As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Product sending an email: Can I confirm feature A is all set for its release on April 30th?

Me: ... what? no that feature is going out with Feature B, that was pushed back to June because of the server issue.

Product: No, the release plan document says April 30th for this.

Me: ... theres 6 copies of this doc now. Someone is after deleting my comments saying "releasing with Feature B". Oh look heres a link to another doc that says this. See Feb14th "Will go out with Feature B". This is because they are touching the same code, we can't separate them now without re-writing it.

*Me to myself*: Ha product are going to hate this, their shitty processes have finally caught up with them.

*next day*

Other manager: So heres my plan for the app release x, y, z.

*Me to myself*: ... his plan? this is my app, I mange this. What the hell is this?

*reads email thread*

*Me to myself*: ... oh so product really didn't like my reply, took me off the thread, sent a response to all the other managers asking for alternatives, CC'ing upper management. The same upper management I had a private conversation with yesterday about how shit our product team are.

*cracks knuckles*

I'm going to enjoy writing this reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

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

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

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

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

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

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

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

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

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

Was asked to check the sales team server as it was running slow.
Apart from redundant processes and users with too much permissions I found a "Cobol" folder under one of the sales team member's home folder.

If it weren't the sales people I would immediately disregard this as trolling but with them it's quite possible that this is a real attempt to learn programming...
...most likely from the facebook ads with the hooded guys that offer to teach you to code in 10 days for $800.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Hi ceo_candidate:

Welcome to CEO 101:

Q: How do you impress shareholders?
A: Without understading any processes, I cut down half of the IT team, saving a few 100k a year. Adding stress to the remaining team that now has to maintain lots of extra stuff. But, who cares? I still will expect my deliverables on time.

That is correct!

Achievement unlocked: Advanced CEO Practices

Worst interview is the one that actually got me where I am today.

Its been 15 years ago, but I remember very well. Since it was a startup back then they didn't really have any job titles yet or what so ever. I applied for the role of network engineer, heck I didn't care I needed a paycheck.

5 minutes into the interview the smalltalk left the room and they started asking me questions, mainly about me as a person. Eventually it was my turn. After my first question I facepalmed so hard.. Do you guys have any SLA or documentation around here? Heard of ITIL? How is your load balancing?

They stared at me as if I was some kind of alien that had just invaded their little safe planet.. it was hilarious.

An hour later they called me to come back in and sign a contract.. from there on I kind of multi tasked my way around the first year.. bit of network support & design, customer support, sending and packaging orders after 5PM.. god we had long but awesome days.. hence, we were just the 5 of us. Nowadays we've got 150 developers out of 1019 total staff currently.. We also improved interview questions and processes ;)

It's fantastic how you blame me, the back-end developer, for the things that the manager, business analyst, and front-end developer missed.

The front-end developers didn't make the user interface and admitted they didn't get to do it and outright forgot about it due to workload, oh it must be the back-end guy's fault for not asking them. You, the manager, have no fault here at all. Why are they overloaded again? And they, as the developers who totally missed out, were just innocent creatures who "were not informed".

The business analyst admits that he thought I was the front-end developer even though I corrected him during the first meeting where he said, "Oh okay, so Rutee is the back-end and <this other guy> is the front-end." EVEN THOUGH every day, we have a meeting and you see my JIRA ticket in all caps "BACK-END". Ever thought about asking? Then the manager comes in there and says, "No, it's not your fault. We as a team should take responsibility. That's how smart teams work." And yet your fucking face, I hate your face, man, and your fucking insinuations. I swear you're all just looking for a scapegoat, now it's making sense why you borrowed me.

While I'm doing my job here minding my own task and knowing that shit has been assigned to the proper person, the manager, business analyst, and other developers who's been in this project for years never bothered to ask for updates regarding the front-end until now. Why is back-end making noise the past few weeks? Because someone is WORKING on it. Someone is RAISING issues. Someone is CLARIFYING the requirements.

I had my own problems. Your requirements are severely lacking, your setup fucking sucks and doesn't fucking work, there were issues and dependencies from several other teams, and now it's my fault that I didn't ask about the front-end? How is that? I create the API, you fucking call it. If anything, you should be asking me about the endpoint but I guess I have to do EVERYTHING and know EVERYTHING in this project where I was just borrowed and I'm technically the new guy here.

I guess it's a "let's blame the new guy" game around here. You can hire the most senior of all developers you can but no one can ever just guess or read your fucking minds. You can't just put someone in one project and expect them to know all your processes, your repositories, your developers, your fucking uncommitted code changes THROUGH EXPERIENCE and PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY. This has nothing to do about proficiency and being proactive. I can be proactive TO AN EXTENT. I can't do YOUR job for you.

Jesus fucking Christ. This project is so disorganized and yet you can't acknowledge that. Then I would get an advice from someone else that we should have talked while front-end is there. He WAS, he's even on the invite. Every fucking time shit hits the fan, you all get a week to fix something and I get a couple of hours or a day. Issue two weeks ago? Resolved Friday after my shift, yet I managed to deliver the next morning. Issue last week? Resolved Friday afternoon, yet I managed to deliver before end of day.

"This is the first time this happened." I highly doubt that. You just want to correlate my *new* presence to your failure so you can insinuate that the new guy is to blame. Your team sucks. Your management sucks. "Oh, that's just how he manages, he tells you the end goal and it's up to you to THINK what you have to do." I did THINK but why the hell do I have to THINK for them or for everybody else?

So yes, another rushed deadline. Another excuse for the slacking pieces of shit, "Oh, I can't do my job because back-end doesn't have this other endpoint I need for this one. Guess I'll go home." When did you say you need another one? "Just now. But you should have known earlier if you asked." IF I ASKED. At what point of my life would I randomly ask, "Do you need this endpoint that isn't part of the requirements but does this/that?" where "this/that" is some functionality I know nothing about because it was never discussed.

Seriously, fuck you and your fucking requirements. You fucking lazy pieces of shit cunt whore motherfucker. I hate all of you. You ruined my entire fucking month. How do you expect this to be less chaotic when you defend the slackers and punish the ones who actually do their jobs and use them as scapegoats?

Three more fucking days, man, and I'm out of this shit. When I get back, I hope you don't bother me with this shit anymore. Your mom's a hoe and I'm accepting calls from recruiters anyway.

!rant

It's been months since I last posted in here, but I finally get to share good news for once!

I quit my current job and took an offer at a much better company in a senior developer role.

I no longer have to put up with an idiot tech lead who cannot either prioritize tasks or follow simple processes, a self-absorbed senior developer who keeps deleting my code for his because he prefers tables over divs for layouts, and an incompetent HR manager who is more concerned about his image than the welfare of us employees.

I felt pure bliss when I handed in my resignation. I feel focused and ready to tackle my next challenges at my new job in January. I can't wait.

My personal learning here is that while good things come to those who wait, it still needs you to take that first step yourself and without hesitation.

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

All this "political correctness" cancer spreading through the Python community at the moment over "master/slave" terminology has me wondering where will it end. When the pendulum swings will be have a pro-life movement opposed to pre-emptively killing processes? Will a branch of PETA form to oppose the taxonomic appropriation of reptilian names for the language as a whole? Are we going to need to find gender-neutral names for motherboards to avoid offending those who are offended by the oppressive digital binary? Will removing "mother" from the name motherboard invite 6th wave feminists to decry the influence of toxic masculinity in electronics? Do snake lives matter? Seriously, some people need to take a month off to go fuck themselves somewhere far far away and stop confusing "diversity" with "rampant idiocy".

I have a laptop which I bought for the sole purpose of gaming and I bought a hell lot of games off steam to startup.

But the problem here is I have to run those games on Windows (nvidia graphics card) and I only have a primary hdd and no ssd. Even though the ram and processor is up to speed due to high I/O on disk, I am not able to get a good performance out of it. To top it off random Windows processes hogging hdd in the background.

Any suggestions on what to do?

Typically my low motivation stems from some form of management dickhead-itis, too much red tape or restrictive processes (current place took 3.5 months + 2 forms to order a webcam our client had paid for as part of the project ... it was €45).

How I deal with it? I try to give a go changing it, talking with managers, explaining the issues, suggesting alternatives. Such as removing your head from your ass, when done, it can have a wonderful impact to the team.

When that fails (not if) ... I quit. Which I actually just have. Got a job offer last week, although I really wasn't a fan of how things were going on this team, I was working on some cool projects and wasn't sure what was right for me, career-wise.

Then I had a argument with a new manager as he doesn't remember agreeing to allow the developers to estimate their own tasks. He was annoyed I told him we can't do X in 2 weeks, we previously asked for 2 months.

That was enough to knock me over the edge, so I handed in my notice, took the job with much more management style responsibility and hoping for a fresh start.

Background: I'm proficient at PowerShell, I was told that I got hired to my previous job (as DevOps engineer) mainly because of that skill.

Few months after I started I wrote a script to automate some processes. My boss saw the script and told me that it was too complicated, and that I should make it more simple.
Now I'm all into clean code, meaningful names, small functions.
So the code was readable and maintainable.
I asked him in what way is it complicated. He didn't know exactly. (Later I figured that he didn't know of some of the (built-in) cmdlets and functions I used.)
He raised his hand high and made a gesture and explained that I'm "that high (skill? enthusiasm?)", then lowered his hand to a lower position to mark the bottom line, then raised it up half way up and said that he wants me here - in the middle.
After that he added: "This is not Microsoft! and we don't own the 3 other buildings that can be seen from our office window" and pointed at the window.

I was surprised by his comment, I didn't know how to respond.
I've got more stories to share about that workplace.
I can't believe I stayed at that place for 1 year and 2 months.

!rant
Observed a full deployment the other day and discovered it's extremely inefficient. I proposed an idea to fix it, and was shot down by a senior dev on the team. I was ranting about how asinine the process was and how my process could reduce the amount of time and training required to do deployments with out any additional cost or overhead. A senior dev from another department over heard me, found my workspace and told me (in a nutshell), "write up a document about why the current process is garbage and how yours is better, and how it works, I'll review it and we'll get it worded and formatted right. When we finish the document, I'll forward it to the CTO of your department with your name on it and my recommendation for review." Fuck yeah. 😈😎

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

I just realized that CPU's are essentially electronic hookers, for processes.

They'll service any process that calls upon them, but keep switching between various processes so that it can spend time fairly with each of its processes. And of course, they'll immediately abandon their current process if one with a higher priority reveals itself and attend to that one instead. Once it is finished, it'll return to its less-important processes.

Kinda sounds like a hooker to me... 🤔

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

Soooo, after raising my issue regarding microsoft's massive invasion of privacy and removing control from the user a couple of my friends, ahem I mean "aquaintances", said this to me:
"Get a mac! So clean, lightweight and user friendly and won't spy on you".

Clearly people who never looked at their list of background processes and installed little snitch. I swear, every couple of minutes something is trying to phone home to Apple.

Now I've been pretty open to all platforms (Win/Mac/*NIX/misc) until recently but this has reached a point it is no longer funny.

When I get a moment I'm gonna shove linux so far up that machine's arse Steve Jobs is gonna feel it in the ether!

I have an interview on Thursday for a job I've been doing for the past 9 months - I bloody hope I get it!

I'm currently classed as an 'Apprentice' but have been doing the sole job of the Developer after he left a week before I started.

The only differences between the two roles is the pay difference and title (just about double my current rate).

I've started to produce documentation and processes for rolling upgrades to our application without downtime which is something they're big on.

Public sector for you, it took 9 months for a replacement...

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

Fuck post-it notes.

Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.

Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.

Now your whole project is on the floor.

OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.

Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.

Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.

Guy: - "Your restart script doesn't work."
Me: - "What do you mean?"
Guy: - "It does nothing."
Me: - "It should kill every processes that's running within the project and start them again. Wait... Why do you terminate it?"
Guy: - "I don't. It just stops."
Me: - "It says `Terminated` here. You killed it. Just let it do it's job, don't kill it."
Guy: - "I'm not killing it! It just stops!"

(...two hours later...)

Me: - "Wait... Where do you run it from?"
Guy: - "What do you mean? I just run the script you gave me."
Me: - "Yeah, but where do you run it from? Where did you put it?"
Guy: - "It's part of the project so I put it in the project, d'oh!"

Big project this week. Lots of fires to put out. Deadlines approaching.

Monday: I can get by on just four hours sleep. No problem. Will be just like college.

Wednesday: I'm going to just close my eyes while this file uploads. Maybe I will backup the server while I'm at it; Just take a nap while that processes.

Friday: Sorry if my office smells like vomit. It's because I am so tired I vomited.

Sunday: I'm not getting out of this bed tomorrow. Let them fire me. I think I will just will myself into a coma. That will be nice.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

> Monitoring: Load Average of 57!! ALERT!!!!
> me: What? That's not possible?
> *Monitoring froze 14 hours ago*
> *sshs into server*
> *see attached image*

The issue was ~1200 df processes that were issued by our monitoring system and all of them didn't finish because the external cluster we mounted onto that server died a few minutes before that. Just re-mounting the cluster fixed it but still a funny sight!

A friend of mine bought a new laptop with an ssd and called me over since it behaved weirdly. All the icons on the desktop would turn to white squares and slowly reload their images. Also the laptop was pretty slow.
She said she had brought it to the store to show that behaviour and the only advice they would give was to reinstall windows...
So I started checking on what processes are running...
The thing was constantly running an "optimization" tool... which, you guessed it, was constantly defragmentating... the ssd... are you fkn serious who set up that shit this way...

Thank you sooooo much for giving me a list of six tutorial videos you expect me to record by tomorrow, before I leave the company. It shouldn't be too hard, you say, having never ever gone through any of the processes before. Oh, and this is in addition to the big video tutorial which you asked for this afternoon that you expect by Friday morning. Not to mention the eight separate projects I still need to write documentation for. Oh, and this all would have been much smoother if this company would have given me time to work out all this documentation earlier instead of waiting until after I turned in my two weeks to take documentation seriously.

I guess I'll be lucky if I only have to deal with these things tomorrow. But given your penchant for pulling me off my main projects to deal with bullshit tangents, I bet that ain't going to happen. And I bet you're still going to flood me with calls on Monday morning, as I start my brand new job.

Currently, a classmate and I are working on our technical thesis.
It is all about industry 4.0, IIoT, big data and stuff.
This week, we presented our interim results to our supervisor. He is very pleased with our work and made the following suggestion:
He thinks it would be awesome to publish our work on our own GitHub repository and make it open source because he is convinced that this thesis is able to kind of "set a new standard" in some specific fields of using big data analysis in production processes.

I guess I'm kind of proud :)

So after a llllllloooooonnnnnnngggggg struggle with the team i've been working with, today is the day that my group move to a different org and start working with a different team.

This is a huge step in the right direction for us and we are so happy. This new team is much bigger, but has been around for a lot longer and has proper processes in place and works a lot smoother. Never going to be perfect, but still going to be much more workable and we are so ...... thats an interesting linter file, hhhmmm they have disabled all the checks for the stuff that will cause crashes, like force unwrapping ... but they've enabled the rule to make sure our imports are sorted alphabetically

... nope, cant do it, no sign of intelligent life in this company at all. linkedin here I come.

Am I the only one who thinks recruitment processes are lower quality the more the industry evolves?

I just shocked an interviewer by saying i’m not checking all their boxes from the ad, after being pushed by their hr to take the interview, regardless beeing made sure by HR thats not a problem.

After interview radio silence. i don’t get it...first you headhunt someone, spend 3 weeks in convincing for an on-site and then you can’t even bother sending a “Dude you are not what we look for in the end” mail?

Guess I ask too much from recruiters, did anyone else encountered this?

TL;DR
I accidentally surpassed(?) my user permissions and closed some of my classmates browsers and locked up a terminal for me

In school we have 2 primary operating systems: Windows and Ubuntu. Windows is hell in general and but not as hell as the firefox installation on Ubuntu.

"Just loaded this page. Now wait half a minute so that I can render it"
"Woah, woah, woah. Slow there. You just made an input event. Give me those 5 seconds to compute what you just did"

Executing "top" or "htop" shows you a long list of firefox processes with a cpu usage of 99.9%, since the whole school shares that linux environment.

Anyway, one day it was way more servere than normally and I way forced to kill my firefox instances. So I pressed CTRL+ALT+T for that terminal, waited 5 minutes until it accepted input typed "killall firefox" with a delay of half a minute per character and smahed that enter key.

At this very point in time I could hear confusion from every corner of the room. "What happened to firefox?"

Around 30% of the opened browsers where abruptly stopped. I looked back to my screen noticed I was logged out. I couldn't login from that terminal for the rest of that day.

Our network admin, which happened to be there, since the server is just next door, said that this was just convenience, but the timing was too perfect so I heighly doubt that.

I felt like a real hackerman even if it was by accident :)

So I just received this second DSP5005 DC-DC programmable power supply. Time to make an enclosure for the thing!! 3 power supplies totaling at around 1kW, and 2 variables connected to the 50V 10A one, through external banana wires (I want all of this to be modular). No biggie, take measurements for the AC-DC supplies, add in the variables on the front, and cut it out.

So, I went and did just that. Now my 500W (50V 10A) supply is a bit larger than the others, and it's got a fan. So I figured, well then probably my 24V 8.3A (200W) and 12V 15A (180W) supplies could use some cooling as well. But how am I going to achieve passive cooling without a spacing between the supplies?! So I thought of some spacer design. It had to be out of wood, and I had some 4mm MDF and some IKEA parts around. So, 4mm MDF for the plate and 8mm wood spacers from IKEA for the spacing. And some super glue to hold it all together.

Weighing my power supplies against a 1l bottle of milk, it seems like my power supplies are ~500g. Great, so the top spacer would take 500g and the bottom one 1kg + the weight of the top spacer.

I ended up building one plate with 6 spacers in it yesterday, until I got too tired. Then I placed my entire weight against it, 20kg at least. It didn't budge. Pretty good for something that's only designed to withstand a 1kg load!!

So, I made something good with only a 10x18cm piece of MDF, some garbage from IKEA, and most importantly a bit of a brain. Something that can handle 20x its designed load no problem. Manufacturers, is it really right to produce shit when I can beat your manufacturing processes big time without an assembly line?!

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Debian 9.3's gpg issue is driving me crazy! I can't install anything outside of the default apt repos no matter what I try.

No matter what, apt always does the exact same thing. It adds the repo; then finds, imports, and processes the key; and finally fails with "gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found."

I've spent hours looking this up and trying to fix it.

Just. ARGH!
☹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of months back we were discussing sh with a third party vendor for a very large ass fuck system that another department uses. I had been called into the meeting because the entire I.T department counts on me to at least act as an assessor to the many issues that other departments might have.

the department for which i was working with manages the databases that our institution uses, and in this particular question the DBA (my best friend mind you) was part of the meeting.

Mind you, issues that the third party vendor were having were all fixed by our DBA, and he had documented and mentioned these items to me as I provided assistance to him through the 3 weeks prior to this meetings. Once such case was that we needed a transitioning as well as intermediary system for some processes to happen from one DB to the other and a lot of other technical babble. Well, the DBA used to be an excellent (fuck you) VB developer who recently re-learned the language into .net. He had shown me many of his old programs and even by the limitations of the language they were elegant and fascinating. They really are and ya'll devrant fam know that I ain't one to hate on tech at all.

When the DBA explained how he went around some of the issues by generating programs that could assist him, he mentioned the tech stack, I had coached him into knowing that being descriptive about the tools he used would be beneficial to everyone else. While he mentioned VB.NET the vendor snickered and my boy got quiet.

Then I broke the silence, fuck you. "what was that?" and the dude said "nothing, sorry"
So I said "no no, I want to know, I am not going past this point until you, the dude getting paid over $100 an hour for something YOU couldn't fix explain to me the little hehe moment you had"

The mfker went silent. then explained how he was aware that people were moving past vb.net and shit like that, me "imagine that, someone used a tech stack that your ignorance thought obsolete to fix something you could not solve, even though we are paying you for it, were it me or in my hands, and mind you i have direct access to the VP so this foolishness might change, I would have cut you and your little sect loose months ago, I have no patience, or appreciation from leeches like you or the rest of the "professionals" that work for your company or other similar entities, much less, as you can see, my patience runs even less when you people snicker at the solutions that our staff has to take when you all slack"

The entire meeting was uncomfortable as high heaven.

Fuck you, if someone I know manages to run shit on fucking liberty basic then so fucking be it. I will slap you 10 fucking times over, and then fuck your girl, if you try to put someone else down for the tech stacks you use.

I hate neck beards, BUT I hate fake ass neckbeards ever more

*Colin Farrell in true detective mode: FUCK....YOU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My current company decided to do all automation in node.js.
Crawling, new projects, processes, all of it in Node.

Fuck my life.

Boss: "Sooo.... How long will it take?"

Me: "Maybe we should agree on some processes and specify your wishes for the new feature first?"

Boss: "Yeah you're right.... But what do you think? Will you get it done til $deadline?"

...

Why am I even trying? Who needs project management anyway?

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

So, I just found out a bunch of chrome processes running on the staging server. Very weird, as the server doesn't even have a DE installed, why would someone need chrome running.

Then found out that somebody was spawning chrome headless mode, going to the API url, and saving the page as pdf (calling it generating report)

-_- Very very innovative, So instead of generating the report on the server side and be done with just a single API call, one has to launch a web browser, then GO TO THE DAMN API URL, SAVE PAGE AS PDF.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

it was 12am when we are ready to launch our new web design which requires a lot of hardwork and routing processes. my team lead was the one who pushes the button to production using "cap production deploy" command. everyone in the room (including PM) was like counting down like launching a rocket to space. the feeling is great knowing that everyone was sleepy at that time. im glad it went smooth and everyone congratulates each other.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

warning: huge ass rant, language.

sooo, i’ve been away from too long from here but in my defence i had nothing to rant about.... LOL YOU WISH.

this yeah and part of the last one were a huge dumpster fire. i had terrible and stupid clients, but this time, oooh my. i had the kind of client that puts you in the state of taking drugs to talk with him.

so, basically my job is to use IT to run businesses and part of it is going paperless and bringing intelligence to their DMS. I have 5 years experience on the field, not a senior, but let’s say i do know my way around the job. this involves a lot of windows services, scripts (in vbscript..), powershell tasks, i basically lick Microsoft boots for a living :D

So, huge part of the job is taking “physical” (on paper) processes, taking them to digital, then making them better, once they are used to the system. (nothing secret I work with M-Files)

But this guy. Dude. this is the kind of person that needs to look good towards his boss. it’s the guy that says his words are “cartesian”, with a “precise meaning”. My, Fucking, Ass.

When it comes to structure (folders, flows, trees, whatever) it’s important to think about design, you want to touch it the least at the end. i have to modify workflows and objects countless times. and yes, i had with him a long and extensive design phase. the dude basically says “yes” without reading what’s been done, and then changes mind and asks “who the fuck approved this shit”. the problem comes when you write services to process huge amounts of data to be saved idk, on the FS, and decide that it was wrong, and that it needs to be changed and retroactively. then change it back. then change the process. then make it bigger, so big your staff gets confused as fuck. then you want to impose stuff to your suppliers, which they don’t give a fuck about your requests.

then. THEN. then you come to me, say it’s my fault you might lose your job because release must be pushed further because you didn’t want to lose your fucking pride by admitting that you were wrong about something it’s my fucking expertise, something your 15 years experience accountant also told you, as well as half of your accounting department (the way VAT is treated basically). get fucking fired already. for real. and guess who had to implement something wrong on purpose knowing It would be a fucking nightmare to properly reverse?

without mentioning that some stuff makes so 0 fucking sense, jesus, get wrecked by a horny duck dude. who the fuck needs to store e-mails in public folder for each fucking email in the company? take a cryo backup solution. no, each email that comes into each mailbox needs to be assigned to a working site. without exception. why would an email to order pizzas for the dinner be assigned to a working site?

also, thanks a lot for making me writing a huge service the other way around because you didn’t read my emails. thank you. because how the fuck am i supposed to know that i need X data from Y and not Y from X? (over, over simplifying here). the number of hours spent there , uuugh.

but hey, don’t worry, I hopefully got to spend the morning of my birthday, which was also a day off, helping you out because your staff is basically overwhelmed.

god, they aren’t the brightest stars in the sky, but I can just understand them. poor souls.

but hey besides all this. it would’ve been nice acknowledging the many mistakes done on your side my dear client. no, while being 100% e-mail backed, somehow the error is in our side. (my boss knows it isn’t don’t worry he covers me).
like, a couple of days ago he asked me to solve a huge bug on an invoice validation workflow that must’ve been a bug because was designed in a shitty way. it wasn’t a bug, it was his “cartesian” specification. which i told him btw wasn’t that clever, but never mind.

hopefully client will have a 3 weeks leave. i will enjoy every day of work without him. every hour.
i will do excel macros for what I care.

once already my boss stepped in to calm down the dude, shit was going south and I was going to basically fire myself because if a phone call I finally didn’t do. i was ready to insult the shit out of his face with his boss. god thank my boss for that.

sorry for the slightly long rant

have a good day y’all

I've just found out that the Chinese can even fuck up the most basic of manufacturing processes. A goddamn fucking perfboard, why on Earth would that need good adhesive with decent mechanical strength, right?!!

Initially I was told by other electronics chaps that the adhesive under the pads melts because I'm soldering at such a high temperature (470°C). Well I thought at the time that these boards are really shitty and their adhesive is garbage, and now that I've even seen a cold pad just rip off cleanly, I guess it's confirmed. That adhesive IS fucking garbage and that temperature on the iron is really just fine.

Well, I guess that I'll just design my own PCB's then, and hope that JLCPCB isn't even more Chinesium shit. Because honestly I'm pretty fucking sick of it.

I’m sure many of you are well aware of this, but I just ran across this today and found it amusing. Apparently, Chrome uses the term “zygote” to identify child processes. 😁

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

Typos kill, kids! And deploying to production.

Instead of "for item in items" in my script, I accidentally did "for items in items". Thus, an exponential loop has been entering things into the database for the past few hours before I found the place to fix it.

By the way, this runs on cron every minute. So there are processes still running exponentially right now, possibly 180+.

Yeah, I'm setting up a a test server instead now.

This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.

A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.

The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.

I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'

$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"

He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.

He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.

$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.

In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.

A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.

Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.

Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.

Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.

Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.

Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.

Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.

OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.

Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.

Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.

Shit runs fast on several cores now!

A few days ago, in my windows machine, I was looking at the Task manager's processes. I was like, "I don't need Cortana. It is using so much RAM already. Why not delete it?"
So, I used "Iobit Unlocker" to force delete Cortana & everything seemed okay. But after 1 day, creating new folder option is gone. Now I have to use CMD and MKDIR to create new folders.
The start menu search is also gone (I guess, That's what Cortana was for).
My context menu became buggy. Some menus show sometimes, sometimes don't. "Open with VS code" option is also gone sometimes.
I don't know what will happen next.
Keep my "Windows machine" in your prayer :/

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Some non-IT people wrote a crappy software tool. Others have started using it for business critical processes.

Asshats: "People are starting to use our tool and that means it's production ready!"

Me: "If and when this breaks are they going to call you to fix it?"

Asshats: "Well it's really just a proof of concept."

They want the glory but not the work that goes with it. And they dont want anyone else to develop it. They have been a huge pain for me lately.

Why does node-sass have such garbage documentation?!
I've now spent over an hour trying to get a clear and concise answer to how that shit works, and what do I get? This: (see picture)

I don't know what any of that means, nor do they care to tell me.
I don't want to render this shit at runtime, I want it to compile the sass code when I make changes to it so my app doesn't get boggled down by unnecessary background processes.
But nooo of course not.
To top it off, the "easy" electron-compile solution doesn't even fucking compile because all its dependencies are either outdated or 404 on me. 😡

It's shit like this that makes me hate web-style development. Lacking documentation and people who just assume everything is logical and clear from the start. It's fucking not.

SQL Rule 1. Always assume there are external processes that might affect your data. (for instance, triggers).
SQL Rule 2. In Denormalised data, never execute logic on dependant table values, always copy from the parent.
SQL Rule 3. When Denormalised data schemas are created the DBA knows what they are doing.
SQL Rule 3.1. If DBA knows what they is doing then according to Rule 1 there is no problem with adding in some triggers to maintain data clones as they are created.
SQL Rule 4. If you don't like or agree with triggers, deal with it. They are a first class tool in a first class RDBMS. In a multi-app or service environment there may be many other external processes massaging your data
SQL Rule 5. If all previous rules are not broken and the system has been running efficiently for many years DO NOT complain that there are triggers in the database that are doing and have been doing the same process that you just butchered (by violating Rule 1 and 2) in your makeshift "hello world, look what I can do from my phone" angular BS when the rest of the users are still relying on the existing runtime app.
SQL Rule 6. If you turn my triggers off, you sure as hell better turn them back on!

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

This wasn't an interview, but a massive rejection which I've never forgotten...

I was working beneath a director from hell. South African, very intimidating. If I was not able to dictate my work, he would give me an expression like I had just kicked his dog.

I think at the time, I had threatened the development manager when I had challenged the way we were running database queries and linked processes.

The director had pulled me into his office one day and said to me, literally, "not everyone can do what they want to do, if they are not good at it". Like seriously, what the fuck... I was doing a lot more than others even more senior to me, and I had just come on board learning the language on the fly (4th Dimension, don't ask...).

I digress... My heart just completely sank and I was left speechless. Two jobs later and I could give him the big finger.

These days in a development management position for a massive Australian company, so I know we all go through a lot of shit, keeps you humble.

I have very low tolerance with people who can't make things work or just give up when they experience the slightest bit of incovenience. Get frustrated, angry, rant away, you're human after all. Take a break but get back to it. It's even more surreal when they work in this field and they have that deadweight attitude.

I'm glad that many things and processes have been improved that we don't need to put that much effort into them but people have been so damn lazy that when the time comes that they need to put in more effort, they just give up.

It's infuriating because back then, they wouldn't have had the privilege to "just give up" and live at the same time. Funny how they can't give up on reproduction though so here they are, passing on the genes with another lazy fuck, raising a new generation of lazy fucks while leeching off the efforts of their hosts.

There should be a visible line between "being considerate and understanding" and "kicking that spoiled brat motherfucker in the face so he knows what's up".

It's almost like a reflex these days. My asshole brain just goes, "Poor genes, lazy fuck, next."

New mobile challenge I created:

... treat this as production code and show us your best practises and thought processes ... please list and explain any third party libraries used.

First submission:

I've used library X, although it has a major UI defect when rotating the device, it should be good for a simple test.

... wrong

My family (dad, mom and I) runs a software business. Things were going decent when I was in college, and just as I was about to finish college, it went slightly bad due to lack of some technical insight. So I figured, I had the knowledge to do so, and joined in the family business as my first job. When I joined, I found out that things were worse that what I expected, (lack of processes in the company to handle day to day business). But we took a year to fix it and solve issues. But during this year, while the company finally runs as a proper company, we went into some serious debt to keep it running, as we were expecting it to get resolved soon. But now, although the company is structurally fine, the sales have seriously dropped. This has us cornered and we aren't able to do anything. We are seriously considering shutting the company down.

Which is not the worst part. The worst part is the debt. Since I, was a part of the company too, I am equally responsible for paying it off. And now, due to both my parents hitting the retirement age, I will be the only one repaying it. I really don't want to invest an estimated 8-10 years of my life living very modestly and spending a large (70-80%) of my income in repaying this.

I don't even know what to do, and things just seem very hopeless for me. Looking for any advice anyone has.

I guess if I had a bit more experience in the real world, I would be better at dealing with this, but I'm literally just 1 year out of my college.

Do YOU know the meaning of MSBS? It stands for Microsoft BULLSHIT, Mary fucking mother of Christ. Visual Studio might be the only thing more UTTERLY FUCKED UP than the Win32 API itself, and have YOU ever touched that thing?! MADNESS!

First off, SURE. Go ahead, just take FUCKING HALF of my RAM. It's not like I have just 3.5 gigs to spare, you cock sucking mother fucking piece of disgusting sticky green horse SHIT. Oh, going to support pages to find an answer? FUCK YOU. This is a VITAL, yes VITAL part of the software gobblin up all your machine's resources! HAHA! YOU CANT TURN IT OFF!

But, A-HA! THEY LIED! THEY ALWAYS LIE. I went and changed the extension of all your USELESSS, incompetently written, PIECE OF SHIT sneaky background executables! TAKE THAT, YOU SON OF A BITCH! Can't launch those FIFTY fucking parallel processes now, can you?! CAN YOU?! AHAHA!!!

And what is the tradeoff? My toaster not going into cardiac arrest anytime I bring up the calculator, and in exchange I can't log in from Visual Studio to your ass-sniffing, ballsack-joggling backwater FUCKHOLE of a server anymore? Haha... FUCK YOU, BILL. I AM IN CHARGE NOW.

And the only annoyance now? Some random "FATAL" exception thrown at startup saying something's very, very wrong, but NOTHING I actually use is broken. I've forcefully disabled like 75% of the SHIT you installed under my nose when I asked ONLY for C/C++ packages, and NOTHING I use is broken!! I'm compiling libraries, a graphics engine, fucking BLENDER and NOTHING is broken!! Take a good WHIFF because this is MSBS AT ITS FINEST!

And I COULD find this funny IF it was the first time it's happened. IT'S NOT. I've lost count how many times I've outright DELETED files from a Microsoft installer that are supposedly "ESSENTIAL" according to the support boards, ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT THEY ARE NOT, AND MY COMPUTER EVEN RUNS BETTER WITHOUT THEM HOGGING RESOURCES LIKE ITS FREE FUCKING REAL STATE YOU BUNCH OF HORSE SCREWING CORPORATE ASSFACES.

Bottom line: FUCK this CRAP. This is exactly why I don't fuck with windows updates since 2016, I know the kind of SHIT they'll pull on my system! Did YOU know? Microsoft LITERALLY and REGULARLY takes SHITS on users and calls it a FEATURE! WELL, NO MOAR, BILL. I'M MOVING TO LINUX, BITCH. SOON AS WIN7 GOES ACTUALLY OBSOLETE... WHENEVER THAT HAPPENS.

I don't even have an ending for this, so I'm off to MANUALLY editing *.vcxproj files in NOTEPAD because that's WAY BETTER than dealing with the configuration editor, which is just ANOTHER gigantically MONUMENTAL endless PILE of DIARRHEA. AAAAGHHYHHHHHHH111!!!111!!!

!rage

*PM 6 months earlier: "Do whatever u want with this lib, your softw. will use it."
*PM today: renames main public function names in my lib - used by about 10 processes of mine.

*Me: (╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻

Seems like everything on android is a "hack" or temporary solution, thanks to google .

Now how the fuck should i create a custom SMS inbox when:
1) i can't run the SMS broadcast reciever in a background service(because background services are deprecated )
2)message SMS reciever in a foreground service ,because this service is not fucking foreground! when the app is cleared from the recents , it shows the service as running, but on recieving the next message , the service dies??wtf?? i think its something related to processes

the app needs to detect a message instantly because some messages are needed to be sent to server the moment they are recieved :/

My head is melting. Does anyone have a colleague who constantly complains about missing specs, documentation, project organization, bad processes and procedures? Everything needs to be planned. Not a single small code change can be done without reviewed details. 10min job becomes a week-long session of whining and dabbling.

You give the guy a small task and at the end of the day nothing is done. Just page after page of written documents and lists in Word and online notebooks. Version numbers, meaningless measurement results, latencies etc. And all you asked was "could you just fucking fix this one thing and quickly compile and check it". But no. There must be a review and at least 10 people need to be called into conference. Someone needs to approve everything just so that he can later move to blame to others. "Yeah I know it's not working but I showed you the code and you reviewed it!". Yes, you did, but other people have work of their own so sometimes you need to tie your own shoelaces.

And sometimes finally there's some work done. All indentations are shit. There’re code changes everywhere just because the guy didn't like the previous smaller, compact and logical code. The code doesn't even compile properly anymore. And if you complain, the reason is "there's no proper reviewed and stamped process description, so I cannot know if a variable is supposed to be 10 characters long. Besides 200 character long variable names are much more descriptive". For fucks sake.

Some coders should've gone to work in some tax office basement.

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

Roommate's laptop.
Only 1 chrome tab open, why so many processes in Task Manager. Should I tell him to format it?

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Absolutely hate it when HR says: "You'll be told about the outcome of this interview in the next two weeks".

What about putting in place a more stringent timeline for recruitment processes at your company?

What the fuck am I supposed to do for two bloody weeks?

Dear senior colleague, not showing up to the meeting I scheduled with you for the second time in a row without any notice on your part (before or after) is NOT OKAY. Especially since it is about including junior devs more in the processes you're majorly involved in. In the last employee satisfaction survey I told the company that I don't feel appreciated. You asked why. Well, dear company: For example: THIS.
PS: I asked him to reschedule for when it's suitable for him. He said he would. Guess what? Didn't happen yet?

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions

big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with

the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while

* everybody laughs *

Ok seriously is Microsoft mining Bitcoin on my computer? If I leave it idle for >5 minutes it starts using intense amounts of CPU and I have no clue why (doesn't show up in task manager, all the processes added up in taskmgr are like 15% max). It's super annoying since I have a razer and high cpu turns on BOTH VERY LOUD FANS.

I checked for malware and stopped any update or useless background tasks (cortana, indexing, etc) and it has not helped one bit. If I click the screen or move the mouse it subsides immediately.

(No, I won't get a mac--I have two and they lacks compatibility with the software I need as well as the specs for what I usually work with)

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

"The tool to push new releases to the data centre blocked us last night. Saying all the nodes are 'unhealthy', resolve the issue(s) first. But then the remote team said 'we have a way around that' so we managed to get it deployed in time. We need to document the process as there were many ... 'shady' processes and steps involved lol"

- Manager explaining how the first production release on our new team went last night

... he called it a success

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

High paying unstable job at a startup vs. Low paying stable job at a huge company.

I'm currently at the latter and I'm expecting a job offer (hopefully!) from the other one today.

Low paying job:

Pros:
1) big name. (their stock has recently gone down tho)
2) insurance and stuff.
3) quite stable.
4) can re-skill and move to another team.
5) work from home.

Cons:
1) shit technologies.
2) lots of fake "we are a family" kinda crap.
3) shit pay for a huge company.
4) boring. I feel very unmotivated.
5) obsolete systems and management processes.
6) it would take years to save for a car even with my upcoming promotion pay raise.

High paying job:

Pros:
1) awesome salary. Like 6x my current.
2) up-to-date technologies. Something I'm passionate about.
3) team lead position.
4) I can buy a car in a couple of months.
5) might get a visa sponsorship in the future.
6) small team, my voice will be heard.

Cons:
1) it's a startup so it can go down anytime.
2) no insurance or any kinda benefits.
3) no work laptop.

I'm kinda in the beginning of my career, so my gut is telling me to risk it and go for the unstable job.
It will be my first time to be an "official" team lead and honestly idk how I'll go about it yet.

Which one would you go for?
And wish me luck! The interview went pretty well but I'm dreading for some reason.

!dev

Guys, we need talk raw performance for a second.

Fair disclaimer - if you are for some reason intel worker, you may feel offended.

I have one fucking question.
What's the point of fucking ultra-low-power-extreme-potato CPUs like intel atoms?

Okay, okay. Power usage. Sure. So that's one.

Now tell me, why in the fucking world anyone would prefer to wait 5-10 times more for same action to happen while indeed consuming also 5-10 times less power?

Can't you just tune down "big" core and call it a day? It would be around.. a fuckton faster. I have my i7-7820HK cpu and if I dial it back to 1.2Ghz my WINDOWS with around lot of background tasks machine works fucking faster than atom-powered freaking LUBUNTU that has only firefox open.

tested i7-7820hk vs atom-x5-z8350.

opening new tab and navigating to google took on my i7 machine a under 1 second, and atom took almost 1.5 second. While having higher clock (turbo boost)

Guys, 7820hk dialled down to 1.2 ghz; 0.81v
Seriously.
I felt everything was lagging. but OS was much more responsive than atom machine...

What the fuck, Intel. It's pointless. I think I'm not only one who would gladly pay a little bit more for such difference.

i7 had clear disadvantages here, linux vs windows, clear background vs quite a few processes in background, and it had higher f***ng clock speed.

TL;DR
Intel atom processors use less power but waste a lot of time, while a little bit more power used on bigger cpu would complete task faster, thus atoms are just plain pointless garbage.

PS.
Tested in frustration at work, apparently they bought 3 craptops for presentations or some shit like that and they have mental problems becouse cheapest shit on market is more shitty than they anticipated ;-;
fucking seriously ;-;

I got notified that tomorrow I'm gonna start a porting project from a FileNet ecosystem.

Well, I don't know what is FileNet, but at least I've enough time to study its architecture. Let's start from the official IBM page:

The FileNet® P8 platform offers enterprise-level scalability and flexibility to handle the most demanding content challenges, the most complex business processes, and integration to all your existing systems. FileNet P8 is a reliable, scalable, and highly available enterprise platform that enables you to capture, store, manage, secure, and process information to increase operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.

Thank you IBM, now I surely know how to use FileNet. Well, I hope that wikipedia explains me what it is:

FileNet is a company acquired by IBM, developed software to help enterprises manage their content and business processes.

Oh my god. I tried searching half an hour so far and everything I found was just advertisements and not a clue about what it is.

Then they wonder why I hate IBM so much

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

What is fucking wrong with Windows? When shit doesn't respond it's impossible to kill it and it freezes other processes. NEVER happens in Linux, all I do is kill the PID. When you can't open task manager or "end the process" you are shit out of luck. You'd think they'd fix this in the decades they've had to built a computing platform. I'd use linux exclusively but some work and tools at my company necessitates windows.

If Java versions can coexist on a system
If all java versions have their own packages on the AUR
If you can change envvars in a launch script and be sure that all processes of the application will persist your settings
Then why THE FUCK do package maintainers keep announcing to change the default java version to install their package, rather than explicitly doing that by themselves? Fuck off, do you really think yours is the only package that needs a specific Java version? Do you think each and every user will write their own init script, or edit the PKGBUILD to include the new version as an envvar in the desktop file? This is why Arch has a bad name, and they're fucking right. If you don't have the time to put a single motherfucking diff in the motherfucking pkgbuild to specify the java version in the desktop file, then don't fucking maintain the package. I know there are too few maintainers, but pretending to maintain a package while doing fuckall is much worse than leaving it unmaintained on the AUR so the first person who has time can pick it up.

A big project in my company. Had some annoying race condition that caused data to get deleted when two processes finished in the wrong order they hit the dB and override each other’s work.

Long story short. Fixed the bug and in the process the codebase shrunk by 60%. I didn’t have to delete the rest of the code, but the bug was due to a function in the legacy section of the code, and found out that it was the only function used in that section.

So I deleted it. Rewrote the function so it upserts. And bam. Smaller, cleaner code :)

Am I the only developer in existence who's ever dealt with Git on Windows? What a colossal train wreck.

1. Authentication. Since there is no ssh key/git url support on Windows, you have to retype your git credentials Every Stinking Time you push. I thought Git Credential Manager was supposed to save your credentials? And this was impossible over SSH (see below). The previous developer had used an http git URL with his username and password baked in for authentication. I thought that was a horrific idea so I eventually figured out how to use a Bitbucket App password.

2. Permissions errors
In order to commit and push updates, I have to run Git for Windows as Administrator.

3. No SSH for easy git access
Here's where I confess that this is a Windows Server machine running as some form of production. Please don't slaughter me! I am not the server admin.
So, I convinced the server guy to find and install some sort of ssh service for Windows just for the off times we have to make a hot fix in production. (Don't ask, but more common than it should be.)
Sadly, this ssh access is totally useless as the git colors are all messed up, the line wrap length and window size are just weird (seems about 60 characters wide by 25 lines tall) and worse of all I can't commit/push in git via ssh because Permissions. Extremely aggravating.

4. Git on Windows hangs open and locks the index file
Finally, we manage to have Git for Windows hang quite frequently and lock the git index file, meaning that we can't do anything in git (commit, push, pull) without manually quitting these processes from task manager, then browsing to the directory and deleting the .git/index.lock file.

Putting this all together, here's the process for a pull on this production server:
Launch a VNC session to the server. Close multiple popups from different services. Ask Windows to please not "restart to install updates". Launch git for Windows. Run a git pull. If the commits to be pulled involve deleting files, the pull will fail with a permissions error. Realize you forgot to launch as Administrator. Depending on how many files were deleted in the last update, you may need to quit the application and force close the process rather than answer "n" for every "would you like to try again?" file. Relaunch Git as Administrator. Run Git pull. Finally everything works.

At this point, I'd be grateful for any tips, appreciate any sympathy, and understand any hatred. Windows Server is bad. Git on Windows is bad.

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

One thing I truly fucking dislike about the development life is knowing about server administration. I think that the mental hurdle that is to develop a huge application, make a stable dev environment, learn all the tools, tricks, techniques, modern standards, processes whatever, detailing software engineering are way tf too much to also handle server admin shit.

We don't have anyone at work that deals with that, and as such my devs need to know how to do entire series of maintenance shit that just takes time and effort plus hours of notetaking and study. I mean I get it, they should know their way around a linux environment enough to troubleshoot issues that are related to the os when working with some tools, but fuuuuuuuck me man, setting up a server, even for the holy grail of easy (standard lamp stack) takes way tf too much.

Wish we could have a dedicated server admin in the team.

I know where my faults are, setting up servers is something that I know but just can't be assed with in terms of keeping up, I wish we had a devops dedicated server admin deployment guru cuz I really cannot stand losing hours doing this shit.

It also diminishes good s admins in value, "weLl ThE deVs caN do It" YEAH BITCH but wouldn't it be nice to have an expert concentrating on JUST THAT?

FUCK man

So today I got fucked by myself. And it hurts.

In my Company, we started thinking how we could organize some kind of think tank for the next 5/ years goals.

As CTO I got designated to be in these workshops... And stupid me, I started to organize the "workshops". Using " agile" and "facilitator" artifacts (serious games, ideation sessions, open space sessions, etc).

Today we finished the roadmap and proto processes to make bottom to top inclusive process, and co-create with everyone what should be the Company roadmap.

We went to dinner. And I was happily talking with my smartphone when they decided that I should preside the committee in charge of the roadmap creation!!!!!

Useless mother fuckers!!!!! Go kill yourselves!!!! I have some interesting stuff to do!!!

Why didn't I just shut it!!! Now I'll have to make sure the old cluster fuck part of the Company do real shit!!! They are fucking useless and don't give a shit about the future!!!!

FUCK THEM!!!!!
FUCK ME!!!!!!

** this means words are muted **

Friday:
I send a mail the client a Google doc with elaborate details about evaluation of an Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer.

Monday:

The client is upset, he says "You say there is no GPS chip on the tablet while the manufacturer says otherwise"

Me- "I have clearly mentioned that it has a GPS chip"

Client- Opens the Google doc, points to a sentence. Looks at me like I did something horrible.

Me - **This guys is either word blind or something else is wrong with him, the line reads 'GPS chip available'**

Me- "Look, it says 'GPS chip available'.

Client- **Blinks n blinks again** "Alright, but why did you share a Google document, why not PDF, docx"

Me-**Politely** "You can download the document in any format, look I will show you..."

Client- "It should have been in the mail itself ideally"

Me- **WTH** "We normally maintain a document for such things to keep everything organised, but if you want I will put everything in mail itself"

Client- "Hmm.. do both from next time"

Me- "Alright" **BS**

Client- "Why is the new feature taking so much time"

Me- "As planned earlier, we going to deliver it tomorrow"

Client- "Why not today??" **Gives a strange look.**

Me thinking - **Enough**

Me- "See, I am trying to integrate a smarten with a socket connection, reading it's data via exposed APIs that are hardly documented, we need faster performance so I need to implement caching, multi threading, offline handling, multiple processes to avoid memory fluctuations, sync adapter to sync data...."

Client- "Ok ok ok, it's fine if you give working build tomorrow"

Me- "Ok, fine"

#limit

Have you become a replacement tool doing manual and menial IT work to bridge the lack of a proper IT process and streamlining?

I've worked for such companies and it's super annoying.. companies that zip projects to Google Drive instead of using a VCS.. not even having a drawing board or proper office chairs.. not even a cafeteria.. companies using Subversion instead of Git, no project management systems nor software, no JIRA, shit written down on printed paper,.. the list goes on.

A nightmare, really. Like developing in the 90's..

Hello devs, I need help from database devs.

The company where I'm interning is a non IT company, so they planned to migrate to a SQL Database from their older MS Access Database.

Since I'm the only IT intern, I'm up against the major devs and hot shots from where my company outsources IT solutions.
They suggested SQL Express.

I have a meeting tomorrow with them, please help me so that I can get better results for my company.
Basically I have to question them about how their decision works better for our firm and why didn't we go for MySQL Enterprise Edition or anything which is much better and cheaper and such critical questions.
Please help me.

The Database would be used to store information about the products manufactured and their parts' history so that in future if there's a problem with the product, it can be looked up in the database so that there can be further replacement or repair processes.

I might be able to release my first application tomorrow. At least the first version.

Nothing special, be amazed if it gets much attention.

In short;

You specify any running processes you wish to forcefully close, in my case, games.

So any time these games start running, it's force closed.

The app also monitors the active window, of it's and IDE, like Visual Studio, it will add credit towards allowing those blocked processes to run.

Currently you get 1 credit for every minute you code.

I plan to refine it some more. And yes I know there's ways around it but, it was fun to make

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A coworker created several WinForms-Tools because it was "more comfy" than learning XAML which we usually use for all our sw clients.

Now that these tools are relevant for our infrastructure and some even for the product itself they have to be maintained by others as well.
Note: he tried to use OOP but the result is more like a complete new style of programing . Processes, objects and external scripts in the mix.

Mainreason why noone could know about it: the product manager used him as kind of private dev for some hours a week. No reviews, barely documentation... Now we decided that developing the tools from the scratch is more time and cost efficient.
What a mess...

Agile my ass.
What has become of: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"?
A fuckton of rules and processes to do it the 'right' way: tickets, estimations, hours of sprint planning. Yeah, we're so professional we no longer have time to write code.

Note: manifest was mainly full of fluffy business buzzword bullshit (effective sustainable excellence), but one thing resonated:
>Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

(I cherish every line of code deleted or unwritten, so it needn't be maintained)

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

An annoying type of colleague: the kind that refuses to cooperate and insists on doing shit their own way because they have done it that way for years and they become little crybabies whenever someone new tries to work with them.

Somehow managers accept their baby-like behavior because they've been producing output. However, like my Business Processes professor said: "Don't focus on output".

It's just annoying trying to work with these guys.

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

Email from a department mgr regarding a sharepoint site we inherited (lots of custom javascript, XLS, etc, stuff we didn't write)

Dan: "The department filter isn't showing up when I select the 'Logistics and Support' department. Was this caused by the changes you guys made? Its causing a major disruption in our processes and need it fixed ASAP."
Me: "Those changes went out almost two months ago and all the filters were working fine, at least that is what you told me when you tested it."
Dan: "I thought so, but its not working. It has probably been broken ever since you made those changes so I filed a corrective action ticket against your department for not following the documented deployment and testing processes"
Me: "Really? We've been over this. Its your department that is responsible for that sharepoint site. Previous developers hacked javacript together to make it all work, but I'm sure its something simple."
Dan: "Great. I'll start putting together a root-cause analysis to determine which of your processes we need to address."

Start looking at the javascript and found the issue..

if (dept === "Logistics & Support") {
$('deptFilter').show();
}
else {
$('deptFilter').hide();
}

Me: 'Found the issue. Did you rename the logistics department?'
Dan: 'No'
Me: 'To show or hide the filter, the code was looking for "Logistics & Support", someone changed the title to "Logistics and Support"'
Dan: "Well...I guess I did that yesterday...but I didn't change the name, just that stupid character. That shouldn't make any difference."
Me: "I can fix that right now. Are you going to need more information for your root cause analysis?"
Dan: "No, I think we're good. Thanks."

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.

They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.

I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.

It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.

You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.

And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.

Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.

Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

Malwares are nasty applications, that can spy on you, use your computer as an attacker or encrypt your files and hold them on ransom.

The reason that malware exists, is because how the file system works. On Windows, everything can access everything. Of course, there are security measures, like needing administrator permissions to edit/delete a file, but they are exploitable.

If the malware is not using an exploit, nothing is there to stop a user from unknowingly clicking the yes button, when an application requests admin rights.

If we want to stop viruses, in the first place, we need to create a new file-sharing system.

Imagine, that every app has a partition, and only that app can access it.

Currently, when you download a Word document, you would go ahead, start up Word, go into the Downloads folder and open the file.

In the new file-sharing system, you would need to click "Send file to Word" in your browser, and the browser would create a copy of the file in a transfer-partition. Then, it would signal to Word, saying "Hey! Here's a file that I sent to you, copy it to your partition please!". After that, Word just copies the file to its own partition, signals "Ok! I'm done!", and then the browser deletes the file from the shared partition.

A little change in the interface, but a huge change in security.

The permission system would be a better UAC. The best way I can describe it is when you install an app on Android. It shows what permission the app wants, and you could choose to install it, or not to.

Replace "install" with "grant" and that's what I imagined.

Of course, there would be blacklisted permissions, that only kernel-level processes have access to, like accessing all of the partitions, modifying applications, etc.

What do you think?

I wrote a Rust script in 10 minutes or so that processes several GiB's big ISO files and it calculates its values so fast, that most time is spent waiting for the HDD! Look at the CPU usage and the disk read/write stats :D

(No, the picture is not fake, it's a real screenshot from my desktop edited with Gimp)

It's always so funny when a person starts using multiprocessing in Python, because if there's "multi", obviously THIS is the thing that should free the person from a headache of having GUI frozen. You know, because it does "multiple" ehm... stuff..... at once....... yeah. And it's popular, it must work for me too! Oh how often I see this. :D

Stupidly enough that's not entirely a user's fault, but Python's as naming things with "multi" doesn't end up well basically with anything. I bet if there was such thing as multipointer in C half of the beginners would be totally fucked and the other one would just break their machines beyond repair with a joy.

Yet... reading the damn documentation should be a requirement before using threading or multiprocessing to prevent the confusion, because there's this funny difference between multiple threads and multiple processes which will haunt you unless you see what's what and use it correctly.

Hello,
I just quit my job at a big market research company. It was disturbing how much processes there depended on excel and obscure visual basic scripts.

They load data from a database, do typical database tasks with excel and upload it back into the database.

PhDs run complex statical computations through an excel interface that passes the request to R.

Instead of an hour Python they execute stupid tasks with excel by hand. Day after day, month after month.

WHY? My colleagues were not dumb but instead of learning SQL and some python they build insane excel tables.

Maybe it's time pressure. But this excel insanity costs much more time in the end.

"Our supplier asks that you double the number of php child processes for this fpm pool"

"Are you aware, that that would lead to about 100% of memory overcommit, taken the current limit of 128MB/child, and that if a lot of them started at once, the system would probably go for OOM-Kill, which would most probably kill your database, that still runs on 100% MyISAM tables that do not support transactions, and you'd have to kiss your data integrity goodbye, right?"

"Uh... Nevermind then"

I get that some people are not IT-versed, but really... Hire someone who knows what they are doing and doesn't live 20 years in the past, god damn it!

I begin with the optimism and the joy that I am creating something new that will improve people's lives.

I listen to the user and analyze the current process in depth.

I try to suggest additional value to the system for the users consideration. Sometimes they do not realize we can improve 10x rather than 2x.

I learn what the users goals are and what they want out of the system. We think about reports and downstream value. Sort of working from the end to the beginning (data ingests and upstream processes that will feed the system).

After the user signs off on the requirements and deliverables and I have a realistic project plan I begin to code.

It works and has worked for me every time for a long long time.

Well... instead of imposter syndrome I think I have something more alike "I can't fucking tell if I'm smarter than everyone around me or if I'm so dumb I have no clue what's going on"-syndrome.
And trying to be rational, I usually consider the second option to be more probabile... right?
Or maybe, the way my brain processes things is just so different from the people I know that It creates a layer of incomunicability, so that others can't understand my reasoning as much as I can't understand theirs.
The usual speaking-through-jargon-all-the-time trend I've encountered is also not helping.
So I strive daily to align myself to what's going on, trying not to slow anybody down, but that drains my mental energies so much I end up getting done so little... and then I realize _everybody_ has done a similar amount of work.
Are maybe my standards too high?
Or it's normal for teamwork to slow everybody down THIS much?

I used to work much better alone, or in teams with proper separation of tasks between people. Like - we agree on a common interface and then everybody goes his own way implementing his part, and as long as the contract is respected and nothing breaks, nobody cares about what's inside the boxes.

But I don't see it coming again anytime soon, and people seem to have an averagely-good opinion of my work. So well, if I get paid and things cruise along fine, there should be nothing to complain about.

Shit, I've let my flow of consciousness out.

Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.

This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.

Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).

We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.

It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first.

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

App idea: Program that processes funny dog/cat videos and removes the annoying ass thought bubble text they put in them. Like "I is hungreh" or "you is doin me a concern" or whatever. That shit. I hate it.

I discovered a commit message from one of my (senior) colleagues today. It made me shudder. It read, 'Just adding some changes made outside of source control and deployed (over last 12 months)'.

I genuinely think he can't follow any processes he didn't design. He controls the servers too, so it's not like any pipeline would prevent him from just doing what he wants. It's a bit scary to be honest, he thinks MD5 is a secure password hash!

On the days when I just want to sob and put my head through the monitor....

I get out a piece of paper and draw my processes (whether that be code or mapping etc). Each step of each process, helps to represent the input and output of each method.

This makes it easier to find which step isn't giving the desired output....

Either this or the rubber duck method. :)

Fucking hell it pisses me off when you go to so much trouble to streamline processes, set up systems that improve workflow and solve issues, find better solutions and show how they make life easier... and people are like "yeah nah let's just do things the same old shitty way we've always done things".

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

So I tried to use Opera a few times at a time with different IP addresses(Opera has a VPN but normally only one connection) ...
I decided to copy the portable version
Via CMD to create a few Profiles(6 GB) and create a launch.bat
Now I have Opera running about 50 times and now my Computer starts making noise because I have a total of over 400 Processes running
CPU & RAM love it

I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.

I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.

I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.

I love devrant so much for how I feel it's the one social network in which I feel part of the community, and I hate it for letting me realize how alive all of the stereotypical behaviours the IT crowd is usually shunned for are amongst us.

Users and managers aren't stupid, processes in a company are usually there for a reason, and if your boss is really that much of a dimwit, then why the hell are you even there?

This has to be one of the most recession proof professions out there. Change jobs. Stop blaming everybody else for your shortcomings, damn it.

But, yeah, much love to all of you making us look good and being humble about it.

Ugh, I hate having to port data from windows to Mac. I myself use Linux and windows. My mom got her first Mac for her birthday, but she needed her 200gb of pictures on I cloud. So I thought it would be like Dropbox, put them in a folder or start an upload and then it processes and is on the cloud. NO. It’s a hellscape as Apples windows programs are awful and I’m ashamed they exist. There is no indication of when they have successfully uploaded, you just have to figure it out. It also doesn’t help when macOS Is oversimplified. Ugh. I ended up taking my terabyte external and having to wait 3 hours for files to transfer and put those on the MacBook. I hate I cloud more than comic sans. I know Dropbox isn’t great or even good for security reasons, but it’s a hell of a lot better than I cloud BULLSHIT.

Ugh am so done with linux.

I dualbooted ubuntu 16.4 LTS alongside win10 on my new laptop 3 years ago. Back then , the whole os and kernel stuff were new for me, but once i understood how things work in it, i always found linux to be a superior alternative for doing any development related task than windows.
The way terminal gives us sheer raw power to handle services and applications ourselves makes everything easy in linux.

Wanna run a lamp server? Install all parts by yourselves. Problems with the lamp server? You are just 1 command away to know which service/package is causing issue. Some python module fucked up? You can go on checking every package present anywhere on your disk. No permissions? Sudo.

But recently i got so much fed up of its gui. I have gone from 16.4 to 18.4 to 20.4 , but no version seems to handle multiple gui s/w running parallely .
I usually have the requirement to open 2-3 windows of chrome with 30-40 tabs, 1-2 projects of Android studio and studio emulator. But this shit blows even with just 1 project open on studio and nothing else! The even the keyboard and mouse gets stuck when i studio is making a built.
And don't get me started on how slow my system becomes when switching b/w AS and chrome :''( . Maybe there's issue with the dual boot or because i gave very large swap/root partitions when i first dualbooted or something else , but i am in so much pain :/

Finally i went back to win10 a month ago and was a little surprised to find that it sucks a little less now. Aside from the ugly forceful updates, it has been a breeze for working . The builds take longer time (fuck windows defender), but My Android studio (and everything else) does not lag when switching between multiple processes. I even once ran an emulator instance and it was still working fine . The process management of windows is very good.

I have heard that mac is kind of in middle of the 2 and better than both providing rich process management and powerful terminal commands . Waiting for the day when i have enough money(or no longer require my kidney) to buy and maintain a MacBook :/

Good afternoon guys. Long time no hear from me and I'm sorry about that. Had a lot health problems to fight.

I'm currently trying to list all processes that are running on my pc with a C# program. VS is running with admin rights but I'm still getting an error: "System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access denied Error"
I tried googling it but if found the answer I didn't understand it.
Please help me.

Posted previously about our codebase being a monolithic, poorly-written, pain-to-maintain gigantic cluster-fuck. And the efforts made to rewrite it.
Well, we made huge success the previous year in this regard. I rewrote the entire API while my other team mates worked on two different UI apps one of which is now in production and the other soon to be released in alpha.
Processes have being put in place for our team and are being improved.
We still have some technical debts though.
Dev goal for 2020,
- Pay most of the technical debt.
- Dive deeper into Flutter and finish the app I wanted.
- Play with ML, AI and Game dev.

I don't know about obnoxious processes, but I do know about one single event that happens WAY more than it should, and that might be people from customer relations coming with "new awesome features that MUST be implemented asap"

oh boy the times I've pictured me shoving a scrum guide down their throats....

The futility of working in a bank, or probably any other big corporation.

I was working in a small dev team that made improvements to the applications and processes of the department we were in. I was given the project of creating a small data entry system to track some communications. The comms were currently stored in a spreadsheet and had no validation which made any analysis of the data difficult.

Boring but easy, should have taken about a week.

We had 3 meetings just to define requirements, they took about a month to send me their shitty little spreadsheet so I could actually see what they were recording. Over the next 2 months they kept changing what they wanted. Finally got it finished just before I went on maternity leave.

Went off thinking, that I’ll never have to deal with that clusterfuck again.

Had a baby, went back 9 months later.

First thing I got given was that shitty project back. They hadn’t even tested it - in 9 fucking months! I transferred departments not long after. I have no idea if it ever got done.

And that is on my list of reasons as to why I’ll never work in a large corporate again.