working on a Wordpress site, my job is front-end and make it look nice, the other persons job is to do some backend development(dont ask me what and why, I have no idea). Basically, I was waiting for the other person to finish his part so I can do front end development. I was expecting it to be just a theme, and then I fix it, add new stuff, etc etc, like usually..but the horror I saw, THE FUCKING "BACKEND" PERSON HAS ACTUALLY MADE A FUCKING THEME EVEN THOUGH IT IS MY FUCKING JOB. Now dont get me wrong, I wouldnt mind if I did almost zero work and got paid, but..THE FUCKING THEME WAS UGLY AS A TWO HEADED DICK SMOKING A FUCKING CIGARETTE. There was STRONG RED FUCKING EVERYWHERE, padding between posts was basically -20px. Well ok, I could have just started making a new theme, but there was already some stuff in this one we needed so I went it it and tried to make it look nice. And trust me, it is great now, great colors, fonts, shadows, button animations, everything, even looks great on mobile.
I started making some changes to the header, and I noticed that post title changes also..hmm wonder why..So I inspect element and what do I see, TAG OF THE FUCKING POST TITLE IS <HEADER>???? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, IF YOU TRIED TO DO SOME FRONT END, AND YOU SAY YOU KNOW SOME, WHY DO FUCKING FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT???????? WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO MY JOB IF YOU SUCK AT IT??? DONT DO MY FUCKING JOB, I SUCK AT "BACKEND" AND I DONT FUCKING DEAL WITH DATABASES OR TRY TO MAKE THEM FOR YOU!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARHHHHHHHH FUCK -
i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story
"""
"hey, can you help me fix something?"
sure?
"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."
# oboi
did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers
"no"
then install them
"no"
why not?
"it doesn't need any"
why do you say that?
"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"
it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found
"shouldn't they work?"
some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases
"ok, well, where do I find them?"
do you have a model number?
"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno
gimme a few minutes
<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>
alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.
"they don't work"
# oh here we go
why not?
"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."
what version of XP are you using?
"XP Pro"
x86 or x64?
"x64"
# fucking...
ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.
"oh ok"
<User left the IRC channel.>
"""4 -
Was working on a system we planned on to deliver to a hospital
basically it was meant for controlling and monitoring pactions coming in and attendance time from the staff
Got it off the ground well and got to where the system was supposed to update room status
occupied/free then horror started
the db was not setting the room free after clearing a client off the list... room remained occupied and this kept on happening for 6 months and I was so focused on fixing the db models thinking thats where the problem was....
1 day after leaving the project for several months i just revisited the project randomly and started going through the whole code base trying to make sense of what was happening as there where no errors generated..
I had to verify the whole system logic... and that day i figured out what was happening...
upon adding a client to a room the system was also creating a duplicate room so when the function for setting the room free executes it would set the duplicate room free and not the actual room and the system would pick the room with occupied state causing the user not being able to assign new pactions to the room
Solving this brought so much relief coz it required so much work just to solve what seemed to be a minor issue5 -
I really don't understand this particular Government Department's IT Unit. They have a system and network to maintain except:
- They don't have a DBA
- They don't have a dedicated Network Engineer or Security Staff
- Zero documentation on all of the systems that they are taking care of (its all in each assigned particular staff's brain they said)
- Unsure and untested way of restoring a backup into a system
- Server passwords are too simple and only one person was holding this whole time and its to an Administrator account. No individual user account.
- System was developed by an in-house developer who is now retired and left very little documentation on its usage but nothing on how its setup.
But, the system has been up and operational for the past 20 years and no major issues whatsoever with the users using it. I mean its a super simple system setup from the looks of it.
1 App Server connected to 1 DB Server, to serve 20-30 users. But it contains millions of records (2GB worth of data dump). I'm trying to swing to them to get me on a part time work to fix these gaps.
God save them for another 20 years.3 -
I wasn't hired to do a dev's job (handled sales) but they asked me to help the non-HQ end with sorting transaction records (a country's worth) for an audit.
Asked HQ if they could send the data they took so I wouldn't need to request the data. We get told sure, you can have it. Waits for a month. Nothing. Apparently, they've forgotten.
Asks for data again. They churn it out in 24 hours. Badly Parsed. Apparently they just put a mask of a UI and stored all fields as one entire string (with no separators). The horror!
Ended up wasting most of a week simply fixing the parsing by brute force since we had no time.
Good news(?): We ended up training the front desk people to ending their fields with semi-colons to force backend into a possibly parsed state. -
Once I was using rsync to copy some large files from a cloud to my local machine. So right after I started it, I went out for some coffee and when I came back it was not done. And to my horror I forgot to use --progress. For people who don't know what it does is , it only shows you how much copying is done. So now after about 45 mins of copying done , I had to stop it start all over again with --progress so that I can see the progress as it completed. 🤔2
-
Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.
Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.
What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.2 -
I have dabbled with Linux quite a few times in the past (dual booting with Windows) and I'm looking to get into it again. Any recommendations? Any horror stories?
So far I've daily driven Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, and CrunchBang. KDE and Gnome are my go-to DEs.30 -
Ok the ionic datetime component horror ended. I got it working good enough but I'm not proud of my code. The whole thing is a giant hack parsing dates to and from strings, switching locales, setting months and days and using the month as a daypicker as this fucking component does not allow me display day names in it, only month names. Such a mess... at least now I can work on the stuff that matters.
Actually though about making this open source... I reconsidered.8 -
Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?
A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.
If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.
But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?
And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.
In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.
By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.
In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.
For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?
One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.
Mechanics might include
1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.
2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.
3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.
4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.
And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.
Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.
If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.
How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.
The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.
And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.1 -
!Not Rant
I'm so hopeful. It's actually comedic.
Short backstory catch-up. I started working with an *actual* huge firm.
And unlike my other horror experiences with huge monopoly firms, this one is actually chilled out. So different that it seems almost like a startup.
Idk how tf they preserved this dynamic but I literally like everybody in this team of twenty-ish individuals. In fact I somehow even look upto some of them.
Hope this stays up and I might be locked in for a few more years.1 -
When the PM has been letting a fresh faced graduate loose on a codebase without any code reviews and you come back to some cronenburg level horror in your now crippled project. But it LOOKS like the mock ups.... * internal screaming *
-
So... IT was fucking horrific. Just the sight of red and white makes my heart race. (It was a great movie though; if you're into horror I highly recommend watching it)
However, I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight so I'll probably just stay up all night coding and studying for my CSIII exam on Monday.
SERIOUS QUESTION: as developers, do you ever use base conversions or boolean algebra? I'm trying to figure out how what we're learning will actually apply to the real world.4 -
Spent seven hours reading source code at work yesterday. The little documentation I was able to find alternated between English and Spanish. And some of the things I saw... Straight out of a horror novel.
For example: NUMBER_2 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_1000 to get the number of milliseconds in two hours.
Or this super contrived method which capped the registration age at 100, which now caps it at 102 anyways because they use hard coded values for the current year. Took me 15 minutes to find out what "fixYear" (this method) did.
No wonder I got home and crashed in bed till nearly midnight after that... I swear that was harder than a university Calc final...3 -
I am going to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show now. Is it wayyy too early, or are ALL times good times to watch it?
Please choose only 1.0000000000000001 options.7 -
Didn’t touch to my arch usb install in a month (didn’t have to use it)
Ran pacman -syu.
The Internet connection is not fast, it’s been ongoing for 1 hour and will probably last for another.
i3 semicrashed, can’t close/run programs, can’t do anything.
Anyway, just wasting my time on here.
Listening to “thoughts and prayers” from grandson because of santa fe:
May their gods be with them and their families and their friends. I wish the best of recovery for the ones wounded, physically and mentally.
And for the shooter:
Take a trip to the hell of js frameworks and just stay there, 🖕you for what you did! You’re a twisted tomato burried deep in the fucking ground of sadness and horror jambled with middle fingers crooked by bullets shot from your gut and mind. -
!dev
Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).
Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.
I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.
But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.
This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.
That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.
And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.
Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.
Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.
Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.
Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.
All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.
Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.
The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.
We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.
Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.
I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.
In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.
Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.
Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!
I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.
it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.
Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.
I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.
But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.
And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.
Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.
When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.
In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.
Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.
Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.
I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.4 -
I’m working on a react codebase and company decided to add a new module.
Now im writing markup and css to ensure UX is smooth as designers thought of it.
Imagine my horror when I start to code and find out no matter what HTML tag i use, it’s been FUCKING OVERRIDDEN in the global stylesheet. AND STYLES HAVE BEEN OVERRIDDEN WITH !important
They’re also using Ant design as a component library. Guess what, default ant design classes have been overridden too. So i try to use ant design button or card, and bam, MAGICALLY SOME DESIGN FROM SOME SHITHOLE MODULE DECIDES TO FUCK WITH MY STYLES
On top of that, styles of parts of application has been written in SASS, some part of application uses bootstrap components some use third party components like tables and responsive grids to suit to their preferences. Some parts use handwritten css. Some parts use CSS IN JS and styled components. THE FUCK IS THIS GARBAGE!!!! THE FUCKING CODEBASE HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN!!!!!! YOU NAME A WAY TO ADD STYLES TO A COMPONENT, ITS THERE!!!
And the company’s management thought a “fractal” approach to maintain each individual view is “best” for SCALABILITY!!! HOW THE FUCK DID IT NOT CROSS YOUR DUMB MIND THAT FRACTAL APPROACH ALSO GUIDES TO HAVE ALL COMMON STUFF AT ONE PLACE!!!! THIS CODEBASE HAS DUPLICATE STYLES AND DUPLICATE CODE IN ALMOST EVERY MODULE!!!!
Not to mention every developer choosing to freely decide the way they should write their code without any guidelines.
HOW THE FUCK PEOPLE WRITE THEIR CODE WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT OTHER DEVS!!! SO BASICALLY I AM NOT ONLY CLEANING SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT BUT ALSO TRY NOT TO SHIT IN THE PROCESS!! FML2 -
Writing a horror screenplay. It starts off with a ringing phone. The person answers, and it's their mum saying "I have a computer question."1
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Just got my new phone today. My old Huawei was acting up, so I replaced it with an island model: an Asus. Man, I have read lots and lots of horror stories about bloatware that came with the previous version of their skin, ZenUI. Their UX people must have been listening, because this phone came with fewer preinstalled apps than any phone I've ever had, and that includes a Nexus 5. And so far the only preinstalled apps I've had to disable are the default keyboard and chrome.
It's as close to AOSP as I've ever had without using a rom. I'm pretty stoked! -
A truly scary multiplayer gothic horror action RPG set in a Victorian world with a Lovecraft inspired story (already got the story written as it so happens) with multiple mutually exclusive but tightly linked story lines. That is to say you can experience only one part of the unfolding story with the player having to communicate and interact with others in the game world to discover the full horror of the world.
The world would not have instances the world would be in a state that players find it in, based on what other players had done.
I have a lot of the game mechanics thought out, but time and money... If only it were limitless...3 -
I once had to write a feature, which should allow the user to login and edit an appointment, which was automatically set. All the data we got, came from an incredibly unreliable API. And with incredible unreliable I mean like heisenbug-level unreliable.
The API spoke perfectly unreadable xml and was a horror to work with.
After a few weeks of me being messed with by this shit piece of an API, I finally got something which did kind of work sometimes.
Proper error handling has been added later and just before I was done, fixing all the flaws of their data management and nonsense status codes (not http status codes) which rarely correlated in at least some way with their data, our client said "scrap this, we don't want it anymore"
Many hours and effort gone, this thing worked almost perfectly. -
Just had my first lesson of the course Web Development. We got an explanation of what html, css, js and php are. Nothing bad ever happened from repeating what you already know, so yeah..
But then came the horror: We need to make a website in FUCKING WORDPRESS!! I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO BUILD A FUCKING WEBSITE WITHOUT A FUCKING SHIT CMS!!
So I showed the teacher my personal website and asked if I could use and/or extend that. They loved it, but I still need to build a website using fucking wordpress!! Not even using php! No, we need to build it with the UI of wordpress.
I know that's not even hard. It's just.. WORDPRESS!!
I guess I'll just have to live with it :/2 -
Magento Debugging Horror!
Changing lots of things in magento with no problem. Continuing development for quite sometime. Suddenly decide to clear cache to see affect of a change on a template in frontent. Suddenly magento crashes! There's no error message. No exception log. No log in any file anywhere on the disk. All that happens is that magento suddenly returns you to the home page!
Reverting all the changes to the template. Clear the cache. Nope! Still the same! Why? Because the problem has happened somewhere in your code. Magento just didn't face it, because it was using an older version of your code. How? Because magento 2 even caches code! Not the php opcache. Don't get me wrong. It has it's own cache for code, in a folder called generated. Now that you cleared all the caches including this folder, you just realized that, somewhere something is wrong. But there is no way for you to know where as there is absolutely no exception logged anywhere!
So you debug the code, from index.php, down to the deepest levels of hell. In a normal php code, once the exception happens, you should see the control jumps to an exception handler, there, you can see the exception object and its call stack in your debugger. But that's not the case with magento.
Your debugger suddenly jumps to a function named:
write_close();
That's all. No exception object. No call stack. No way to figure out why it failed. So you decide to debug into each and every step to figure out where it crashes. The way magento renders response to each request is that, it calls a plugin, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin, which calls a list of plugins, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin.....
And if in each step, just by accident, instead of step through, you use the step over command of your debugger, the crash happens suddenly and you end up with the same freaking write_close() function with no idea what went wrong and where the error happened! You spend a whole day, to figure out, that this is actually a bug in core of magento, they simply introduced after your recent update of magento core to the latest STABLE version!!! It was not your mistake. They ruined their own code for the thousandth of time. You just didn't notice it, because as I said, you didn't clear the `generated` folder, therefore using an older version of everything!
Now that after spending 7 hours figuring out what has failed with absolutely no standard way of debugging and within a spaghetti of GOTO commands (Magento calls them plugin), why not report it to github? So you report it with a pull request. This also takes 1 hour of your time. Just to next day get informed that your pull request is rejected because another person already fixed the bug and made the same pull request. It was just not on the latest stable version yet!
So you decide to avoid updating magento as much as possible. Because you know that the next Stable version will make your life and career unstable. But then the customer complains that the Admin Panel is warning him of using old Magento version which might pose SECURITY THREATS! -
As a POC I removed all client specifics from a project and made it reusable. Thousands of lines of code. In a day. From a project I knew nothing about in a language I previously used only in school. And it compiled and ran in the end.
Ripping out so much useless code felt great, possibly as good as creating something new, fresh, innocent. I improved on performance and maintenability and found some errors in the process.
After a successfull POC it was time to do it properly. That was a nightmare. A horror movie you want to see through. In the end I felt even better.5 -
horror stories from my old job: we had to ask to get the internet 'turned on' (of course only for a short period of time), you had to disable loading images, because otherwise you'd have to wait for fucking EVER til you could safely move your mouse and: Google had a massive lag when you scrolled. let me repeat that: GOOGLE. LAGGED. I didn't even know that was fucking possible! and the worst part: my old job was at a software dev company. not a shitty IT department at -I don't know- a bakery?! I mean, wtf?! and it wasn't even a start up. and they still exist! how? why?! I'm still not sure how I managed to work there for five months...1
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I want a horror movie with some undergraduate IT student watching coding tutorials, ending up really liking videos of a specific youtube channel.
Then, the student send a message to that creator, and they start knowing each other. After a year, the channel author invites the student to come over.
That youtube channel is called Carl H.2 -
- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.
In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.5 -
So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.
TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!
Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".2 -
Ah, yes, the ages old dilemma of a piece of shit function written in-between taking long drags out of a fucking crackpipe being more reliable than the refactored version; how delightful.
Now, they say broken code from cleanup of sketchy bits is better than any working snippet whose reading feels as pleasant as being repeatedly slapped with a decaying rhinoceros testicle sack, but I'll be fucked if I don't __sometimes__ feel like I just *might* prefer eating the maggot soup out of the rotting fucking gonads of deceased male pachydermata than deal with this kind of shit: feet facing backwards and all that.
Ugh. If only I could live my life without everyday feeling like I'm on a pointless quest to slay a mother fucking dragon, where everytime I get to the castle I'm suddenly a mustachioed italian plumber stepping on turtles and my bitch is in another sicillian ghetto. You know, basic shit.
The good thing in seeing these old errors pop up again after my shoddy bandaid of a patch is taken off is that I'm finally experienced enough to realize that my ~ A P P R O A C H ~ was wrong to beg with. And this is VERY nice, because I came in to do some trivial maintenance of forgotten code, and now I have a plan for correcting a very small and silly but definitively annoying as fuck design error.
Why am I so annoyed then? Because it's more and more work, it never fucking ends, and I can't EVER take a break: with apocalypsis incoming, as we have clearly seen in the stars, tea cups, palm readings, crytal balls, ouija boards, and also in the cover of old-school pornographic magazines nailed to the wall of a defunct newspaper kiosk, the fear of economic collapse is somewhat too real to even THINK about any kind of necessary vacation.
And so: fucking shit, here we go again... TIME FOR MORE COFFEE.
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Rocket League is the most ruthless program you run on Windows 10.
It hangs sometimes, so bad that the task manager can't be put on top of the window for me to be able to kill the program.
I unplugged my earphones mid game and that action was enough to set off the atom bomb that this game is.
Tried creating a new desktop and starting Task manager there. It resulted in my laptop screen resembling a horror movie. It became so scrambled.
No other option than to force restart my laptop.2 -
Let me try the two sentence horror thing. Here it goes:
It's getting late, and my son is yet to return from his private programming class. I looked through his laptop, and his teacher is some guy named Carl H.8 -
I wish I could show y'all my fav youtuber, the dude's youtube name is Dross. He makes entertaining videos about horror, some of them are not legit at all, but still entertaining to watch. The issue is that they are in Spanish.
It sucks. -
I overcomplicated shit yet again.
Last year we had taken over a massive project, where the main problem was an abundance of design patterns. I was (who am I kidding, I still am) a newbie, and most patterns I'd seen the very first time. By the end of it I learned what they're good for, but now I love design patterns for what they are rather than the problems they solve. I write the same horror that I saw and I know full well how terrible it is, but I Just. Can't. Stop.
What do I do?2 -
I remember when i was first deciding whether to do web programming or desktop applications, i chose java/C/C++ mainly because I already had experience. Back then when i was researching web stuff it was HTML + CSS + javascript and something called jquery, ok cool seems like I can pick it up in the future. Fastforward to 2018 and i was looking to get into it, BUT holy fucking shit what a confusing minefield and cesspool of javascript horror and frameworks and bloat, wtf happened??
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First let me start this rant by saying: Don't use SharePoint lists as your primary data store if you can avoid it. You're gonna have a bad time.
My coworkers and I work on a system where we need to pull tons of data down from a SharePoint site and run various algorithms and operations on it. Generate reports, that sort of thing. This is all done in the browser using a Typescript React SPFX webpart. Basically using SharePoint as a DB/DAL.
Because of the sheer amount of data we end up pulling down (our system in production is the single source of truth for one of the largest companies in Canada, and they're currently building a pipeline as we speak), in order to maintain a reasonable speed while using it, we have some pretty intense caching logic implemented, logic that ensures we get new items when new items are detected, and merges changes to already exisiting objects. It's pretty brilliant, and that's before we even consider the custom paging that my coworker implemented in order to get around the IndexedDB max size of 100MB.
Well that's all well and good, and works great in production, but it is a horror to work with. Because EVERYTHING we touch on the server is cached locally, it can be IMPOSSIBLE to detect data anomalies, be they local or server side -.- You don't know how many hours I have completely WASTED fixing a "bug" that didn't really exist... Just incorrect data in the cache12 -
I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!
Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.
The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.
I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.4 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.
Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.
People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.
People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).
I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.
THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.
But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.
Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.
They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.
Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.
This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).
We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.
People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.
And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.
There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.
I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.
It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.
Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job11 -
This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?
Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.
And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.
Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.
Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.
You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".
The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.
Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.
Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.
Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.
Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.
That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.
In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.
But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.
Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.
How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.
If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.
On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.
On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.
Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.
And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.
What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?9 -
SHUT IT DOWN !
SHUT IT DOWN FOREVER !
APPARENTLY THE DREAM OF INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION TO VIEW THIS ALL AS HORROR DIDN'T SET IN DESPITE JENNIFER CONNELLY AND HER FINE TITS MAKING AN APPEARANCE AND I MADE THIS JOKE TWICE NOW !
6 -
Some Devs at work can listen do podcasts without losing focus. I wonder how they can do that. Maybe it depends?
I love those with horror stories but I always lose track of the narrative.9 -
I realize that my story made no sense so Im back to square one.
The story was suppose the playerz an option on how they want the outcome to be but I wanted it to show the horror of a straight storyline. Rip -
i'm bored. what video games u guys r playing.
can u suggest some very unique video game like baba is you, webbed, ...
whatever genre, but nothing horror or zombie like doom.
last game i finished and liked very much were far cry blood dragon, aoe2, saints row3 and portal 2 and it was years ago32 -
If havent post a rant in a while since i started a new job a month ago. It is a pretty chill company. Not sure if that’s because i’m working remote and almost don’t have communications or…
I have to work on this project. Appearently from 2018. It’s all php and Wordpress here. I don’t have major deal against it but this project..
I have flushed down prettier things then this piece of shit code. My god. And this is live. The horror! -
Well, after almost a year of doing self study and what not... I decided to enroll in a bootcamp. Partially to help keep me accountable, mostly to help with networking and making contacts in the industry around me. I'm really stoked for it in spite of skepticism. They do offer guaranteed job placement if you finish the course, which was a major selling point for me. I'm curious if anyone on here has attended one? Thoughts? Success stories? Horror stories? From the research I've done, seems like you get what you put into it.
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Reading through these horror coworker stories and getting anxious what my colleagues would say about me actually. I only started working part time 6 months ago and I definitely have a lot of moments when my questions are plain dumb. The recurring theme I see in these rants is the stubbornness to learn so to everyone reading these stories and getting self conscious stick to it :) having questions and facing problems the only way to learn something and get better. Thanks for the stories everyone.
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Holy shit my dream last night was the best I had in years. I was basically in this open world (just real life) kinda thing that felt a lot like DayZ with the atmosphere (just no zombies). We we're a lot of friends just running about. But it was also kinda an exploration dream where I went into this bunker on the airfield (I guess) and then it was more like an action horror game where I had to shoot the most disgusting creatures. Except one monster was a cute girl (yeah I don't know). The dream then shifted to cuddling and making out with this super cute girl in bed
Oh man. This dream had it all and it was crystal clear the whole time, it was just amazing
Sorry, not sorry for reading this lol7 -
!rant
I've been having this idea for a programmer's horror movie. The main villain is this dev (or maybe PM?) whose first program was "Goodbye World" instead of "Hello World", thus cursing all of his code from that moment on.
They write an artificial intelligence library but they don't document it properly so the user ends up creating an evil AI that threatens to destroy the internet.
Any ideas?3 -
If it were possible i would make windows punish itself by playing this: https://youtu.be/th4Czv1j3F8 . But this goddamn piece of garbage software refuses to connect to my Ian-network since an hour ago. Why? I have no fucking idea. There are a switch and a repeater between the router but that never stopped wanblows before. And the devices located deeper in my network topology are fine, i also reset everything from the physical connection to "network adapters" in the UX horror they call system settings.
And i'm pretty sure it'll work again in an hour or so for no appearent reason just so this steaming pile of shit code could ruin my afternoon. -
Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.
It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.
The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.
The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.
And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible. -
No matter how much trickery is added
No matter how many distractions
In the end if even one person deviates
They may as well be punished
Because they likely did or enabled something wrong by trying to cause a check that distracted someone important
And a person who is caught cannot be helped by their fellows right away if at all because it associates them with the crime
Imagine the horror of one of us fully enabled catching one of them doing something horrible
The loud scream of fury the last thing they heard before the icy feeling of metal entering their body is experienced and noone could help them
Outside very specific times and places the best that could be accomplished is a temporary suspension of punishment
Eventually because of how convoluted things have become punishment will be effect
Now I want to smile
And act appropriately
Because I need to
I'm so happy
And I can't believe this is happening to me3 -
Used to not be out of the ordinary to see a chick with rolling luggage
Then it was whores arriving
Now it's a thing of horror because you never know for sure11 -
I worked for 7 hours today trying to find the bug because our BPM process wasn't working and the clients are really upset. I was pretty sure everything was correctly configured. I did around 15-20 rounds of debugging, putting and removing breakpoints in different parts of the whole project, going back to certain lines cause I might have missed a bug or maybe an error was there and I'm just not seeing it.
In the end, the only fucked up thing about it is that the table in the clients' ddbb was broken. It was considering something NULL even though it's not and the only thing I did was duplicate it and change the duplicate's name to the original name.
Those were 7 hours of wasted time, but at least I get paid for it! -
Thoughts on the Elastic stack? I.e. if you have used it and regretted it, please share your horror stories. Or, if you feel that it's great, share why that's the case or how did it help your company/business/product/whatever.4
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