Pain the ass sales guy walks into my office uninvited. Looks at one of my screens which has sftp copying a lot of files and spewing out each one. He asks what that "nonsense" is.

I politely tell him that it is all his sales data and I am deleting it. At which point I got up and went to lunch with no further discussion.

The next phone call I received was from my boss asking me to stop fucking with the sales people. I hope he learned to knock after this.

!rant
After knocking off from work, I went to nearby Coffee shop to grab a Coffee. I met a girl and we started talking about our day. She asked me to do her a favor and take a look at her laptop, it’s been playing up for sometime now. So, I went. She took me to her bedroom where the laptop was, and the conversation continued on topic romance, sex and girlfriend. You know what happened next…Yes.

For the first time in my life I fixed a hot cheeks computer and got laid.

What was wrong? There was a malware in her computer which was opening random websites.

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

Y'know what I can't understand? People who knock and literally immediately come in. THEN WHATS THE FUCKING POINT OF KNOCKING

Everyone is updating their privacy policy because of GDPR while my mom still busts into my room without knocking.... She hasn't read the GDPR has she?

Chase Bank Burning by Alex Schaefer

"This is a "plein air" painting which means I set up my easel right across the street of this Chase bank in my city and painted it like it had caught fire. The police questioned me on the spot. Three weeks later Homeland Security was knocking on the door to my home. The question they kept asking me was "Do you hate these banks?" I can honestly say yes."

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.

Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.

Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.

Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.

Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.

This is the state of our current industry.

*Drops the mic*

!dev

In the US, when a technician or something says "yeah anywhere from 8am to 7pm" they will show up around 6pm.

In Germany, however, if they say "8am to 7pm" they're at your door at 7am, knocking loudly and unapologetically.

Yes, please, checking my heaters is so urgent, please do it right now. There's not a moment to lose. Don't worry, it's not like we were still asleep.

>_>

I went to sleep at 7 fucking AM.
Mom kept knocking on my door until I woke up. Apparently I am the only one in this fucking house who can give directions to guests coming home.

I mean I feel like a fucking Gollum right now. Fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkk !!! 😠😠😠😡😡😡

Finally, got this piece of beauty and badass combined, just to get some peace at work...

Now, dare those noisy neighbors, who doesn't silence their mobile and laptops, making loud chimes in IM, playing music on speakers and knocking at my desk when I'm on headphones and clearly don't want to be disturbed...

Text a random number, 'I hid the body. What's next?'. When cops come knocking on your front door, show them this,

body {
visibility: hidden;
}

I have this pact with my neighbor - if someone delivers a package to them, I knock on their door when I notice it to let them know and if they don’t answer, I take it into my apartment and leave a note. Same goes if she or her kids see a package delivered for us and we don’t answer.

So last month, we have a flooding incident in our complex and her flat’s damaged so they have to leave to stay at a hotel for a bit. It’s only supposed to be until the 20th (of last month).

So when she gets a package a few weeks ago, I knock and when there’s no answer, take it into my apartment and leave a note.

Note stays on the door for days.

And then it disappears, so I assume she’s home.

But she never answers the door.

And then I see workers in her place.

So now I don’t know if it’s the workers who picked up the note or if she was back and I missed her.

But it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m starting to worry about her. Like, the day of the flood she almost died and I ended up coming over to help (getting her oldest to do CPR, talking to 911, trying to keep people calm), so I know she’s not feeling great lately.

And I’m the kind of idiot that never thought to exchange numbers.

So I’ve resorted to internet stalking and messaging her on Facebook.

And knocking on the downstairs neighbor’s door since I know they’re related. They didn’t answer. I’ll try again later.

I have no idea what else to do. I mean, I don’t think I can contact the office and be like “Can you please provide me contact information for my neighbor? I have their stuff. Thanks.”

#awkward

Becoming an 'almost' decent developer these past few years has made me realize how absolutely undeserved my ego was back in high school when I first joined DevRant and StackOverflow and thought i was 'all that' just because i did some programming thing stupid teenagers found cool in a random school.

At 24 I can say I'm happy for the internet knocking me down a few pegs when my 16-17 year old ego got out of hand. I feel it's really made me better in the long run.

Thank you DevRant

Fuck-a-doodle-do Fuck Fuck Fuck what a fucking dipshit. Scared the god damn shit out of me.

So I am deep in code, listening to my music pounding out some code and Drupal configurations and I feel a shadowy draft over my right side like someone is watching me.

I work with a guy that will not for the fucking life of me use Slack to send me a message when I have my headphones on or at all for that matter.

He gets up and walks to my cubicle and just stares with a goofy fucking grin on his face. You know the one. LIke a retarded fucking dog eating shit out of a wire brush. Yeah that's the grin. Silently derping with his fucking derp ass Derp McDerpington face waiting on you to turn around an notice him there instead of knocking on the cubicle wall or waving to get your attention.

The FUCK dude? CreepyPasta

In my office, it requires security clearance, but the office is sooo fucked up it takes months to get it sorted

So, now in the position of people knocking at doors, annoying you at your desk to take your pass, often for large periods,,, leaving me sweating when im dying for a piss

WTF is going through MGMT heads,

Of course im sitting next to the fucking door, so when u sitting down to do some nice code, fucking knock on the door,

And wouldnt mind but its the same fucking Wagon who smokes, pisses and chats on the phone like its a God damn super power, as i type this im looking over my divider and they're rolling yet another fucking smoke!

I need out of this fucking 7th ring of Dantes inferno hello hole

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Gag SO, tie em up & suspend them in the air in the basement or attic..
Helps if SO is into BDSM..if not it's a bit awkward.. // joke, I don't even have an attic or basement.. :(

In all seriousnes, if anyone knows how to prevent people from knocking on the office door to ask if I want coffe or sth to eat, that'd be great..asking them to not disturb unless the house is on fire or they cut off their fingers clearly doesn't help.. :(

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

Me: Ugh i want to try a hackintosh again but all my SSD's are in my PC already and its not worth spending $100 for a small one...

*Leans back in chair literally knocking 3 SSD's off my shelf*

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Opportunity. That is impossible. Opportunity doesn’t come knocking twice!

First proper day of work today.

Started at 11. Listened to multiple guys shout about how much everyone made in this crap-infested cesspit of a sales job.

Got to a city I'd never been in at 2.

Walked around in the fucking rain knocking on doors till 9.

Got on the bus at 11.

I earned £20 the whole fucking day, which I'm not even going to get for a fucking month.

I'm would firebomb the office tomorrow, but I need this job. Badly :/.

Time check 12:21AM in Philippines. Someone is knocking on our house. Suprisingly received a swag from #devrant. Thank you guys!

When you give your self a mini heart attack by knocking over an empty water cup while coding.

I can't count how many times I have done this over the years.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Opportunity. That is impossible. Opportunity doesn’t come knocking twice!

A remarkably stupid but efficient technique I invented today to measure the latency of an audio feedback channel involving multiple hardware elements that is difficult to synchronize by itself:

1. Knock. Observe the echo in the feedback.
2.Try to knock in such a way that the physical sound more-or-less lines up with the feedback. The human brain is really good at this on average.
3. Once you often only hear one knock (as perfect synchronization as your ear can tell), record several minutes of audio
4. Stop knocking, count the additional knocks in the echo
5. Multiply the average delay between knocks on the recording by the number of additional knocks from step 4

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Opportunity. That is impossible. Opportunity doesn’t come knocking twice!

I have seen many debates on how children are taught but rarely about what they are taught. This reminds me of my mother who used to tell Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door that ‘we’re Church of England’. We weren’t and our family never saw the inside of a church except for weddings and funerals (thank you God). But my mother had sorted out our official spirituality with the holding position of ‘we’re Church of England.’ In the same way, most people don’t question what is taught in schools any more than my mother thought about religion. It was like just ‘there’. We lived in England and it had a Church so ‘we’re Church of England’ was enough without delving into detail, thank you. Most people treat education just the same. It’s a school and that’s enough delving into detail, thanks very much. What goes on there? They have lessons and stuff. What lessons and stuff? Well, they’re taught what they need to know. And what’s that? Well, lessons and stuff. Phantom Self has an image of how things are, an image supplied by the program, but for the most part knows or seeks precious little detail about anything

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Opportunity. That is impossible. Opportunity doesn’t come knocking twice!

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

A thing that I am annoyed that people are getting wrong is security by obscurity.

You have heard of it and being told it is bad. It is so bad that it alone is a counter argument. Let me set you straight:

>>>Security by obscurity is the best security you will ever have<<<

There is an asterisk: It is probably not right for your business. But that is for the end.

Security by obscurity means to hide something away. Most security is based on hiding. You hide your private key or your password or whatever other secret there is. If you had a 2048 long sequence of port knocking, that would be fine, too.. Or it would be fine if it wasn't observable. You could write this down in your documentation and it wouldn't be security by obscurity. It would just be security. Weird, but fine.

The real meat of obscurity is: No one knows that there is someone. The server you port knock looks like a harmless server, but suddenly has an open port to a bad application for an IP, but only if that IP went to 25 other ports first.

In the animal kingdom, there are different survival strategies. One of them is being an apex predator or at least so big and lumbering that no predator wants a piece of you. That's our security. It is upstream security. It is the state.

But what is the rest of the animal kingdom going to do? Well, run away. That works. Not being caught. And those not fast enough? Hide! Just be invisible to the predators. They cannot triple check every leaf and expect to be done with the tree before starving. That's security by obscurity. Or hide in the group. Zebras. Easy to see, hard to track in the group. Look like everyone else.

There is a reason why drug smugglers don't have vaults in the carry-on. Arrive at the customs and just refuse to open the vault. If the vault is good enough. Nope, they lack the upstream security by the state. The state is there enemy, so they need obscurity rather than cryptographic safety.

And so, for a private person, having a port knocking solution or disguising a service as another service is a great idea.

Every cryptography course happily admits that the moment they can catch you physically, cryptography is useless. They also teach you about steganography. But they omit to tell you that obscurity is the second best solution to having a stronger army when you cannot rely on your state as upstream security.

Why did I say, not a good idea for companies?
1. It is self-defeating, since you have to tell it to all employees using it. A shared secret is no secret. And therefore it cannot be documented.
2. It makes working with different servers so much harder if there is a special procedure for all of them to access them. Even if it were documented. (See 1.)
3. You're a company, you are advertising your services. How to hide that you run them?

Do you see how those are not security relevant questions? Those are implementation relevant questions.

Here is an example:
Should you have your admins log into servers as normal users before elevating to root or is that just obscurity? Well, not for security purposes. Because that foothold is so bad, if compromised, it makes little difference. It is for logging purposes, so we have a better server log who logged in. Not only always root. But if our log could differentiate by the used private key, there is no issue with that.

If it is your private stuff, be creative. Hide it. Important skill. And it is not either, or. Encrypt it your backup, then hide it. Port knock, then required an elliptic curve private key to authenticate.

It is a lot of fun, if nothing else. Don't do it with your company. Downsides are too big. Cheaper to hire lawyers if needed.

!rant

Does anyone else use the old “I’m not available today / tomorrow too” with clients when they come knocking?

Y’know, to let them know you’re not at their beck and call?

Am I evil?

Any fellow U.K. devs knocking around?

Any based in the Cambridgeshire / Norfolkshire / London areas?

We should totally organise meetups.

Hey. @dfox, a meetup tool would be pretty cool.

Meeting scheduled with a client to train them how to edit things in their new WordPress site for 11 am today. At 9 the account manager walks into my office and tells me the meeting will be starting at 10, and in addition to that we will be starting with the web stuff because the analytics team didn't do any of their reports.

The time is now 1130 and I still haven't heard from the client. I'm afraid to start anything big because as soon as I do the client will show up, but I don't want to just sit here and wait. I have been knocking out the little things on my to-do list for an hour now while I sit here with the team and "discuss the meeting points."

Why can't clients respect my time? If I say I'm going to call you at 3 your phone is ringing at 3, if I say I'm going to show up to fix your workstation at 1215, then I will be there at 1215.

I decided to try out a vertical mouse. So, far I really like it. I do need to get use to the fact they are taller then traditional mice. I keep knocking it off the mouse pad or over when I move my hand from the keyboard to mouse.

So I was working on a web scraper to basically download all listings with detailed info from a e-shop to my database for some analysis.
And I completely forgot throttling which is quite important when writing such things in node.js.
It's funny how in other languages you try to figure out how to make your application faster and in node you're trying to make it slower 😄

Anyhow, I apparently hit the poor site with 5000+ simultaneous requests, all of which hit their database (to gather product info). Suffice to say, the site got visibly slow 🤣

Thankfully I print out where each request is made so I quickly realised my mistake and killed the process.

Now I hope no-one comes knocking on my door lol

The adventures of being a node.js dev

I find goals for developers to be pure busy work and almost impossible set meaningful ones.

You can't set ticket based goals, because one ticket may take a week or an hour. You can't really set learning goals, because how do you measure 'learning Svelte'? And if that was your goal, what'd be the point of the outcome?

You can set goals like, ensure all tickets have at least one unit test... but then you get tickets that need to get out yesterday and you get people knocking on your door while you're trying to create meaningful tests.

But we often have a meeting to teach everyone how to set goals, then we have to sit and invent goals that satisfy someone in the org, then twist our usual daily work into some BS about how we're working towards the goals in 1:1s and then the whole thing is forgotten by H2, if not sooner. Just to be resurrected in Jan/Feb of next year.

!rant, I have a couple of sky hd+ boxes knocking around, we've cancelled our sky subscription as we're big on netflix and amazon prime instead and sky don't want the boxes back. I was going to take the hard drives out (1 TB each) as i could use some more external storage for my work and pics, but before I do so is there anything I can do with the boxes instead?

Afterall they have a circuit board, memory and a chipset, can I replace the sky OS with something else?

Context: Working in a small IT department of an SME that sells wine during my uni placement year.

Having the MD come into the office cubicle without notice or even knocking and always expecting people to work long hours (when his dad was more of a _work efficiently 3h per day_ type of person) and not hold his promise on getting me to work on projects relevant to my degree and the initial contract (where I was also paid less than promised).

People selling and buying $30k projects and wondering why the site/application is so simple and shitty.

How about realizing things take time and you, the client, are a core part in the implementation team. You are bound by deadlines as well.

Don't you come knocking on our door demanding explanations when you can't produce materials on an agreed upon deadline.

At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?

I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.

I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant

I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.

I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.

I don't know, what do you guys think?

“The Fraud Police is this imaginary, terrifying force of experts and real grown-ups who don’t exist and who come knocking on your door at 3 am, when you least expect it, saying 'Fraud Police! We’ve been watching you and we have evidence that you have no idea what you are doing.'” ~Amanda Palmer