toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

As a developer in Germany, I don't understand why anything related to development like IDEs, git clients and source code documentation should be localized/translated.
Code is written in english, configuration files too. Any technology, any command name in a terminal, every name of a tool or code library, every keyword in a programming language is written in english. English is the language of every developer. And English is simply a required skill for a developer.
Yet almost everything nowadays is translated to many other languages, espacially MS products. That makes development harder for me.

My visual studio menus are a mess of random german/english entries due to 3rd party extensions.

My git client, "source tree" uses wierd translations of the words "push" and "commit". These commands are git features! They should not be translated!

Buttons and text labels in dev tools often cut the text off because they were designed for english and the translated text is bigger and does not fit anymore. Apparently no one is testing their software in translated mode.

And the worst of all: translated fucking exception and error massages! Good luck searching for them online.

Apple does one thing damn right. They are keeping all development related stuff english (IDE, documentation). Not wasting money on translations which no developer needs.

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Am I the only one here doing this? (especially when the internet is down)

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

!dev

That moment that your favourite YouTube channel (I only use YouTube from google and mostly through hooktube.com) announces closing soon.

I’m genuinely very sad. This channel was awesome because it allowed for beginning raw producers to get feedback from raw fans and even get in touch with the top raw labels!

Some top producers which are around now got into the game because of this channel and I was hoping that that’d be me one day as well.

I’ll miss you, RawstyleNation 😥❤️

If you want to learn about bad UX design, look at every GDPR-compliant cookie alert on websites. The dialogues generally follow this pattern:
* Highlighting "Accept all" instead of "Reject" to bait you into habit-clicking.
* After clicking "Reject", you'll be redirected to an infinite list of usages. There is never a "deselect all" option. You need to opt-out everything manually.
* Sliders use some ambiguous coloring scheme without labels, which means you never know if you turned it on or off.
* Instead of "Reject", there is an "Other options" button. Clicking it redirects to a EULA document, with at the end... no other options.

Everything looks compliant, but they are still boobietrapping everything so you just wouldn't be able to opt out. Fucking data-vendoring assholes.

Dev lead on another team: Ok we can build that API for the mobile apps, we'll generate everything, generate printable images for the labels, persist it all and do all the relevant lookups and checks. Do you need an SLA?

Director: Yes, 9ms

*silence*

Lead: Sorry .... 9ms?

Director: yeah, its a must have

Lead: ... the speed of light wouldn't even let us transmit it that fast

Managements definition of an MVP:

- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.

My definition of an MVP:

- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

Being a Woman in Tech® is exhausting because every time we know something a male superior doesn’t, we have to end our statements with “but maybe I’m wrong, what do you think?” so they feel like it’s their idea and take the topic seriously.

I used to be adamantly against this type of coddling but they beat it out of me. You can only be straightforward and confident a finite number of times before you’re pulled aside and told you’re “cocky,” “arrogant,” “irritating,” etc. So many of us use this strategy to avoid those labels, but it’s a tiring part of the job we shouldn’t have to think about.

Can someone explain this shit?

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

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.

TL;DR; I unfucked a micro sd used by a nintendo switch with one command: fsck

I had noticed that the nintendo switch displayed way more storage usage then it should. I didn't mind at first, but at some point I couldn't download any games. When I checked I saw some ridiculous storage usage.

According to the system, all games summed up ~20Gb, but >100Gb was in use? Sounds retarded, so I did the following:
* Plugged it into laptop
* Spend one our searching for a way to to access this seemingly unknown filesystem
* Find out this filesystem is actually exFAT
* Find out that 2/3 sd adapters suck
* check filesystem with dust (A visually more pleasing version of du)
* Find 20Gb of files, nothing hidden or whatever
* run fsck
* "File system contains some errors want me to fix then?"
* "Sure"
* check usage
* 17%

As for the reason why this happened in the first place, my guess is that the switch labels the whole segment of the card as used before downloading a game and it something goes wrong, it shits itself.

Anyways, fsck is a pretty useful command.

Working with a delivery ordering API. Response:
Shipping label type: PDF
Label: base64encoded string

I was like, that's easy, literally two lines of code. Proceeds to convert and save the file. Then on open, bam! Format ubreadable. What the actual fuck?! Found an online converter, and tried to convert it to pdf, to see if I was missing something, but the results was the same.

Then checked the decoded string. First 3 characters: GIF

Well fuck you too! This carrier uses GIF's for it's shipping labels for 2years at least, how hard is it to change that in your fucking api response, you pice of shitbag.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

If you like purely electronic music, try drum'n'bass, more specifically neuro(-funk). Believe it or not, it really boosts productivity.
I can recommend:

For getting used to it: Noisia, Teddy Killerz, Neonlight, Zombie Cats

When you are used to it: Current Value, Pythius, Hydra, Jade, Machine Code

When you need the next level:
Billain

Generally good labels: Eatbrain, Blackout Music, Terminal, Bad Taste Recordings, Invisible Recordings

first off, they've defined (just yesterday) FOUR (not ONE) features to be done by the end of the month (yes really no joke, i mean _this_ month, as in october, i.e. they mean by monday)

four of them still have "to be defined" labels

so, what, you guys gonna define those today so we have uh.... all of friday to do them?

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

Fuckbug client has no brain but worse is fuckbug has not one bit of understanding.

I am a fucking developer not a fucking DESIGNER.

You are supposed to give me your fucking information. Information as in text and photos and documents that I can use with minimal modification for your FUCKING website.

It was fucking stupid of me to help you out with non-dev work in the first place. My fucking stupidest mistake of 2017.

Just for the fucking slider, this whole goddamn project is dragging for the whole 2017.

I even helped you out with taking the fucking product photo at your office with my camera so we can have decent images to use.

I stupidly helped you out with doing photoshop of those images with your product labels and stuffs.

But in the end, you fucking dare give me 1 properly designed image to use in slider. Then ask me to change the rest of sliders with similar design like that one. If you have that image why the fuck cannot you do the fucking rest by yourself and come and fucking ask me.

I fucking hate you.

So I'm wrapping up for the day and right before I leave a coworker comes up to me with a problem. Our company uses barcodes to track some of our products through their development and we recently switched over to a new system for producing them. The barcodes for this particular product are supposed to have 8 digits, but the last 200 we printed have 9.

I immediately panic because I wrote the script that generates the bar codes and there had been a bug in the past where the script would add extra leading zeroes that weren't supposed to be there. I scramble and check the database, it would be a huge headache if our production database had been compromised with junk barcodes. Nope, all the new barcodes there have the right number of digits.

Next place to check is in the code that writes the barcodes to a text file for staff to print the physical labels from. Nope that's all fine too.

I ask the person who printed out the recent batch of labels to show me how the printing software reads from the text file. She seems confused by my question and shows me how she manually enters in the barcode range to the software. As she does this I watch her add an extra zero to the numbers. 🙃

Even worse there was an option to import all the codes from a text file literally RIGHT BELOW the manual option.

TLDR; Thought my script had screwed up our database, ended up being the fault of a coworker who didn't know how to import text files.

I'm 2 months into my first dev job. Today, I was working on upgrading one of our products to React 18. Had a feeling my UI changes weren't being pushed to AWS so I wanted to test that. Changed all labels from ".. filter users..." to "shmilter shusers". Committed, then nearly pushed those changes for a PR. There are multiple lines of defence and only a 5% chance that no one would spot it but as soon as I realized that there's a small possibility that our customers would suddenly see "shmilter shusers" on their instances, I had an absolute fit. Maybe it's a "you had to be there" kind of thing but I don't remember the last time I laughed this hard.

That moment when a client is all upset about a tiny bit of cutoff of some text, but they haven't noticed they've been missing labels from their map for who knows how long...

Working with assembly is just something different... note to self: keep a cheat-sheet with the labels and corresponding addresses at hand.....

!rant

<curious>
How do you guys format data like this? Using js framework? Or pure HTML tags?
html labels? invisible table?
</curious>

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

I want to share this story and need your advise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY DON'T PEOPLE PUT FUCKING [FRONTEND] AND [BACKEND] LABELS IN THEIR GODDAMN JIRA CARDS

FUCKING FUCK

Can I just say fuck Xcode? How the fuck have I been working on an app for over 3 hours and only now when I do the first compile do you feel like showing me an "Internal Error" message which has caused all of the buttons, labels, text and just objects in general to disappear

So I downloaded the handwritten character dataset from EMNIST, took an hour to extract. Found out it has 814k + pngs. I haven't optimized all of them with Gimp 😕 change them to idx3-ubyte format, or make labels for each char in a c++ automation.. While Gimp was frozen in bulk process, I started hearing crackling sounds from my desk 😨😨 I'm like fckkk shits gonna blow..

That's when the poorly taped 0x7E2 calendar fell from the wall.🤣🤣🤣

So, I was rejected from a job cause I didn't answer one mail asking for a technical detail about my code... my bad for it.

Except I checked the mail every single day and it was neither in mails, nor in spam, nor in the other gmail smart labels, and it magically appeared October 30th, with the date 27th October. WAT?

I am not even angry (I am extremely sad because a remote job would have allowed me to finally move in with my sweet half, but that is another story) just... wtf? How...did it...? WAT?

TIL one of the first few issues on the ISS was that they had a laptop that wouldn't boot. The (pirated, some say) copy of Norton Ghost they had on a floppy was also suffering from bad sectors, so it wouldn't boot. These guys had an entire floppy image beamed up from base to replace a copy of Norton Ghost. (Some say this was a pirated copy of Norton Ghost, as none of the floppies had the official label, instead all had either hand-written or custom-made labels.)

Then they had codepage issues.

Not only is the documentation only in Chinese, but also the labels used in the components are. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Oh well time to get my hands dirty.

Epic labels from managers crack me up.

They're so generic and undescriptive.

"Focus on users"

"Prioritize ABC"

"Increase XYZ"

I had a wonderful run-in with corporate security at a credit card processing company last year (I won't name them this time).
I was asked design an application that allowed users in a secure room to receive instructions for putting gift cards into envelopes, print labels and send the envelopes to the post. There were all sorts of rules about what combinations of cards could go in which envelopes etc etc, but that wasn't the hard part.
These folks had a dedicated label printer for printing the address labels, in their secure room.
The address data was in a database in the server room.
On separate networks.
And there was absolutely no way that the corporate security folks would let an application that had access to a printer that was on a different network also have access to the address data.
So I took a look at the legacy application to see what they did, to hopefully use as a precedent.
They had an unsecured web page (no, not an API, a web page) that listed the addresses to be printed. And a Windows application running on the users' PC that was quietly scraping that page to print the labels.
Luckily, it ceased to be an issue for me, as the whole IT department suddenly got outsourced to India, so it became some Indian's problem to solve.

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

NO MICROSOFT FOR FUCK SAKE NO!

I have a fucking 15inch screen and that left side menu is eating 25% of it! IF you gonna throw in a new "Creative" design, make the damn menu re sizable, NO I DO NOT WANT TO HIDE THE LABELS AND MEMORIZE YOUR STUPID ICONS!

At least do what Gitlab did, a nice small menu that DOES NOT EAT HALF THE DAMN SCREEN!

Oh, did I say anything about sub menu hell that pops up whenever your mouse hover over any of the items on the left? Yaaa... that goes to a brand new rant!

Legit Apple Interview
There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?
Those who got it answer it directly on Saturday/Sunday until then good luck

Dockers JSON output is garbage.

First, you'll get no JSON per se.

You get a JSON string per image, Like this:

{...} LF
{...} LF
{...} LF

Then I tried to parse the labels.

It looked easy: <Key>=<Value> , delimited by comma.

Lil oneliner... Boom.

Turns out that Docker allows comma in the value line and doesn't escape it.

Great.

One liner turns into char by char parser to properly tokenize the Labels based on the last known delimiter.

I thought that this was a 5 min task.

Guess what, Docker sucks and this has turned into try and error...

For fucks sake, I hated Docker before, but this makes me more angry than anything else. Properly returning an parseable API isn't that hard :@

If Gmail could let me edit the labels (that I've made myself) on the android app, that'd be greeeeeeeat. 😐

For some reason GMail removes the Inbox label to some mails (usually receipts or communications from shopping sites) so sometimes I miss important mail and not realise until days later when I go "why the fuck is there no update?" I removed all filters and disconnected all services from accessing Gmail

Does anyone else have this issue?

So anyway... Finally got pissed of enough to build an IMAP program that looks are all Unread emails (with no labels) in All Mail and then moved them to the Inbox.

Part of me is wondering is this a test? Does Google like pissing me off to see what I'll do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

Mozilla really knows how to nudge one to not use email encryption by default.
Since Thunderbird has native support for OpenPGP encryption, i can only chose to encrypt all or no messages by default. There is no opportunistic mode and there are no per-reciepient encryption preferences. The Enigmail addon had both.
So i obviously have gone for encrypt-by-default.

But since then, whenever i want to send a message to the majority of my contacts, i have to manually disable the encryption or get annoyed by the no-key-found dialog.
I thought, i would get the muscle memory to just disable encryption for recipients for wich i don't expect to have a key.
But they also made the GUI so i have to open a dropdown and then click on the right item to do that. All the items basically look the same, as there is no color coding or specific icon for them. The item labels are also too long for unconscious pattern recognition.
So i didn't got that muscle memory.

I now have turned off encryption by default and will probably forget to enable it for some emails wich i actually could send encrypted...

Why does XCode take like 10 minutes to show or clear a syntax error? It doesn’t help that the language itself is verbose as fuck as well with its ever-changing method names and sometimes optional parameter labels with each version of the language

Went to steal a tool from my father's office. That was 3 hours ago..
Didn't find the tool (more labels for a label machine, I'm marking everything), still found lots more stuff, filled the space in my office that took me a week to open and now I have like days off stuff to unmount, reuse,... And didn't find the fucking labels...

You constantly see these professional profiles with labels such as 'Expert'/10 years experience/senior/CTO/CIO/Consultant.

Isn't it funny when you go and work with these people in the field, they appear to be frauds? How can these people legitimately have these titles and know less than a snotty freshman year student? Their knowledge is so poor, a 14-year old with basic Windows and Javascript knowledge could outmatch them. If only this weren't true.

I think it's very unfair because they attract employers and they even get hired, while some of us with veteran knowledge in several fields don't get considered for a job.

May I add that it's always the funny guys who get a job. Apparently being a relatable frat bro at an interview is more important than having priceless expert knowledge.

i think im losing my mind.

i swear i placed like, 10 labels on my VB form, the designer even shows it's there! but when i run it for testing it all disappears!

i think i need a break.

I'm a C++/Obj-C programmer finding it ludicrously hard to switch to Swift.

I find that the constant ability (leading to very poor programmer code) to reduce syntax and add tokens reduces readability and nowhere is this more apparent that with closures.

I'm working through (to my shame) Ray Wenderlich's Swift course and the closure chapter has this:

PS I loathe K&R as much as I do Swift so it's all in Allman formatting for clarity.

let multiply: (Int, Int) -> Int =
{
(a: Int, b: Int) -> Int in

// do Something else

return a * b
}
Why oh why isn't this more simply and elegantly written as:

let multiply = (a: Int, b: Int) -> Int
{
// do Something else

return a * b
}
The equals sign shows clearly that it's a closure definition assignment, as does the starting 'let'. But this way all of the stupid excesses, like the 'in' keyword, the repetition of the params / return type only this time with useful labels and additional tokens are removed and it looks and reads much more like a regular function and certainly a lot more clearly.

Now I know that with the stupid ability of Swift you can reduce all this down to return $0 * $1, but the point I'm making is that a) that's not as clear and more importantly b) if this closure does something more than just one line of code, then all that complicated stuff - hinted to by the comment '// do Something else' means you can't reduce it to stupid tokens.

So, when you have a clousure that has a lot of stuff going on and you can't reduce it to stupid minimalism, then why isn't is formatted and syntactically better like the suggestion above?

I've mentioned this on the Swift.org (and got banned for criticising Swift) but the suggestions they came up with were 'use type inference' to remove the first set of params / return type and token.

But that still means the param list and return type are NOT on the same line as the declaration and you still need the stupid 'in' keyword!

What happened to the buttons on top of my smartphone after updating to Android 12?
How did everything get so clunky?
How to turn off the labels and simply display 4 icons in a row like it used to be before?

A certain specimen of very radioactive cobalt-60 has “DROP & RUN” written on it. Talk about warning labels. 15 minutes at 1m away from it means certain death.

If you drop it and run as fast as you can, you’ll only lose your arm.

The only really influential product Microsoft ever created is Verdana. Yes, the typeface.

It was the first typeface designed to be displayed on a screen rather than in print. Before that, there only were monospaced typefaces like we saw in terminal, or digitized typefaces like Helvetica Neue.

More than that, its looks were partly generated by an algorithm, hence the odd, alien looks. But because of it, Verdana works amazingly good in small labels. The 8pt Verdana is more readable than 10pt Helvetica.

I still use Verdana in all of my projects, religiously.

All the other Microsoft products: Windows, Xbox, Surface, Office, Azure, all that stuff — is mere garbage compared to the influence Verdana made on how our interfaces look now.

Tutorial: How to get rid of your dev?

1. Find a very old (2+ years) jira task that took a lot of sleepless nights to get resolved.
2. Make sure that your dev is still on the watchers list.
3. Reopen to 'change some labels'.
4. Forget to close the task again.
5. Remove the body. Heart attack will get classified as a natural cause.
6. Close the task.

DevRant-Stats Site Update:
A little Christmas Present for you!
-> Graphs!

Added two Graphs now to view the stats of the last 30 days.
Unfortunately the system is running since yesterday and there is not much data...

Little tip:
If you click on the labels above the graph you can disable them!

This is iOS. The “Phone” label should move and transition from white to blue. But, it’s not just one label, it’s two labels on separate screens, so for this effect to work, they should be aligned perfectly.

However, blue label is off by two pixels.

Yes, to notice that you should probably have Aspergers. Yes, I do develop user interfaces.

Yes, I basically monetized my Aspergers.

We are currently refactoring our application in order to use multiple languages. The application startet 1997 and later it supported 2 fix languages. So it's one defined language or the other, this was used in uncountable places. Now a team of 6 developers has to refactor all the code of the last 20 years, where labels are used and an old translator was magically used out of nowhere..
Turns out it's a ton of work to get the software ready for really multiple language support.

So as a student developer with years of background in web development (including both front and backend), c++, java and c#, I was more than surprised when I found out my Informatics assignment hadnt received the proper excellent mark. In fact both me and a friend of mine who has been working with C++ in particular for years got a --mark.

// The assignment was the most simple Windows Forms Application with 2 buttons and a textbox

When we asked about that the teacher said we hadn't labeled the buttons and textboxes, though we had actually taken our time to put labels next to each UI element that would need usage directions.

Though what she meant was renaming the actual variable names, those being textBox1, button1 and button2.

We of course got really mad, because w both follow the accepted naming conventions for each of the languages we write in. Arguing was to no avail. Even telling her that variable naming was not in the assignment instructions was pointless as she said it had been self explanatory​..

The others for whom computers are powered by magic, did their assignments as they had memorized everything that teacher had shown them. Why? Because she didn't teach them how to code in the first place. So they copied what would work.

Fucked up educational​ system, sadly nothing new..

Oh and btw, the naming she uses and teaches students to use is:

button1 - btname
label1- lbname
textBox1 - tbyear

In the latest update of firefox, the dev console shows all tabs as labels instead of the icons that never really made any sense to me, and in Swedish too! This is a great improvement, I love it! :)

Me: What's this new icon in the app?

* Long press on the icon *

Nothing

Me: Huh. Ok. I will press it and see what it does.

* Presses it *

You have successfully done what you did not want to do. Congratulations!

WTF! Just tell me what it does when I long press it.

As a developer in Germany, I don't understand why anything related to development like IDEs, git clients and source code documentation should be localized/translated.
Code is written in english, configuration files too. Any technology, any command name in a terminal, every name of a tool or code library, every keyword in a programming language is written in english. English is the language of every developer. And English is simply a required skill for a developer.
Yet almost everything nowadays is translated to many other languages, espacially MS products. That makes development harder for me.

My visual studio menus are a mess of random german/english entries due to 3rd party extensions.

My git client, "source tree" uses wierd translations of the words "push" and "commit". These commands are git features! They should not be translated!

Buttons and text labels in dev tools often cut the text off because they were designed for english and the translated text is bigger and does not fit anymore. Apparently no one is testing their software in translated mode.

And the worst of all: translated fucking exception and error massages! Good luck searching for them online.

Apple does one thing damn right. They are keeping all development related stuff english (IDE, documentation). Not wasting money on translations which no developer needs.

FUCK YOU SYNCFUSION, JUST FUCK YOU!! TRYING TO USE YOUR FUCKING LINEAR GRAPHS AND THEY NEVER FUCKING WORK!!! THEY DON'T ADAPT THEIR OWN BOUNDS, THEY DON'T SHOW LABELS EVEN THOUGH I'M FUCKING TELLING YOU TO SHOW THEM AND EVEN WHEN I ADD HEADERS YOU REFUSE TO SHOW THEM!! AND FOR SOME GODDAMN FUCKING REASON, WHENEVER I USE A TABBED PAGE YOU JUST GO UP AND FUCKING THROW AN "UNKNOWN EXCEPTION" JUST FUCK IT FUCK YOU , FUCK YOUR GRAPHS, FUCK EVERYTHING!!!!!!

These labels are useless.

(Found during a code review)

I think we need more labels!

— What is this malleable metal that is awfully convenient to make all sorts of things from?
— It’s lead. It is considered harmful by some.
— Nah, I don’t think so.
*proceeds to make pipes, solder in plumbing, glazed pottery, crystal glassware, cooking pots, utensils, paint on kitchen walls or utensils, foil used to wrap food, seals on wine bottles, weights in fishing or curtain weights stored near food, storage containers for food or drink, gasoline additives, water fountains in schools, candy wrappers, ink on food labels, bottle caps with liners, food can solder, ceramic dishware, spice containers, children’s lunchboxes, toys, baking molds, measuring spoons and kettles out of lead*

Which one will be a better user experience ? A or B ?

0:
A ) user scrolls in the main activity for most of the features
B ) user selects very basic features in the main activity and finds the others in the sub menu

1:
A ) long text in one page
B ) shorter text in number of pages

2:
A ) brief walk through at the beginning
B ) very clear and detailed labels
C ) complete help section

3:
A ) separate rating section
B ) ask the user for rating every time till the user rates or presses dismiss

4:
A ) inappropriate billing
B ) show ad

The last ten days i’ve been working on some animations for this website. Basic stuff but when you make elements move on scroll, people go wild.

The designer had a big opinion on this ofcourse.
So big she hád to scroll through the page herself.

So, multiple times a day, for the past two weeks she came over, checked animations, and gave a bit feedback on what could be improved.

She never mentioned the labels that where only appearing on scroll. Everything was just fine after 9 days.

However on day #10 i got a bug that the labels had to be appearing “just after loading the page”.

Like what?! Are people to dumb to scroll 2mm on a page? Damn ho. Wtf do you mean with “just after loading the page”. 1sec? 2sec? 10sec?

Hello all, I know we can search in git lab for the labels(easy, first commit etc) to find open source projects that suit me, but as a rookie it gets a bit frustrating not understanding the project and so on. Does anyone know a better way to contribute to open source and learning at the same time?

It is this time of the year that I get to work on a shitty project to add some new functionality to it, it is a front end part of the project which before was externally developed, so now I have to deal with this BS Marionette mess where nothing they wrote comply to standards, like the fucking router.js doesn't look anything like the Marionettes doc, the bootstrap they used they fking decided to override classes in custom css and turn the 12 col grid system into 5ths or shit, then they created some autmated tests with bunch of intricated selectors selecting by 'labels' instead of !!!!FUCKING WHAT ARE THIS FOR IDs!? - fuk me - so I better decide to procrastinate on this project since luckily enough we don't have a deadline and I wouldn't care if we had either! My job is java developer, and yes I feel good about learning new things and learning front end. BUT NOT THIS CRAP DEPRECATED MttehorseShit!

HTML Writers Guidelines

When designing your web site you want to make the visiting experience as enjoyable as possible and at the same time make it so that if the site needs to be changed in any way, the changes are not too difficult to make. You want the look to be as appealing as possible for all browsers and also make the site accessible to users with disabilities. In order to accomplish all this there are some general guidelines when creating your HTML code.

1. The first thing that will really make your life easier is through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is used to maintain the look of the document such as the fonts, margins and color. HTML directly on the page is not a good choice to handle these aspects because if say, the font color you are using for certain paragraphs needs to be changed from blue to red, you would have to go in and change each color tag manually. By using CSS you can designate the color for each of those paragraphs just once in the CSS file. That way if you have to change the font color from blue to red you make one change instead of the countless number of changes you might have to make, especially if your web site contains hundreds of pages. This is a big time saver and a must for all professionally designed web sites.

2. Don't use the FONT tag directly in your HTML code - This becomes a problem when using some cheap authoring tools that try to mimic what a web page should look like by using excessive FONT tags and nbsp characters. These tools end up creating web pages that are impossible to keep maintained. There is a program you can use, if you've created one of these disaster pages, called the HTML Tidy Program which you can actually download here . This will clean up your code as well as possible.

3. You want your web pages readable to people who have disabilities - People who surf the Internet depend on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to interpret the text on the page. If your HTML markup is sloppy or isn't contained in CSS the software these people use to read pages have a difficult time in interpreting these pages. You should also include descriptions for each image on your page. Also, don't use server side image maps. If you are using tables you should include a summary of the table's structure and also associate table data with the correct headers. This gives non visual browsers a chance to follow the page as they go from one cell to another. And finally, for forms, make sure you include labels for form fields.

By following just these three guidelines you give your visitors, especially disabled visitors the best chance of having an enjoyable visit to your site while at the same time making it so that if you have to make changes to your site, those changes can be made easily and quickly.

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

So we map conditionals based on the form labels that the client can change and don't autoupdate them.

I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.

Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.

The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.

And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.

Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.

Thank you for your time answering.

Anyone tried converting speech waveforms to some type of image and then using those as training data for a stable diffusion model?

Hypothetically it should generate "ultrarealistic" waveforms for phonemes, for any given style of voice. The training labels are naturally the words or phonemes themselves, in text format (well, embedding vectors fwiw)

After that it's a matter of testing text-to-image, which should generate the relevant phonemes as images of waveforms (or your given visual representation, however you choose to pack it)

I would have tried this myself but I only have 3gb vram.

Even rudimentary voice generation that produces recognizable words from text input, would be interesting to see implemented and maybe a first for SD.

In other news:
Implementing SQL for an identity explorer. Basically the system generates sets of values for given known identities, and stores the formulas as strings, along with the values.
For any given value test set we can then cross reference to look up equivalent identities. And then we can test if these same identities hold for other test sets of actual variable values. If not, the identity string cam be removed, or gophered elsewhere in the database for further exploration and experimentation.

I'm hoping by doing this, I can somewhat automate the process of finding identities, instead of relying on logs and using the OS built-in text search for test value (which I can then look up in the files that show up, and cross reference the logged equations that produced those values), which I use to find new identities.

I was even considering processing the logs of equations and identities as some form of training data perhaps for a ML system that generates plausible new identities but that's a little outside my reach I think.

Finally, now that I know the new modular function converts semiprimes into numbers with larger factor trees, I'm thinking of writing a visual browser that maps the connections from factor tree to factor tree, making them expandable and collapsible, andallowong adjusting the formula and regenerating trees on the fly.

Why are some ketchup bottle labels upside down??

Always nice coming into office with 4h of sleep, realizing you're the only developer in today, so all support stuff falls on me. Which is evenmore fun since I'm still a trainee and don't know everything yet.

Oh and I also spent 1h explaining the logistics/IT director how to generate a label to send off a package and then scanning said labels in.

Chat GPT explains all its versions in a proper way

You said:
Why do suckers that created you made fucking billion inconsistent names? "GPT-3" is ok, "GPT-3.5", "GPT-4" are ok, what about those shit "GPT-o1", "GPT-o3", "GPT-o3mini" and other meaningless shit? Are they stupid or what?

ChatGPT said:
OpenAI's naming is a mess, no argument there. They went from a clear versioning system (GPT-3, 3.5, 4) to random labels like "o1," "o3," and "o3-mini" that mean nothing to normal users. Probably some internal model identifiers they just dumped on the public without thinking. Makes zero sense from a branding perspective.

You said:
Can you sum up all the shit they created in a proper increasing order? "GPT-3" should be "GPT-1" since it was in reality the first GPT that was available to public, "GPT-3.5" should be "GPT-2", etc.

ChatGPT said:
Here's the mess cleaned up logically:

GPT-1 (2018) – Never public
GPT-2 (2019) – First public model, but with limits at launch
GPT-3 (2020) – First real public GPT (should be GPT-1)
GPT-3.5 (2023) – Improved version (should be GPT-2)
GPT-4 (2023) – Major upgrade (should be GPT-3)
GPT-4 Turbo (o1) (Nov 2023) – A cheaper, faster variant (should be GPT-4)
GPT-4 Turbo (o3, o3.5, o3-mini, etc.) (2024) – Different tweaks, no clear meaning (should be GPT-5)
They could’ve just numbered them properly, but instead, they turned it into a cryptic mess.

FLUTTER
I want to reduce the width(length) of a Slider widget. (Seekbar). I want to display time labels and some icon button on the sides...
It’s overflowing in a row...
Anyone any pointers or alternative ideas pls :(

speedrun.com completely destroyed itself today.

Apparently they thought it was funny to change all kinds of labels, links, images etc. around for April fool's, so now the site became completely unusable. In a game that I identified as Minecraft by looking at the URL, over 10 moderators were added and minutes later, a 5 minute world record of getting all achievements was verified, which didn't even have a (complete?) video. Context: The previous world record was over an hour. I would check what the correct previous time was, but I can't figure out what any of the labels are supposed to say.

I already wrote them a mail saying that they should revert it as soon as possible, because the site is completely unusable, and that they should consider that there are people who don't like being blocked from doing anything just because it's April again. Hopefully they made a backup recently, because they might as well reset to yesterday's data.

Anybody know of a good and affordable label printer that does sticky labels?

It’s crazy that banks don’t have the technology to provide properly redacted bank statements. Will have to remove the labels of 13 pages of transactions by hand.

I need to make an app that can scan addresses from labels of parcels, and converts into map route. Where do I start about the recognising of address? I’m lost. Any pointers would be helpful.

I used to hate the tediousness of "busy work" e.g. changing labels in forms or running unit test procedures. But damn does it make the day go by quicker. I missed having something (anything) to do.

Is it "goto" still a thing?
Ran today into a 1k lines haywire method which calls itself (not recursive) with "goto" on labels within it. A little hell.

I need to pick one terminology for shipping so I don’t forget my function names, css classes and labels.

I’ve used a mix of “Shipping”, “postage” and “delivery” and now I’m confused :-/

Around the web and within the CSS Working Group, there has been some discussion about whether we should specify a version of CSS — perhaps naming it CSS4.

I think there is some value in grouping a bunch of specs into tidy version labels like "CSS4". It's much easier for me to ask "does this browser support CSS4?" than it is to ask "does this browser support CSS Color Level 3, CSS Namespaces, Selectors Level 3, etc."

Also, as a developer, if there were a group of specs known as CSS4 gaining traction on the web, I'd know that I need to be well-versed in each included spec, as opposed to just trying to become more fluent in different specs as I come across them in my daily work or research.

Your opinion?

Labels: HEAD, ->, master
ARC-47

Hmmm. Is that a Trouble SHOOTING commit?