I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.

TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!

(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Tested out my first app and it worked beautifully. I’m a projectionist and I made this to give me a constant visual feed of projector communication connection. Still in development, not ready for deployment yet. But it works!
I’m posting here because although this site did not help me technically, it definitely helped me emotionally. ;)

This compiles and works in C++:

int arr[10];

5[arr] = 42;

cout << 5[arr] << endl;

I know why it works technically. Its just pointer math. But I have to ask "Why?" Of all that is unholy, WHY?!

I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.

I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).

Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.

Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like

>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.

For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.

Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).

Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.

The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.

It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.

I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.

I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.

Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.

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

I hate when sites accept a 20 char password but only 'technically' support fewer. By truncating it of course...

Always entertaining to try shorter and shorter versions of the password to see when it works.... yay...

My C# class loves to come up with weird/unrealistic scenarios to teach a specific language feature... I feel like the more effective way to teach would be to mention a real life scenario where it makes more sense to use the feature and give it some context rather than coming up with some arbitrary series of classes to represent departments and employees and then say "write extension methods for them to write them out"

If you tell me that I'm going to go, ok this works, but is there a specific reason I should do this instead of using a for or foreach to do the exact same thing? Don't get me wrong I see the appeal of extension methods as well as LINQ but this class never gives any sort of context as to why we're doing stuff. This class could be good, I've had classes that focus on language specific features taught in ways that make sense... My Java prof did a great job...

Also all the slides are terribly written...

Like I attached an example of the description for extension methods... The slides then go on to explain how the syntax for them works and gives an example...

Like ok I guess technically you told me what they are and how to use them, but gave zero context...

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I go to MSDN for their definition of extension methods, and it is much more clearly written and gives context to where/why they're used... and this is supposed to be a 5th semester course...

So I gave my younger brother my OnePlus One since he is now using an even older Google Nexus and don't care much for phones. The camera is slightly better basically.

Asked him to test drive it:

Me: so did you set it up yet?
B: nope, what's the rush?
Me: well you see it's running a custom OS (Lineage) as it technically doesn't support it. You need to test drive it and make sure it works with your SIM? May need to change some configs
B: sounds like a pain, should I just get a new phone?

Me: ... yes probably...

He's a just graduated CS major that doesn't like tinkering with tech...

(Well can I have it back then so I can play around with it?)

I got a new computer recently. I got it with an evo 970. I tried installing the Samsung controller software so that I can view the health of the drive.
No go. Why?
Looked around and everywhere they are saying turn off raid. I checked in bios. Says my drive is not in a raid volume.
Okay, now what?
Look at manual of laptop maker. Says there is a mode that allows you to use either VMD or RAID on the drive. Apparently I was in VMD mode. I had already backed up the computer at this point. Yes, I suspected this was coming. So I changed the mode.
No boot.
Okay, I have Aomei backup and linux boot disk I made using Aomei. Linux boot disk won't boot... Well fuck.
Luckily I have my old computer and a Windows 10 install disk. I install Windows 10 again, install Aomei and proceed to try and restore.
4 hours later... I dunno how long. I went to bed.
Wake up and test.
No boot.
I try disk repair.
No go.
So I boot into Windows 10 install disk to look at partitions. 5 or 6 fucking partitions. It has installed 3 partitions into the space of one.
Delete all the fucking partitions. Cause fuck you!
Okay, lets try this again.
I make a window pe boot disk this time.
It boots.
I do restore while I am at work.
I get home.
No boot.
Check partitions and find only 2. Better than last time.
I try disk repair.
No go.
Search the net. Literally: "Aomei restore no boot"
Someone says, just assign drive letter with drive C using diskpart.
Seriously?! Disk repair couldn't figure this shit out by context?
Seriously doubting this solution.
Solution works...

Now, I am an engineer/programmer/computer genius. I have been learning how to fix this shit for over 30 years.

How the fuck is Joe Bloe ever going to fix an issue like this? I feel sorry for the technically un-inclined. I honestly don't know how neither Aomei nor Microsoft cannot solve restoring disk images by setting a drive letter. How did this not get backed up by Aomei? How did this not get detected as one of the most common problems with a disk restore? Why has this been a problem with Aomei restore for over 3 years? I love Aomei. It works most of the time. But this is terrible. The tech world is definitely a shit show at this point in time.

I also read that VMD actually makes the communication to the drive a bunch faster. Not sure if the samsung drivers do the same. So there may be a tradeoff. Oh well. I can see the temperature of my drives now! Woot!

How stupid am i?

1. I tried to learn programming language.
- It just so freaking hard for me to understand. Failed at logic.

2. Tried to learn aws.
- Technically know how it works but often forgot the services name. (Was thinking to get aws cert).

3. Tried to learn OpenSource DB.
- Can do up to db setup only. Else i didnt understand sh*t.

4. Tried to learn cybersecurity.
- Ended up bunch of unwanted process in my vm.

I was envy that some of my friend only read documentation once & he is like know what to do.

Guys, any pro tips for poor man here?
I want to code, but somehow i stuck.

I feel dumb...

From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby

Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.

Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .

Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.

And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.

Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website

I got a lot of crazy ideas and I am starting a lot of different projects. But I always start at developing the complete backend. Which is my strength. So in my opinion the product is ready to use, technically it works. Wouldn't there be the front-end .. It always ends in a total disaster when i try to create one that is beautiful. I just want to write freaking clean HTML5 code with any nasty CSS Framework. Any advise how i can overcome my anger?

Rant! When you live in a less technically advanced country, and everyone cheaps out on their software and hires the company that will do it for the least money and because of that it never works decently you can't reserve movie tickets on the cinema's site and get a SQL constraint error directly on screen, if you can't afford custom software buy a license for something that works out of the box ffs

(I'm goin' to see Star wars ofc.)

Sigh. I don't like the methods of first line helpdeskers. Computer problem? Restart it, or.. re-image it. The hell..

I know these are standard practices but I don't like them at all. Just because there's a small issue with a device, you're going to throw everything away? No troubleshooting at all? I don't call that troubleshooting nor helping.

My friend works as first line helpdesk and I told him: "Hey, WhatsApp isn't giving me double checkmarks anymore for my messages to you since last night. It's odd." and his response is: "Restart your phone". My god.. how much more technically ignorant could he be? Everything network-related on my phone is working, including WhatsApp, but no.. "restart your phone". Anyway.