Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

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

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

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

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

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

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Remote manager: Hey, that contractor you are working with that sits with me. We are thinking of sending him over to you guys, get him a visa, pay relocation and all that stuff and have him sit with you guys as a full time employee. What do you think?

Me: .... eh ... look I have to be honest, that guy is awful. He doesn't listen to me, constantly working on other things, and the architecture he forced onto the rest of the team is some of the worst i've ever seen.

RM: hhhmmmm, ok but what if we have him report to you, can you whip him into shape?

Me: Honestly I think theres too much effort involved. We are very short staffed. I'd prefer to hire someone else here who has more experience. Its a firm no from us on this guy.

RM: Ok, understood, thanks.

*2 weeks later*

Contractor: Hey guys, was chatting to my manager last week and he said the company is finally looking to convert me to a full time employee, and best of all he wants to move me over to sit with you guys. Isn't that great?

..... not really no

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:50am aight alarm clock, give me 5 more minutes

8:55am ok lets round it to 9, wake me up then

9:00am aight enough. lets just sleep for 1 more minute since 9:00 is too round

9:43am fuck

9:44am ok its time to finally study for the upcoming college exam

9:45am nothing but a fresh day to start studying for college

9:46am eh i dont have a lot to study so I'll do it in 2pm, I'll code my project instead

2pm hold on 5 more minutes until i finish coding this feature and then I'll study

5pm where the fuck is this bug coming from

5:504pm goddamn i found it

6:36pm holy shit its already over 6pm, I'll study at night

7:42pm ok its night now, time to study but I'll do it when i fix all bugs

8:14pm ok bugs fixed, commit. lets study

8:15pm you know what, im way too tired and exhausted from this coding, I'll take a short 30 minute break and then I'll study

10:15pm ok im feeling fresh bois lets study now theres not too much

1:31am damn this movie was good

1:32am fuck i forgot to study, I'll do it tomorrow

2:10am *posts this rant*

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

Root has a deadline

I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.

Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.

Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.

I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.

The best part:

Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.

For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?

I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?

No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡

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

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

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

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

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

Question!

I am 26, and recently diagnosed with autism. An incredibly late diagnosis due to my absolutely amazing ability to keep everything internal.. It has caused my countless headaches and heartaches over the years and its good to finally understand what it is thst makes me how I am...

I am also aware that IT goes hand in hand with autism due to our thought process being so 'logical' and our acceptance of failure is.... Er... Not the best. But we also have the stubborness/determination to keep going, learn what it is we did wrong and improve upon it.

So my question really is, are many of you on the spectrum also? If so, are there any coping strategies that you can share with me/everyone who reads this?

By coping I don't mean just dealing with it, but I mean in the workplace. I've never had a job formally in IT because I never did any qualifications in it. Rebuilt my first pc at age 7 and been hooked since.

I have always been a mechanic because again, logic reasons.

I'm currently in contact with an organisation here in Norway called 'Unicus' who are specialised in employing people on the spectrum, specifically in the IT sector... Have any of you heard of them? They seem promising to me

Thanks for reading guys and please feel free to delete this if this really isn't the place for it, I just feel that within this community there are more of us and I would like to open the door for communication

I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.

I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.

I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.

The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.

The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.

The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.

They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.

Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

So I'm a backend engineer and my boss keeps telling me I over engineer stuff. I'm never given a technical spec or architectural spec, just told what to do so I build. But apparently I over engineer? Admittedly I do tend to but recently I cba and done the most basic thing. Apparently its over engineered.
Would you agree that to say something is over engineered a technical requirements document is required in order to specify over engineered said request needs to be?

Ps: my boss is an inappropriate cunt. Finally got that out.
Feel like hes just making arguments with me to get rid of me because I didnt want to cuddle in bed with him after he gave me an uncalled for back rub..

When you've had a long ass 14 hour day and you're getting nowhere with a problem so you finally accept its time to go to bed...

You lie there for 45 minutes doing nothing but thinking up awesome solutions to the problem you went to bed over....

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

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.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Network Security at it's best at my school.
So firstly our school has only one wifi AP in the whole building and you can only access Internet from there or their PCs which have just like the AP restricted internet with mc afee Webgateway even though they didn't even restrict shuting down computers remotely with shutdown -i.
The next stupid thing is cmd is disabled but powershell isn't and you can execute cmd commands with batch files.
But back to internet access: the proxy with Mcafee is permanently added in these PCs and you don't havs admin rights to change them.
Although this can be bypassed by basically everone because everyone knows one or two teacher accounts, its still restricted right.
So I thought I could try to get around. My first first few tries failed until I found out that they apparently have a mac adress wthitelist for their lan.
Then I just copied a mac adress of one of their ARM terminals pc and set up a raspberry pi with a mac change at startup.
Finally I got an Ip with normal DHCP and internet but port 80 was blocked in contrast to others like 443. So I set up an tcp openvpn server on port 443 elsewhere on a server to mimic ssl traffic.
Then I set up my raspberry pi to change mac, connect to this vpn at startup and provide a wifi ap with an own ip address range and internet over vpn.
As a little extra feature I also added a script for it to act as Spotify connect speaker.
So basically I now have a raspberry pi which I can plugin into power and Ethernet and an aux cable of the always-on-speakers in every room.
My own portable 10mbit/s unrestricted AP with spotify connect speaker.
Last but not least I learnt very many things about networks, vpns and so on while exploiting my schools security as a 16 year old.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

Look, I get that it's really tricky to assess whether someone is or isn't skilled going solely by their profile.

That's alright.

What isn't center of the cosmic rectum alright with the fucking buttsauce infested state of interviews is that you give me the most far fetched and convoluted nonsense to solve and then put me on a fucking timer.

And since there isn't a human being on the other side, I can't even ask for clarification nor walk them through my reasoning. No, eat shit you cunt juice swallowing mother fucker, anal annhilation on your whole family with a black cock stretching from Zimbabwe to Singapore, we don't care about this "reasoning" you speak of. Fuck that shit! We just hang out here, handing out tricks in the back alley and smoking opium with vietnamese prostitutes, up your fucking ass with reason.

Let me tell you something mister, I'm gonna shove a LITERAL TON of putrid gorilla SHIT down your whore mouth then cum all over your face and tits, let's see how you like THAT.

Cherry on top: by the time I began figuring out where my initial approach was wrong, it was too late. Get that? L'esprit d'escalier, bitch. I began to understand the problem AFTER the timer was up. I could solve it now, except it wouldn't do me any fucking good.

The problem? Locate the topmost 2x2 block inside a matrix whose values fall within a particular range. It's easy! But if you don't explain it properly, I have to sit down re-reading the description and think about what the actual fuck is this cancerous liquid queef that just got forcefully injected into my eyes.

But since I can't spend too much time trying to comperfukenhend this two dollar handjob of a task, which I'd rather swap for teabagging a hairy ass herpes testicle sack, there's rushing in to try and make sense of this shit as I type.

So I'm about 10 minutes down or so already, 35 to go. I finally decipher that I should get the XY coords of each element within the specified range, then we'll walk an array of those coordinates and check for adjacency. Easy! Done, and done.

Another 10 minutes down, all checks in place. TEST. Wait, wat? Where's the output? WHERE. THE FUCK. IS. THE OUTPUT?! BITCH GIMME AN ANSWER. I COUT'D THE RETURN AND CAN SEE THE TERMINAL BUT ITS NOT SHOWING ME ANYTHINGGG?! UUUGHHH FUCKKFKFKFKFKFKFKFUFUFUFFKFK (...)

Alright, we have about 20 minutes left to finish this motorsaw colonoscopy, and I can't see what my code is outputting so I'm walking through the code myself trying to figure out if this will work. Oh, look at that I have to MANUALLY click this fucking misaligned text that says "clear" in order for any new output to register. Lovely, 10/10 web design, I will violate your armpits with an octopus soaked in rabid bear piss.

Mmmh, looks like I got this wrong. Figures. I'm building the array of coordinates sequentially, as a one dimentional list, which is very inconvenient for finding adjacent elements. No problem, let's try and fix that aaaaaand... SHIT IM ALMOST OUT OF TIME.

QUICK LYEB, QUICK!! REMEMBER WHAT FISCELLA TAUGHT YOU, IN BETWEEN MOLESTING YOUR SOUL WITH 16-BIT I/O CONSOLE PROBLEMS, LIKE THAT BITCH SNOWFALL THING YOU HAD TO SOLVE FOR A FRIEND USING TURBO C ON A FUCKING TOASTER IN COMPUTER LAB! RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN!!!

I'm SWEATING. HEAVILY. I'm STEAMING, NON-EROTICALLY. Less than 10 minutes left. I'm trying to correct the code I have, but I start making MORE dumbfuck mistakes because I'm in a hurry!

5 minutes left. As I hit this point of no return, I realize exactly where my initial reasoning went wrong, and how I could fix it, but I can't because I don't have enough time. Sadface.

So I hastily put together skeleton of the correct implementation, and as the clock is nearly up, I write a comment explaining the bits I can't get to write. Page up, top of file, type "the editor was shit LMAO" and comment it out. SUBMIT.

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Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

Its over.
Its finally fucking over.
Ive done it.
Finished my internship and can finally leave this shithole for good!

I have been burnt out for over a year and a half now combined with mental health issues.

I was working an underpaying job, doing senior-dev work for a less than junior-dev pay, with an incompetent understaffed team. The work was so mundane and most of the clients were stupid. I hated work, my colleagues, and most of all I hated programming.

I finally quit the job and quit programming as well. I couldn't touch or see a terminal window without panicking. I've been spending my time binge watching series and movies.

Recently though, I've started picking up coding again. I've been blogging and doing some changes to my blog beside other light stuff.

This is the story of my first burnout and it's taken its toll on me. I hope it's the last one but who knows.

So this dev writes me an email following a blog post I wrote for their job that they "have an error" - they don't show any output, what the error message is or anything. How can I help if you dont specifically state your problem? I'm not going to do your job for you!

and now its finally come full circle: they said they asked chatgpt and bard but it "just didnt work" - well yeah, those were trained on internet content from over a year ago - the api and tools have changed!

painful and annoying times ahead i'm afraid

you still need to do the damn work, i will stand by the fact that LLMs are overhyped non-panacea till i'm dead

So it's been awhile since I switched from PHP to Golang.

At first I missed PHP a lot, but golang really has some advantages, so its fine.

But over time, and when the project grows in features, I more and more and more start to miss more and more at least basic classes / inheritance and abstraction friendly stuff from php.

Im finally reaching the point where I start to truly miss php, I can't stop myself after writing a feature to think how much less work that would be in php.

Call me crazy, but damn, it's real.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Well today I feel like shit so I called in sick. Found out the lead developer called in sick as well.

The thing is, there was something really important to be done today that he fucking new that if he was not to be there I was going to get shit from everyone. He is going through some shit right now and I get it, so I would normally cut him some slack.

But fuck man, at some point you got to man the fuck up and deal with your job, if anything do it for your fucking coworkers/friends. He fucking new that I was going to get a fuckload of bullshit over something that he takes care of.

Nevermind that there are only 2 fucking developers for the entire fucking campus(2 campuses actually) and we were told last friday that we were needed. Normally, one would put up with the bullshit and make a presence, but that one of us is always me. Today I said fuck it, its too cold, don't feel good and I don't want to take my daughter to the daycare.

Today I sit at home, go over my OS books, play Skyward Sword with my daughter, watch movies with her and I don't think about work for one second.

On another note, the reason why I need to go through my OS books is that a good portion of my masters degree(which I am to start on August) covers OS development, it seems that the entire curriculum will be C/C++ galore which makes me FUCKING STOKED! finally a break form web development that I can probably use to get me out of web development professionally as well.

I may not be a dev... (learning in my off time though, best thing ever) but I have been responsible for the computer system validation, requirements definitions and planning of a new piece of software that will have a major increase in effeciency for a division consisiting of over half our companies employees.

For months it has been a painful process. I have had night terrors, immense pressure on my head all the while thinking we are getting to that final goal (live deployment), and the light at the end of the tunnel has just seemed to be getting further and further away... Like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick.

After all the grey hairs, stress and drinking I am finally going to deploy this thing to the live environment tomorrow. Funny thing is its the part of this process that managers are stressing about and I am here like... Oh wow my Friday just got a whole lot better

I love software. Seriously, I love it. /s

Transmission is given a bad torrent (which, given that it's a torrent service, you'd expect it handles quite robustly) and completely fucks up. Like, really badly. It doesn't respond to RPC anymore, systemd has to resort to sending it a SIGKILL to get it off the process tree, and the web interface.. yeah. Nothing.

It doesn't log by default, so fine I'll add that to the systemd unit and restart it with debugging options enabled.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec

Turns out that /var/log/transmission.log can't be written to by my Transmission user. Well shit. Change that to /home/condor/transmission.log.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec
# systemctl restart transmission-daemon

*blood starts to reach its boiling point*

Still logs in the wrong fucking location. Systemd, I told you to log over there. I did everything I could to make you steaming pile of shit reload that fucking config. What's the fucking problem!?

*about 15 minutes of fighting systemd*
Finally! It spits out a log in the right location! Thank you Transmission and systemd for finally doing your fucking jobs. So a bad torrent it is, hmm...

*removes torrent from .config/transmission/torrents*
Transmission: *still fucking shits itself on that ostensibly removed torrent*

That's it. BEGONE!!!

Oh and don't get me started on the fact that apparently a service needs some 400MB of memory. Channeling your inner Chrome Transmission?

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:

"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since!

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Last night my Kindle got frozen and failed to respond to the touches, so I hard reseted it by physical power button. After a dozen of minutes of unresponsiveness, it finally restarted. Some light of hope sparked in me when I could see the silhouette of the lovely boy sitting under a tree, and soon enough the starting progress bar appeared and just stopped right before its end. I kept restarting the device over and over again and the starting progress bar has never reached its dest. The mtfk boy sitting under the tree grew up and becomes a douchebag, and still I can't do a thing with my Kindle. I had nothing to do with it now, and in a moment of having nothing to do, I put it out of its case, and even made a big scratch in the top left corner. Just want to smash it right away!

So I decided to switch over to Ubuntu to get used to it and have fun with it along with trying to use Vim just as a side thing for experience (I'm still studying anyways and its semester break).

So I setup Linux in an external disk, booted Ubuntu, setup everything and then loaded a side project coded in C++ and Allegro into Ubuntu.

A few hours of googling and trying to setup Allegro to be properly installed and understanding how to use GCC with Allegro, it finally found the library and one of the cpp files gave an error that is not "cannot find allegro.h". That's great!

Added all the other additional cpp files into the command and added all the includes and there goes the terminal lit up with errors ;_; I'm so tempted to ditch everything and go back to Visual Studios

Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...

Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.

A bit later...

I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.

Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?

Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?

Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.

THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.

I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?

No.

I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.

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

Haha, fuck you kotlin! and your null safety!
I was able to break it 😆

After reading about its syntax for over 2 weeks , i finally sat down to write a simple parsing app completely in kotlin. And now i don't know how, but i am able to store a null in a "val x:String" (i.e a non null variable)

I am not going to claim it as some miracle or discovery as some other ranters, it might be a mistake. I am just a 21 yo Android/java dev trying to re write my old ,tested java code to kotlin by myself, without any auto convert, in the middle of night when i am 99% asleep by brain.

I will try to raise an SO question with details, but all i used was a simple volley request returning heterogeneous data, a gson convertor and a single activity,
Right now i am buzzing off to my sleep

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

Fuck you GREEN CHEMISTRY!
Fuck you SULPHURIC ACID
Fuck you NITRIC ACID
Fuck you U.S. PRESIDENTIAL GREEN CHEMISTRY CHALLENGE AWARDS
Fuck you WATER PHASE CYCLE
Fuck you CARBON DIOXIDE

ahhh! finally its over...

shit FUCKING PHYSICS EXAM STILL LEFT !
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

Okay, so...

We have backend app written in phalcon 3.4.

I got task to prepare new test enviroment, based on ubuntu 20.04, php 7.4 and 'copy-paste' our Phalcon backend there.

Soooo.. That backend was outsourced and I have exacly 0 Phalcon expirience.

Phalcon 3.4 does not support php 7.4

Last 2 days Im tearing my hair out to port it over to Phalcon 4, with honorable mention why the fuck memcache didnt just want to work, and finally its working.

Now Im taking the heat that making new test enviroment takes more than few hours.

Fuck off, let me do this shit, and understand its not just apt-getting dependencies for fuck sakes.

Been working on a particularly elusive HTML menu sizing glitch for over a year now, trying to get it to appear consistently enough to track down its cause. Finally a) got it to happen in a browser so I could hit it with Chrome Inspector and b) figured out what was probably causing it and fixed it.

And then...

*happens again*

*cannot reproduce the issue, but bossman can*

me --> *commits suicide*

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

just had a bluescreen in win 10 killing my newest project and reducing it to ashes😡
for no reason
not even an error code
fuck windows and its update policies. my laptop is way slower and more instable since the new fall update. it killed some software i had to reinstall and ms changed the options for advertisement again. ive had enough of windows
im finally switching over to Linux and im going to bann win 10 on a vm

Turned up on customer site yesterday to do a says SME work for them like I have done every week for last 3 months..

As I walk in they took a decision 15 mins earlier to power off the platform I'm working on to do a backup ( on a big data platform?) and its down till 13. 30...

Irony? The minute they finally let me turn it on New data arrives in the platform so their backup is out of date and they wouldn't need backups if they'd followed my original design and distributed it over two data centres....

Oh and they 'forgot' I was coming so there was little / nothing to do for the rest of the day either

Clients can be a PITA but I can't really complain.... Easy day though!

Two years ago we took over this project which has been a nightmare to maintain. It's a set of netcore 2.1 webapps running on an on-prem windows machine. Everyone who has worked on it so far has quit, leading to two episodes of it being passed on with near zero handover.

Its function is fairly simple, so naturally we have been nagging to redo it and cloudlift it.

I was finally given one week to see how far I'd get, and had a poc running in Azure after one day; 4 apps in clean net6, SSO, and managed identities. The only thing lacking was setting up the authentication for third parties.

And... they still don't want "something new" when the old one works. Back to IIS and debugging windows event logs.

The customer service dept at Koss Headphones sent me an adapter gratis for my Pro 4/AA headphones so I could listen to loud rock and roll on my pc. I've been using Koss exclusively since I rec'd a pair for Christmas in 1971. Despite the natural deterioration in sound quality on a PC, I found I could hear more on certain Rolling Stones soundboards [the ones in question are Philadelphia 1972 and New York City a week later]. So I penned a rather whimsical email to Michael Koss, who actually replied with a letter, the kind we used to lick stamps for and put in a mailbox.
OK, that PC died. And the HP I have somehow has a really loose jack so the whole mechanism will slide out if you move the least little bit. It happened so often I became shell shocked about listen to loud music on my headphones at night when my nabes were sleeping because I didn't want to wake anybody up.
Finally, after too much jiggling, the end bit of the adapter got stuck in the headphone jack. Koss sent me another adapter gratis. Last night, I got out my headphones, removed the new adapter from its envelope, and inserted tweezers into the jack to pull the broken off bit out.
Except the broken off bit slid deeper into the jack. On my own, I have been able to rig the pc so I can use the speakers. And a friend who can remove the bit of the jack stuck in the jack will be over in a couple of days.
I went online and googled the methods others have used to remove broken off bits. That was worth the keystrokes!
In any case, I just wanted to say something about the irony of expecting the problem to be over and then having a few days more to live with the broken bit.

one of the projects i maintain is something no one else knows much about in the company. its a huge project which maintaining is a nightmare that casued previous ppl to quit.

i have been vigilant for 1.5 years, finally they agreed to give me help. so we got another dev to help.

i was given a bunch of tasks, he was given a few as well. Now he convinced everyone in the company that he is the owner of the project...and everyone thinks i handed over the project to him...

why are people pieces of attention seeking shit ?

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.

So how do you find motivation to finish a work project which is supposed to "go long"?

So, umm, this is weird, but i have been in this situation a few times and i am not sure if i deal with them correctly.

- the company proposes a brand new feature : a feature which never existed in the product before.
- they have high level directions (both business logics and technical) on how its supposed to be build
-they set vague but comfortable timelines (20-30days) to complete it
- they align me as the main dev for frontend, some x guy for backend , some y guy for parallel frontend (ios/web) and kinda forget about us.
- the business requirements are evolved/cleared as we go on making the product, the backend keeps on providing evolving apis which get stable over time.
- the business ppl shows that yeah there is no pressure and we won't mind extending this for release as other systems will be "obviously" taking time.
- our (the folks on new feature) feature is sidelined .nd we are rarely talked about until we reach those deadlines and at that time we are questioned.

I... am not a powerful performer in these situations. adding a new feature required solving some major problems again and again , while solving smaller problems too, so as the product finally takes shape . for eg:
1. i will start fast by adding all the possible screens, their abstract code, their navigation logic, their xmls etc
2. then based on designs, i will try creating designs a bit
3. then once the apis arrive, i start adding them and modify the logic to handle those.
4. meanwhile many smaller problems come up , like when sending an image from one screen to the previous screen, the thumbnail don't show up, so i spend 5+ hours ensuring that it works precisely . or how i could make 3 api calls in async and make the upload flow better.

5. this goes on for days, until and i and other people start to realise that my project is not upto the point of completion

i keep getting distracted from the original goal of making a working poc first and then fixing the nuances

I've been an android/anti-ios person for around a decade and im now seriously considering switching to ios when the new iphones land. My mother is an apple nut and my brother is on android and everytime i bring up even the slightest nitpick about ios or macos (such as the fact that the "always use this application" checkbox on macos does not work or that you have to upload music through itunes) they jump on the "wtf then why would even consider it??????" train. In short its because ios seems at least a little bit more stable overall (havent had much experience with ios in general this is really more of a first impression). Well I got a replacement LG V20 just over a year ago and it has not aged well, had to replace the battery because i barely got 4 hours with minimal usage, even when i got the thing it was rather jittery, and its just now getting oreo (and surely wont be getting pie). Hell i was removing several apps earlier and it took a solid 4 MINUTES to uninstall an icon pack. After some investigation into the ios ecosystem i found that all the apps that i would need are on there so that was great. What im really hoping for though is some stability/longevity, im ok with paying around 1000 for a phone if it lasts a while and stays in decent shape. Finally the fact that the updates are sparing at best (with the exception of pixel phones) is a great annoyance whereas my mothers (around 4 years old) ipad is rocking ios 11. Could someone who has made the leap make a recommendation? I love android but i feel like all i would accomplish is buying another phone that craps out after less than a year.

I have been working on a long time, low progress project of mine that keeps on giving and giving.

Let's begin like two years ago where I dipped my toes into "more then gigabit" networking thanks to a Linus Techtips video about infiniband.
I had the dream of booting my Workstation from my NAS, a so called diskless setup.

Well, since I run FreeNAS on my Nas , a very nice Freebsd based Nas OS, everything's gonna be good.

In the beginning, there was no infiniband support.
Turns out, you don't need it, since the mellanox CX2 nics can do ETH too.
Yay.
Just took me a few weeks of anger.

So, to be able to boot something over the network, you need firmware that finds the bookable stuff and loads it.
That protocol and firmware is called PXE.
PXE needs a DHCP telling it what to do, and what is where and etc.

Freenas here I come! Installing dnsmasq on the actual freenas install turned out to be not that great of an idea because freenas thinks of itself as being an "appliance" that you don't fiddle with. So things work, until you update/ upgrade when everything will basically be wiped, except what you have done through the ui.
Ok. So I gona use a jail, a container like thing for that.
Everything is great, jail has internet, everything Installs fine, what could go wrong?
Dnsmasq can launch and work, but not as dhcp server. Some thing about permissions.
Turns out, jails have permission like things.
A few days of head scratching later, it has ALL the permissions.
Dnsmasq still can't work as DHCP server though, why you ask?
Because it needs a specific kernelmodule that isn't contained in the jail. Since jails are kind of like a docker container, they run on the same OS kernel, who does not have this module, I'd need to patch the freenas, which is an appliance, so fuck that.

Like a year later, freenas has finally added good VM support, so why not make a VM for the dhcpserver?

Well, about a year ago, I didn't know that the virtual Intel nic is a fucken unstable piece of garbage, crashing nearly any OS at some point.

So that was it for a while again.

Now to the last few weeks.
Finally dnsmasq is running in a freebsd VM with a good and working configuration which is rather simple, if those tutorial fuckers out there would explain shit instead of just telling you to copy, paste and replace X.

Now back to the PXE side.
I'm using iPXE because I have no clue how to boot anything over tftp so iSCSi it is, since that is what I can relate too.
The idea behind iscsi is to fake a SCSI disk over the network. Attached devices appear as if they are actually directly connected to the machine instead of over the network.

iPXE gets a lease from the server, can connect to it, everything is fucken great. Finally.
Except that if it "sanBoots" the iscsi drive, it can't find anything to boot.
Well fuck.
If I attach a Linux live USB over iscsi, it boots, finds grub, and crashes because the live iso isn't configured for network-boot.
But it boots.
So what's so different?

Well iPXE is booted in legacy mode, where as the content of the target is windows 10 in efi mode.
Ffff.

Ok. Can I get iPXE to boot in EFI mode?

Well yes, after like 3 days fiddling with it.
But it only finds the onboard Intel nic instead of the new Mellanox CX3 cards, and can't even connect to the target....

Sooo, I guess my options are as follows.
Either, get PXE efi to work on the network cards directly, its called flexboot and might be able to since I just found some firmware options for that.

Or give up on efi and install windows in legacy mode.
Which isn't that easy when it has to end up on a drive on my nas.

Rant 1
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I honestly would love to get fired. Im looking forward to, but not trying to. Feel me? If i ever get fired for whatever reason i wouldnt be depressed. I'd actually be so relieved and happy as if i died and all my problems are solved. Getting relieved from stress and finally having ability to allocate my time towards my personal project makes me be productive even more. A salary of 600-1300$ in this economy and inflation isnt gonna do much. Is it just me?

Rant 2
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Im slowly leaving separate backend-frontend type of work. Spent years to perfect it only to find out through someones tutorials what i can build in 1 year with separate backend and frontend he can build in 20 days with nextjs. Its mindblowing to me. And every website i open when i inspect code its always _next. All websites are nextjs. Nextjs seems like its the future and already taking over the web space. Is it a smart idea to do this? or is it better to separate pure-frontend from pure-backend