I just remembered the first time I set up a Linux-Server. It was a simple Apache webserver at my first internship anf I didnt have a clue about literally anything.

My mentor guided me through and gave me literal step-by-step instructions (alright, now type... and now type...).

At the end he told me "OK, now run 'sudo rm -rf /*' to finish setting up". Me, being the naive and clueless motherfucker I am, happily nuked the everloving shit out of my newly setup server. I was like "Alright, WTF just happened??" He then told me "Now that you know how it works, do the entire thing again all by yourself. And you just learned an important lesson: NEVER exexute commands you dont know what theyre doing". I really did learn a lot on that day and still follow that lesson :D

The intern learned a great lesson today...

"Turn it off and on again."

Great for Wi-Fi routers and office appliances.

Life support, not so much.

So a friend of Mine asked me to check their Mail server because some emails got lost. Or had a funny signature.

Mails were sent from outlook so ok let's do this.

I go create a dummy account, and send/receive a few emails. All were coming in except one and some had a link appended. The link was randomly generated and was always some kind of referral.

Ok this this let's check the Mail Server.

Nothing.

Let's check the mail header. Nothing.

Face -> wall

Fml I want to cry.

Now I want to search for a pattern and write a script which sends a bunch of mails on my laptop.
Fuck this : no WLAN and no LAN Ports available. Fine let's hotspot the phone and send a few fucking mails.

Guess what? Fucking cockmagic, no funny mails appear!

At that moment I went out and was like chainsmoking 5 cigarettes.

BAM!

It hit me! A feeling like a unicorn vomiting rainbows all over my face.

I go check their firewall. Shit redirected all email ports from within the network to another server.

Yay nobody got credentials because nobody new it existed. Damn boy.

Hook on to the hostmachine power down the vm, start and hack yourself a root account before shit boots. Luckily I just forgot the credentials to a testvm some time ago so I know that shit. Lesson learned: fucking learn from your mistakes, might be useful sometimes!

Ok fucker what in the world are you doing.

Do some terminal magic and see that it listens on the email ports.

Holy cockriders of the galaxy.

Turns out their former it guy made a script which caught all mails from the server and injected all kind of bullshit and then sent them to real Webserver. And the reason why some mails weren't received was said guy was too dumb to implement Unicode and some mails just broke his script.

That fucker even implented an API to pull all those bullshit refs.

I know your name "Matthias" and I know where you live and what you've done... And to fuck you back for that misery I took your accounts and since you used the same fucking password for everything I took your mail, Facebook and steam account too.

Git gut shithead! You better get a lawyer

Dear me,

We have noticed you uploaded files to a public github with your API keys in plaintext.

Please proceed to bang head against desk until you have learned your lesson.

Sincerely me.

Boss: Who knows VB?
Me: I once wrote a calculator
Boss: Good enough! You will edit the companies biggest VB Application.

Lesson learned. When your Boss asks if you know a programming language you do not really know, you are like John Snow: Know nothing

Funny story about the first time two of my servers got hacked. The fun part is how I noticed it.
So I purchased two new vps's for proxy server goals and thought like 'I can setup fail2ban tomorrow, I'll be fine.'

Next day I wanted to install NginX so I ran the command and it said that port 80 was already in use!

I was sitting there like no that's not possible I didn't install any server software yet. So I thought 'this can't be possible' but I ran 'pidof apache2' just to confirm. It actually returned a PID! It was a barebones Debian install so I was sure it was not installed yet by ME. Checked the auth logs and noticed that an IP address had done a huge brute force attack and managed to gain root access. Simply reinstalled debian and I put fail2ban on it RIGHT AWAY.

Checked about two seconds later if anyone tried to login again (iptables -L and keep in mind that fail2ban's default config needs six failed attempts within I think five minutes to ban an ip) and I already saw that around 8-10 addresses were banned.

Was pretty shaken up but damn I learned my lesson!

Second semester

Java - OOP Course

We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone

Neat shit

And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.

BUT

Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.

A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.

Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.

3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.

So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.

I loaded that.

The bug is back.

But

REPRODUCIBLE.

OMG.

So I started setting up breakpoints.

And guess what the issue was.

FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS

(Basically the calculations were not as expected)

Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.

Most satisfying night yet.

Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.

Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

Spending 5 years at University with a friend....uh???

Let me explain...

I have a friend. A very good friend I can say. I know him since 18 years but I started being everyday with him at the beginning of my "University's journey".

And when I say everyday, I am not joking...every lesson, every exam, every project...

The problem is that he is one of the smartest person I have ever met in the "scientific field". So? He is also unable to say that he doesn't understand something. He is unable to say the he is wrong or to admit that someone else is better then him.

Let just say that he is not good in "relating to other people".

I am very smart too and suddenly he started to fail where instead i was doing good. Jealousy, anger. Every occasion to point out my errors. Every occasion to say to the others that I am stupid and he is smart.

But I know him and I am not like him. So I continued to stay with him, work with him and also going out with him. Because he is my friend.

And you know what? After 5 years he started to be more "human". I learned so much from him and he learned to be respectful and humble.

It was a very stressful period but thanks to that I know that I can be strong and work hard also when someone try to stop me. I am not afraid to say my opinion just because someone is yelling at me. And I know that I can go over stupid judgements and still work good as a team member.

That's it.

Be respectful. Be patient but defend your opinions. Trust yourself but listen and learn from everyone. And if sometime you fail, remember that it's normal. No one is perfect. No one can be perfect alone.

I hope that this rant can help someone else.

Good week to all of you.

Had to wake four people up at 2 am to fix a crashing service.

10/10 would deploy to production on Friday night again.

Saying yes to people who want a website for $100.

I've learned my lesson, all brand new websites now start at $1000.

Lesson learned: Ask the company to see a sample of their code before accepting the position.

Life lesson learned:

If your girlfriend asks you what SO means, it's "Significant Other",

NOT StackOverflow.

A few years ago:

In the process of transferring MySQL data to a new disk, I accidentally rm'ed the actual MySQL directory, instead of the symlink that I had previously set up for it.

My guts felt like dropping through to the floor.

In a panic, I asked my colleague: "What did those databases contain?"

C: "Raw data of load tests that were made last week."

Me: "Oh.. does that mean that they aren't needed anymore?"

C: "They already got the results, but might need to refer to the raw data later... why?"

Me: "Uh, I accidentally deleted all the MySQL files... I'm in Big Trouble, aren't I?"

C: "Hmm... with any luck, they might forget that the data even exists. I got your back on this one, just in case."

Luck was indeed on my side, as nobody ever asked about the data again.

fellow from the team was asked to do the estimate by manager - he said 2 weeks

then manager asked what if we add one more developer - he said, again 2 weeks and maybe add day or two

I was asked same question without knowing that they already asked fellow from the team same question - I said around two weeks, maybe day or two more! XD

as manager was confused and not satisfied with the estimates, goes to our team leader with the same questions - team leader said - 2 and half weeks and if you add one more dev to it, 3 weeks minimum

we didn't know that all of us were asked as manager did that behind our backs, in the end manager learned lesson in greed as we got to stick to team leaders estimate!

also that was very rude of underestimating someone's ability, same manager did had personal bias and frequently mocked us, for example when we said that that we will implement ML for cropping images at the right place (ie. crop part of the image where the face is) on the backend. Response was something like: 'You guys will do the ML? Are you shitting me? You're not /insert FANG company/!'

best team win ever!

second best team win ever is when whole team left the company in matter of weeks

So yeah, the name change is done. Me making a joke out of being called a code slut clearly backfired and people just started calling me a slut or inferring I was a slut or something unsavory because of an online username. Lesson learned. A few lessons, in fact.

Anyway thanks for allowing the name change @dfox and @trogus. Now, back to ranting.

we had this guy once, who we gave access to our private repo. everything's all good until we noticed that our amazon bill was USD 8,000+!!! we found out that lots of servers got created and that's bec. this guy forked our private repo and his fork was a public one. our keys were still not in .env files and were part of the commit so some bot got hold of it and accessed our amazon account. we suspected that the servers were used for bitcoin mining. anyway guy was fired on the spot and we also learned our lesson to keep keys out of repos.

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

I get a call: "Hey the site is down. Fix it!"
Worked on my workstation, not on my phone => DNS issue.

Local cache: "All OK"
ISP's DNS: "No record"
Google DNS: "Server error"
MXToolbox: "All OK"
CloudFlare DNS: "Domain? What domain?"

After a day of fucking around with configs and wanting to strangle the customer support guy, I just started pressing buttons, until suddenly, it worked. Turns out I'd accidentally enabled DNSSEC on a domain, that wasn't configured for it.

Lesson learned: There is no official DNS error code for "DNSSEC failed somewhere upstream". If you're lucky, you might get something useful out of the authoritative server, but apparently not on Mondays.

You know what I realized we should always say no for demo driven application development.

We should always ask for enough time do a proper development and if its not enough, shouldn’t write a single line.

Because once we deliver a working demo. Its release ready for them because its FUCKING WORKING..

And trying to explain why this is just a demo and cant be put to production is even bigger pain in the ass than saying no in the beginning.

LESSON LEARNED .

I still miss my college days. Our crappy IT Dept restricted internet usage on campus. Each student used to get 10 GB of internet data and they used Cyberoam for login (without HTTPS). 10 GB was so less (at least for me).

Now, thanks to CS50, I learned that HTTP was not secure and somehow you can access login credentials. I spent a night figuring things out and then bam!! Wireshark!!!!

I went to the Central Library and connected using Wireshark. Within a matter of minutes, I got more than 30 user ids and passwords. One of them belonged to a Professor. And guess what, it had unlimited data usage with multiple logins. I felt like I was a millionaire. On my farewell, I calculated how much data I used. It was in TBs.

Lesson: Always secure your URLs.

Spent 4 hours today working on a monitor that wasn't working. someone had put by their garbage can in the rain. I dried it out for about 2 weeks before plugging it in. It turned on but when I plugged in the DVI, it did nothing.

Today, I pulled the ENTIRE thing apart because either I could find out what was wrong, or all is lost anyways. Who knows what the rain could do to it?

With no luck, I did a quick search online about the model and found that this one just had some defective firmware (Who knew monitors had filmware??) I installed it, ran it, it took about 20 seconds and it worked!

Lesson learned once again: google is your friend

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

Today I told my lead developer that I liked star wars episode 8.

I got grilled pretty hard.

Like, I can drop a db and the motherfucker ain't gon give a fuck. But God forbid a mofocka likes episode 8.

That is a big no no to him.

Manager had told me that I should keep that opinion of the movie to myself.

Lesson learned.

This one time I aliased a coworkers 'sudo' with 'sl' (sl shows a train running across the screen)

And then I removed him from the sudoers group and sudoers list.

I then magnified his screen 200%

Changed his background to a shitty narwhal.

And then full screened a terminal with the 'sl' train stuck in a while loop.

You can't control c out of the terminal.

He solved the first part really quickly, fixing the full screened terminal and exiting out of it, magnification and the background.

But took him 4 days to find that I had fucked up his sudo. Apparently, he didn't need to use sudo in those 4days. It wasn't until he mentioned it out of the blue.

How did he find out about it? He was running an important script that had sudo in it. When he ran the script a train would pop up and his script would terminate early.

He came to me and cursed me to Satan's anus. He then asked me to fix it, but then changed his mind and said that he'd do it himself. After a while he couldn't figure out what I had done.

I walked him through it. Told him that he had to go to his .bashrc file and remove the alias.

Later he comes back to me and curses me to the 12th circle of hell. He found that he was no longer a sudoer. At this point he gave me access to his computer and told me to reverse everything that I had done.
Added him back into the sudoers group and called it a day.

Lesson to be learned? Don't leave your machine unlocked.

Recruiter: are you interested in a client side java role?

Me: yes, here is my client side resume please submit me

Recruiter: sorry the hiring manager said they are looking for more of a back-end engineer

Me: you told me it was a client side role, please resubmit me with my back-end geared resume

Recruiter: yes that's correct, it's client side, we'll keep you in mind for the future but you should know there is a difference between mobile devs and web devs

Me: what you just said is not relevant to this conversation. I would be happy to discuss the diff between front-end and back-end, client vs server, etc.

Recruiter: I'm just relaying what the hiring manager is saying to me

Me: your [lack of] ability to relay technical information is quite apparent :/

*lesson learned*: interview recruiters before they start interviewing me

Unbelievable waste of time, how do these people even make a living? FML!

A recent project actually taught me how HORRIBLY STUPID it is to store large bodies of text in a SQL Server database. There were millions of records with pages of compressed text each.

More and more text records pile on every single day. Needless to say it was becoming super slow and backups were taking WAY too long.

After refactoring them out as compressed files to disk storage (I love you, micro-services) and dropping them completely from the database, the backup size went from 90gb to 3gb!

It's not every day you get to see a dramatic result like that from a refactor.

Lesson learned, and yes it was quite cool.

Ok so the ex boyfriend (let's call him Joe) of a friend of mine is a dumbass

He wanted to hack her phone, or whatever, so hired someone on telegram to do it. He asked her phone number and 200€.

After actually giving him the money this guy sent a ransom asking for 2k to not turn Joe in.

Joe learned a lesson.

At work for a bank, I changed the target SQL Server in my SSIS project and arbitrarily, all my custom-coded scripts were erased!!

I didn't take backups and I spent a week coding them! Fuuuuuuuuuckkkkk 😠

Ended up rewriting them.

I learned my lesson... 😥

Me in 2018 : I'll code xLearno.com all on my own!
.
.
.
Me in 2019 : xLearno.com is a team of 5 🎉
.
.
.
Just a quick lesson that I learned in my entrepreneurship career, "You want to go fast, go alone! You want to go far, go together 😍"

Lesson learned from wk111:

We gotta get out of the fucking house more guys and girls!

Go code on a fucking beach or a park or something. Drink some beers and wine. Smoke a couple of joints with good friends.

Some years back I was working in a project that essentially dealt with all things related to foreigners and foreign affairs in Switzerland. You could manage entry visas, work permits, citizenship, international warrants, Interpol requests, etc.

One of the test managers (from client side - i.e. the government) was once manually "testing" and mixed up the production and test instance, to both of which he was logged in at the time.
The test case then ended up setting up an entry ban against himself, as he used his own name for testing...

Next time he returned from vacation the border control at the airport were like "Uhm, Sir, we can't let you into the country. Please come with us." :D :D

(He managed to clear that up in end, I dare say, though, that he learned his lesson.)

Things I have learned:

-NEVER trust a group of people not to reply all to a large email
-NEVER trust a group of people not to reply to a group text

Screenshot is from yesterday, and violates my second lesson learned (Not my group text, not my fault)

TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!

*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*

But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎

But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?

*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?

*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!

*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*

Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?

*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.

*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<

*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...

Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.

Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!

Boss: Can you modify the prototype, so that I can show it off to the customers who will visit?
Me: Sure, when do you need it?
Boss: In two hours.
Lesson learned: Always have a branch in your git with a working demo.

N e v e r, fucking e v e r chmod/ chown permissions recursive on the linux /etc folder❗

I did yesterday (, because I am fucking dumb and know little about linux systems) and got the result today. My whole mailserver wasn't working.
After fucking tons of googling and searching and log-digging I found that postfix and opendkim require specific permissions on their respective folders and files.

After changing a fucking amount of permissions on those fucking files the fucking mailserver worked and I can send and receive mails, now. 😤😤😤

What a torture. Lesson learned. Never will repeat this mistake.

Fucking teammate who did not know how to read/write a simple class diagram.
We warned him that he have to study or we just kick his fucking ass out of the team.

He just did nothing. When we had meetings he just stayed at home pretending to have an heart issue needing surgery.
After just 2-3 days he was tagged on FB in a photo shooted a few days earlier where he was riding a bike for a competition.

He skipped another scheduled-a-fucking-week-before meeting saying that he was on a surprise trip, when I called him 5 minutes before meeting start.

In the end we just kick him out because he did nothing. He went to professor talking about some relationship problem in the team and asked him if he could continue the project by himself just forking the ours.

Professor said HELL NO SON OF A BITCH.

But our team learned a precious lesson : choose your team carefully.

I learned a valuable lesson today about the life of a manager. I’m not a manager, but I am a senior level dev.

Today I was told there wasn’t room on the new team for 1 person, and I had pick that last team member. I had to choose between a friend who really isn’t cut out to be a dev and a non friend who is a better dev.

I talked through my reasoning and ultimately chose to put the friends job in jeopardy. They told me that I had solid leadership traits for being able to separate my emotions from my decision making. But I felt like a piece of shit.

I cried back at my desk. The friend doesn’t know yet and I can’t tell them. Is this what execs feel when they have to let people go?

FUCKING WAITING FOR PEOPLE FUCKED ME OVER AGAIN. WHO WOULD HAVE FUCKING GUESSED?!

I just had my worst hackathon so far and need to puke my whole toxic hatred, the rant will be full of hate so be warned. (I just don't want to let it go on my girlfriend, but I need to shout it out loud somewhere)

First of all, it is alright to be a beginner at a hackathon. It is also alright to not know that much about coding and want to learn. But it is not alright to lie about your skill, pretend to be a senior programmer and waste my fucking time.

Don't even fucking dare to say your are "fit" in Android development if you just have done some foobar tutorial on YouTube, don't even bother to read the document and have literally non existent knowledge about computer science.

Why the fucking hell do you need to pretend to be a seasoned programmer if you are just a bloody beginner? I mean you are in a hackathon full of computer nerds so soon or later your impostor ass will be debunked so what is the point?

And the other guy. Why the fucking hell did.'t you say that you just begin Python for 3 months? You are not a fucking developer if you just started coding for 3 fucking months. Learn some fucking coding before starting with machine learning you fucking punk ass bitch script kiddie.

Alright, maybe I was too naive to not check my teammates' background before make a team with them. Fuck me and my fucking stupid ass. My dumb ass monkey brain fell for big mouths, I deserved the headache right now and none less.

Lesson learned!

You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.

Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.

Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.

Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.

Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.

I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^

Yesterday I spent some time on the meta site for dba.stackexchange.com and found this one guy with 1 rep raging about how his questions aren't getting answered and how is answers are the best etc...

"I have 17 years of experience as a dba, blah, blah, blah, my answers are correct, blah, blah"

He got pretty destroyed by the mods and other users about how shit his answers were and how they weren't factually correct etc...

This just continues to show that no matter how much experience you have you won't always be right.

Same goes for my senior at work, he has 10 years more experience than me (I have 2) and he still asks for my point of view and help without being a dick about it.

I hope we'll all keep being nice people unlike that Stackexchange guy...

Today I learned the hard way that losing your app's key store means no more updating , bug fixing , performance boosting , features adding ...
The app had like 5k downloads on the play store ..
Lost the key when one of my hard drives burned ..
Lesson of the day : keep your keys safe .
*trying to stay strong*

#1 life lesson I learned from coding?

Maybe not coding specifically, but I learned the difference between problem solving and solution finding.
Its helped me in a lot of areas of my life. Made friends and made enemies.

Lesson Learned

I need to make a confession about my terribly unprofessional project I made. Around two years ago I got thrown for the first time into back end development - I had to work on the project alone. As a very smart man I basically exposed our SMTP server as a nice and very flexible API.

Fortunately it was, by the design, a very short-lived project, taken down from the web completely and for good after around 2 months. I'm still happy I had more luck than brains and nobody used our server as a spam sending service in our name and I have learned a valuable and relatively cheap lesson in security this way.

Today I learned a lesson from corporate survival 101.

The difference between get it done vs get it right.

Boss, manager always want to get it done, while developers always want to get it right, most of the time. If you don't listen to your boss, manager and insist get it right, will eventually cost your job. I saw many get it done code, either the dev moves to another team or already left. They avoid their own code forever.

Perhaps be a good student, not the smart student is a good way to survive. Thought????

Sometimes I am so motivated .Today I tried coding in car .(I was in backseat)
20 min: Damn,my eyes hurt😞
40 min: Why do I feel dizzy😵
50 min : Oooh...I feel like puking.🤢
51 min : Dad......Stop the caaa....
Nothing I'm done
Lesson learned

Men. Live with it.

(Stupid mistakes that kept me from sleeping.. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Lesson learned: Sleep.)

Using a copyrighted image on a website not knowing it was copyrighted. That was stupid and humbling. So caught up in the roots lost sight of the leaves.

Lesson learned: Assume nothing, question everything.

This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.

Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.

Pro tip:

Make sure you can RECOVER from your backups.

It's all well and good backing this and that up, but make sure that when the shit really hits the fan you can recover.

I've now 4 days into recovering a raspberry pi that ran:
Pi-hole
Snort
DHCP
VSFTP
Logwatch
Splunk forwarder
Grafana

And serveral other things... I've learnt my lesson

I think my server got hacked, yesterday I made a new server on scaleway for the sake of testing I made a user called dev, with password dev. Forgot to change password before I went to bed.

Logged in today to find that load is 5x.x and this (image) in my crontab

Note to self: You are a disgrace, who the hell uses 'dev' as password for ssh on port 22 -_-

Greatest lesson I learned from myself. Work for yourself. Create your own business while you are working. Be your own boss. Don't rely in employment alone.

I got laid off today. My boss business is a digital agency. Our client stopped working with several agencies including us because of an order from their mother company to only use 1 agency. My boss has no choice but to let me go.

Even if you got the skills and you're doing good in your work, these things can happen. It is beyond our control. I like my company and my boss but reality hits hard. I thought I will be with this company for a very very long time. I want to settle here and build my business but still work together with my boss. I have so many plans that instantly disappeared.

Oh well just be strong and move on. Happy job hunting to me again. Maybe this is God's plan to teach me some things. For me to create my own business seriously while working.

I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

I should just quit. I am not paid enough to deal with this pissing contest.
Reviewer:
Need to add instructions (on readme) for installing pnmp, or if possible, have the top-level npm i install it (lol).
Also, it looks like we are no longer using lerna? If that's right, let's remove the dependency; its dependencies give some security audit messages at install.
Me:
it's good enough for now. Added a new ticket to resolve package manager confusions. (Migrate to pnpm workspaces)
Reviewer:
I will probably be responsible for automating deployment of this (I deployed the webapp on cloudflare pages and there is no work that needs to be done. "automating deployment" literally means replacing npm with pnpm). I disagree that it's good enough for now.

Imagine all readmes on github document how to install yarn/pnpm.

Lesson learned:
If you think an OOP static site developer can't handle modern JS framework, you are probably right.

Fucking brilliant. Paused my Ubuntu VM in VMWare. Unpaused it, the whole file system is corrupted.

There goes my 2 hours of customization. Lesson learned.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.

You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.

Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.

Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.

I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.

It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.

Mining-Noob-Exp. #1

Just received some ordered ASIC miner from Bitmain. I'm very excited wether I'll reach the ROI or just bought some expensive heaters.

Lesson learned: Don't forget about possible (high) import taxes and fees in your calculations. 😐

Time to piss of my landlord who is paying the electricity bill. 👺

So I read this morning about some web teacher. Here is my story:
In high school I had a teacher who was "THE GOTO WEB GUY", at least that was what other theachers thought. Here is what reallity looked liked in a lesson of his:
He comes up with some ancient example he just found on some tutorials page and he just remembered bits of how to do it. So when he got stuck he fired up a google search. When a student had a question he fired up a google search. Because he didn't know shit. Of course you cannot know everything but he was so cocky about his skills that it really annoyed me. Best part? He sold web sites (joomla) where his greates achievment was to change the color of the template. Everything he teached in that semester had I already learned through selfteaching and tutorials in an evening.

#1 life lesson learned from coding:
Don't work on projects for the government or any authority EVER!

New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.

I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.

And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.

And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.

For fuck sake Facebook test your shit before you update!
Lesson learned, never update Facebook pods ... or even better never use Faceshit!

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

My computer science class in school is learning c# so slowly that last year it took 3 weeks for them to learn what an integer is.
I learned most of the language on a vacation last year and now I don't show up for class.
and actually, my teacher doesn't mind it, she encourages me about learning more and doing projects.
best teacher I've had so far.

recently the class teacher noticed me when I go home instead of going to class and he made me come to every lesson. Really frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

The biggest lesson I learned in Frontend Dev is: listen to users, not clients.

There are so many rants about stupid ass clients on here, and when you let clients treat you like that, it's kind of your own fault. Look at how people use your interfaces and you will immediately see what's bullshit about them. When you have user behavior as an argument basis, clients will listen to you.

Worst fight?

Stubborner against stubbornest.

About a focking fact that was trivially true or false. Fun fact: it didn't matter anyway.

Boy, did we raise our voices and attract the attention of everybody in the room. Lesson learned.

Lesson learned: if you're going to derive a class in c++, make sure to declare a virtual destructor on the base class!

I just fixed (one of...) the massive memory leaks in my damn project.

Pictured: the strings in a derived class actually getting freed!

My cat decided to jump on the PC at 5 AM.

Lesson learned: Never going to put my PC on the desk again.

Lesson learned: never drink during programming

Once upon a time, an IT major named adamyeti thought it was a good idea to work on projects directly off of a flash drive with no backup. Halfway through a large ASP.NET project, the drive failed. I fumbled through a free drive recovery tool, but all of the data was scrambled and corrupted.

I ended up having to start from scratch on the project, but I learned my lesson for sure.

A lesson I learned. Clients can't separate design from functionality. They will piss and main about a feature not working right when what they really mean is the aesthetic is not to their liking.

Never buy crappy, consumer-grade SSDs for use in production servers/RAIDs. This might sound obvious but at the company I used to work for, through a series of bad decisions by management and cheapness, we ended up with the cheapest consumer SSDs you can imagine powering all of our storage.

This turned into a nightmare spanning years of failed hard drives and a continues cycle of ridiculousness. Drive failed after a few days, gets taken out, sent back to manufacturer and then replaced with another equally crappy drive destined to fail within days/weeks.

Our ops people were going to the data center multiple times per week to replace failed drives. Lesson I learned: cheaping out on system-critical hardware and software can have long standing consequences and in the end usually doesn't end up actually saving money when you account for time employees have to spend dealing with issues that result from it.

I'm the kind of person that says "Fuck python, worst language, fuck C#, Java, Golang", assembly and C are superior.

But I have learned my lesson; Yesterday I learned enough C# to be able to make a windows app that connects to a another app via sockets. I tried first to do it with C++ but my app looked like shit and took me about a whole day to make. Then I tried with C#, got the App working on an hour, now I'm delighted with C#. I guess I have to be open-minded.

*knock knock*

Race condition!

Who's there ?

And thaaaat's the lesson i learned today after I spent two hours staring at code, to find out that the solution was just moving an unlock_mutex() a few lines down.

Lesson learned the hard way: Remember your SSH Ports or write them down...

On the bright side of things, i had backups this time! Tyy DigitalOcean :)

a lesson that I learned the hard way: Don't test a code or a library on your master branche, in other words: don't shit where you eat.

Make. Fucking. Backups...

I had to find a MailChimp sync plugin for a webshop and thought I found a good one that synced one way (webshop to MailChimp).

I figured, meh, what could go wrong? So I installed it, ran it...and somehow lost around 4000 mailinglist receipients because they were not in the webshop.

Turns out it adds the registered users in the webshop, but also removes entries that are not! Needless to say, I had some explaining to do and was only able to recover about 3000 addresses from a previously sent campaign.

Customer was not happy, neither was my boss, very important lesson learned...

No wonder my Python code was broken. I called the super function of the wrong ancestor 🙄 Lesson learned: run the tests after every functional change, no matter how trivial it might seem.

Just spent an entire night eaning up my codebase...

I optimized some of the functions got rid of unnecessary global variables and changed up the whole file hirearchy so it would be easier to read. After spending all night doing this I went to run the program and for once it seemed everything worked right the first time! However a portion of my application that is supposed to happen at a certain date and time never would run. After spending all night comparing each and every line for what I changed versus my last commit I couldn't find the fallacy in my logic. Everything should still work like it did before. After spending more time looking for bugs I finally realized I didn't break anything when I switched over to this new structure it was the old code that was broken. I went through the old code and after some debugging eventually found the culprit an extra continue statement that prevented my loop from fully executing. Lesson learned sometimes the biggest bugs can spawn from one line of code.

Just had an interview, but since I am a smart ass I decide that half an hour notice before the interview is OK after working the whole day with queues, docker & php multithreading, so we start an interview over Skype and my persona was able to duck up how simple joins work as well as function which is supposed to return the sum of even numbers between 2 and provided argument... I was off by 2..

Lesson learned never get in an interview after a whole day of mindfuckery .. Never

!rant

I've always been kinda lazy about backups and such, thinking it wouldn't be so bad, and "I have my most important stuff on Dropbox".

Just now, for some reason one of my hard drives just stopped for a bit, and I couldn't do anything with it anymore. Luckily it went away after restarting my pc, but it scared the shit out of me, as I almost lost 500 gigs worth of music, films, documents, etc...

This made me really think about the whole backup thing, and I'm creating a disk image as I type this. The time that I spend on that will be much less then the time it'll cost to recover everything. Lesson learned ^^'

Stupid fucking idiot startup asshole hired me as an intern. Promised me the money after the work is done. We were friendly during the internship. The work is done and now it's been a week and still no money yet. He's saying it'll take some time. To beat you to shit it'll take some time you asshole!

Lesson learned: Never ever be friendly with the guy who hires you. Like never!!

Also money later isn't a good thing.

<insert bear grylls meme>
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Lesson learned: take measures before buying parts

Me : *testing json output on pc by sending items with GET*
App : *app crashing with only recyclerview error*
Me : *debugging the app for 2 hours and testing ways to do another adaptor *
Me : fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu... I used POST to get the data on app and forgot to change $_GET $_POST
Lesson learned. Always check the input first
Im ashame of my self #crysinthecorner

I have the same problem as @linuxxx does. Buying things when I really don't need to.

I went to a mall with a friend today because his headset was literally falling apart. We both bought new headsets. Great.

Lesson learned: Don't leave your house unless necessary.

This is why you should make a knowledge database and never trust the internet to keep things

Two quality rants with a lot of useful information I favorited are missing, surely because their authors removed their account

Lesson learned. One more resolution to apply for 2021

At the age of 10 I got interest in ''changing computer'' things. I started to watch over the shoulder (I don't know if you can say that in English ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) of my dad. He programmed I2C and other microcontroller.
I started with little batch files and Visual Basic. I think we all know the ''Virus'' with shutdown 😂
At school in the computer lesson we learned a few other languages. I was the only one who learned these languages at home too. The biggest problem is that you think ''I learn at school and at home I can play games''.
Some day I started to learn PHP and Java at home. I came to Java with Minecraft. Yes, Minecraft. You can learn so many things (like the structure of a network packages from the server) and you can visualize everything with blocks.
Since the professional colleague we learn C# and Python which I use in some projects at home too, for example for the rasperrypi.
Now I'm 17 and I can C#, Visual Basic, PHP, JS, Python, JS and HTML

I know most of you know this, but after having dealt with both recruiters and real companies I can safely say that recruiters are of no practical value.

I've wasted countless months of my life interacting with recruiters and getting nothing out of them. To me it seems they're only after fluffing their client base.
The only time I got a job was through the real companies themselves.

Now I have learned the lesson: stay away from recruiters.

Trying to resolve merge conflicts and you cant remember which changes are the ones you want to keep. Lesson learned, make sure your pull requests dont sit waiting for weeks while master is happily being worked on.

Lesson learned: never ask for VPN

sudo rm -rf *

Just started out on linux, learning the ins and outs. All I wanted to do was remove two directories. Thankfully it was a fresh install, didn't lose anything important.

A valuable lesson was learned that day. 😂

Dev lesson learned the hard way. Never rm -rf with wildcard arguments... If you think you're being clever it probably means you're about to mess up some shit.

#1 life lesson learned from coding: There are things I just can’t be good at no matter how hard I try.

Very important lesson I learned while working with Xcode:
Always have multiple major versions installed and ready to be used.

Xcode 9 can't convert old Swift 2.2 project to Swift 4 and can't open the "old" project? Xcode 7 can help you.

Xcode 9 crashes randomly while moving top level packages? Xcode 8 can help you.

Yeah, always funny to find new bugs in Xcode...

Lesson Learned: Don't ever be so ambitious that you are no longer realistic about your abilities. I remember when I started out, I would give unbelievably short TTC estimates for medium/hard tasks that would undoubtedly take some time.

One crucial lesson I learned while diving into programming:

Use various learning resources. Everyone explains things a little different.

You can understand stuff much easier.

This temporary hack will just temporarily fix this problem. We will come back and actually fix the problem later.

We never come back to fix it later. This shitty hack I made in less than a day that fixed the problem for the day "fixed" the problem for the next year.

Lesson learned that temporary structures and side projects will be there forever. Make them right the first time.

Lesson learned: Browsers won't not try to draw huge images. They'll just...

Newer Dev here. Just recently started in a position as a developer. I'm tasked with consolidating our monitoring systems into one cohesive display. After lumping together all the indexes and helping build a custom API I'm now working on front end. Front end is easy, I've done it before. Should be no problem. I was wrong. I spent a whole day fiddling with a React dynamic table and the CSS to format it. Today, I stumble upon the react-table component. Got the results I was looking for in less than 2 hours. I'm convinced that this was a lesson better learned early on.

Learned an important lesson today- Never be sentimental towards your code.
The only thing common in all clients is the habit of changing their requirements, how sure they are about the unsurity of what they want. And if you are sentimental towards the code you write, about a difficult algorithm you implemented you will be in a mess

Business Continuity / DR 101...
How could GitLab go down? A deleted directory? What!
A tired sysadmin should not be able to cause this much damage.
Did they have a TESTED dr plan? An untested plan is no plan. An untested plan does not count. An untested plan is an invitation to what occurred.
That the backups did not work does not cut it - sorry GitLab. Thorough testing is required before a disruptive event.
Did they do a thorough risk assessment?
We call this a 'lesson learned' in my BC/DR profession. Everyone please learn by it.
I hope GitLab is ok.

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

Biggest lesson learned for me was believing some guy wearing a comb over & a fake tan who sounds like a car salesman. He claimed selling web app services to companies was no different than selling cars. It turns out that a lot of investors were not too happy that the company went under (b4 anything was released) b/c the CEO/CFO somehow managed to burn several million dollars on first class flights, cruises, 5 star restaurants, a luxury company car (for himself), hotels, etc.,. oh and even some fake tans!

Worst part about all that he wasn't even worth sueing because he had no money after all that. He even signed the 'company' car over to one of his kids!

Rant at myself for being a moron.

Manually tried moving some InnoDB stuff around on a local server and corrupted a load of databases, with no backups since June 28th. Spent all day yesterday trying to recover with no luck 😑

Lesson learned: need to backup databases more regularly. Any good tools?

Oh boy, converting the whole codebase from vb.net to c#

Pain point 1: CType all over the place (Convert.To*)
Pain point 2: almost everything is static!
Pain point 3: "I learned about DI just 3 months ago..."
Paint point 4: deployments ever happened by hand!

But I'm happy to be there because the guy who's running the thing is a very nice one and he's absolutely grateful for every bit of learning lesson I give him.

Becoming member of a political party.

I met a lot of smart people, had many great debates about different issues, yet most of all: I learned how dangerous group dynamics can be. (It's insane how fast Us-vs-Them-group-thinking can manifest itself.) I learned to reflect myself (the hard way) and that if I want to convince someone, rational arguments is not enough if you are a dick about it and that sometimes the how you say things is so much more powerful than the what.

Basically, I learned a valuable lesson on how (not) to communicate. I still profit from that on a daily basis in my work as a developer.

(On the other hand, the whole experience made me rather cynical about the state of the world at large.)

Never! ever! EVER!!! run sudo rm -fr * inside your home directory! Hard lesson learned on a Monday :(

P.S it was not intentional at all!

Older tech support story, but still a frusterating one.

Sister was running Windows 8.1 (ew) when Microsoft was ramming Windows 10 down everyone's throat.

Her laptop decided to update to Windows 10, and after waiting awhile, she decided to unplug the laptop's battery and power chord.

This did what you expected, corrupted her install, leading to a bootloop. I then got to deal with that to try and recover it.

Once I got into the recovery mode, it wanted her password to restore from a system image, guess what she forgot?

She tried her PIN, and gave up after a few attempts, and I got to reinstall Windows for her.

Lesson learned from this? If you're the IT person of the house, make sure that you have an account on all machines that you may administrate. That way you don't need to deal with this shit.

Run the tests before you commit, even if it was just a minor modification.

(Yep, I broke most of the tests by changing only a couple of lines. Lesson learned.)

I had my presentation early morning, it was 3am, and I was still up because the code was not compiling. Then showed up my roommate who had gone for party. Can't believe that he was the one, in the half drunk state, was able to find just a short typo,but not ME, EVEN THOUGH I HAD 3 CUPS OF COFFEE the same night. Lesson learned. Patience is a virtue. Blessed to have a nice roommate. :)
PS. It was a Matlab code for filtering the mentioned portion of an ECG Signal, and analysing the problem faced by the patient. Well, I was pretty sure to get arrhythmia if I couldn't complete the code by morning.

Have been playing the pirated version of Rust for 30+ hours with no issues.

Decide to buy the game and every fucking time the game turns into Chrome and consumes all my RAM forcing Windows to show the low on memory dialog.

Lesson learned I guess.

Plan plan and then plan again

Especially on a hardened server in an off-site facility.

If you fuck up your SSH then you will be in trouble.

Am I the only one who gets intimidated when shit its roof?

Yesterday, during crucial business hours, one of the major OMS db column type got overflowed. Caused around 30 mins downtime and then later, pool of all connections with high concurrent requests flushed down stream which caused thunder herd.

One by one.. all services went down; Fucking java service couldn't even start because of load..

This is the moment I fell in love with GoLang. We shard request using GoLang service, it just started and picked up the load beautifully..

At the end, it is around 6 millions business loss, but a good lesson learned :)

20 issues assigned to me this sprint with very vague titles and in the requirements it says "See *person name* for details"

Lesson learned: Never go on vacation during the spring planning meeting.

I spend all morning on trying to solve an Algo problem for upcoming interview practice (Euler #3) that comes down to implementing IsPrime.

I remember reading once how Sieve of Eratosthenes

Isa the right way to go do when I first started I wanted to use that.

Then I couldn't think of the right code though so I went with Brute Force (for all numbers upto X see X is divisible by it)

It actually worked but I wanted to just try the "right way".

It's way slower and actually ended up with the wrong answer...

But at this point I don't give a **** anymore.

I guess lesson learned... Use Brute Force first... Then optimise for a problem more elegant solution.

Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.

The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.

I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.

Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?

However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.

Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.

Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.

Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.

Lesson learned: Always use node LTS in production, library maintainers are lazy af.

Lesson learned: never fuck up with the python version that comes with a distro. I spent the whole day re-installing Linux Mint on a new partition and transferring home folder to the new partition. 😣😣😣

I'm an idiot 😥

I just asked a client if he wants a contact form instead of just writing down an email address on their contact page.

Now I'm trying to explain to him how building a full blown CRM is outside the scope the business website we agreed to build.

Lesson Learned: Never make suggestions.

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

So I wrote the script for the GAL in WinCupl for our project. I used the operators: ! for NOT, * for AND, + for OR

me: *writes code*
me: *compiles it*
compiler: error, unknown operation.
me: wtf but thats how its done, isnt it?
friend: u used the wrong operators. didnt u read the manual?
me: smh i didnt, i invented the syntax xD

lesson learned: always read manual first before writing it directly without knowing the syntax

So I'm sitting there in Android practice. I already have some experience with Android, so the exercises they make us do are quite easy for me. Nevertheless I start doing the exercises, when the teacher tells us that whoever implemented last week's exercise well gets a + point (and a pat on the back).

Implementing it well only means that you used a Model class for your Model (basic stuff). I raise my hand, hoping to get that sweet ++.
Teacher comes over. My laptop dies. Can't boot for shit. All the while I'm losing my shit. Then I remember that I have the code up on Github (I started using git for these small projects, to practice it). I showed the teacher my code on Github and the app on my phone (I debug from my phone because there is no way I can run an emulator on my laptop). I got the ++ and the teacher was delighted that someone was using Git, even though they didn't *have to*.

I definitely learned my lesson there. I'll be using Github for all of the small shitty projects we have from now on. My Github repo might look like garbage, but I will have peace of mind.

For me side projects have been things I'll make to do something that others will use. Some people call it innovation, some call it side business. But that's how i look at side projects. So the points below are more to do with entrepreneurial experiences.

1. If there are more people involved, ensure that there is work for everybody (also level of commitment is tested by how much they put in). Also have as varied set of skills as possible. So that areas are well defined in terms of scope of work and areas of expertise.
2. Put in some money. Money is super glue. It will ensure that you're committed to the thing. Things change when decent amount of money is involved. You're invested, as may be others.
3. Learn something as an intention. This has nothing to do with the learnings you'll get on the way. This one seems obvious, but nevertheless needs to be said.
4. Set timelines and deadlines. Ask someone else to check on whether you're keeping on to your deadlines or not.
5. Don't go live without proper testing.
6. Make something you feel strongly about. The path will be exciting and clear.
7. Talk to people to get their feedback on everything. You may not like what's told to you. Listen dispassionately. Absorb everything. Feel miserable. But listen and think about it after sleeping over it.
8. Continuation of above point. Talk to varied set of people in terms of backgrounds. You would be surprised as to how differently people think.
9. Ask for help when stuck. Kill your ego and be vulnerable.
10. Check out what's already available. What value are you adding. And make it!

An important lesson I learned:

When upskilling yourself and taking notes, make sure you do it on your personal laptop because when the time of contract termination arises, you will have to sign a waiver that you can't keep any of the data you saved on company infrastructure (including cloud). And then you lose all your notes and possibly knowledge. lol.

I find this concept so annoying. Even in college they said that anything you write down is property of the university.

Customer wants a place to list his products he sells through other sites. He doesn’t have much money, but he’s a referral from a reliable customer, so we arrange a payment plan. We agree on the details, including a place to post his wares.

Then he tells me he wants to post a few thousand items at a time. I decide to throw in a loading system I built for a previous project.

Then he can’t figure out how to add images. Add a way for him to upload them all as a single zip; no good.

Long story short, let myself get conned into developing a full-on Amazon import system that auto-detects several categories automatically AND imports the images. For no additional cost because I felt bad asking for more and we were working through a language barrier.

Third installment payment never comes.

Lesson learned.

Hidden pixel just scratched my finger while I was wiping the screen with my palm. Lesson successfully learned.

In person interview is normally less work than take home test.

Lesson learned.

Now i think Microsoft just want to use the win 10 users as testers.

After getting anniversary update windows started showing application not responding message for the FUCKING WINDOWS itself .
like if The OS itself is not responding shouldn't it just show BSOD rather than freezing?
Combined with the fact that it is almost impossible to go into recovery mode without the shift+restart , it just wasted a WHOLE DAY .
And my laptop(lenovo Z50-70) has pretty common hardware.

I learned my lesson and deferred Updates But for Some versions of windows That's not even an option.

I think my biggest issue is learning, I never really learned how to 'learn' like take notes or 'study' things. My method of learning is more akin to skimming books (not knowing a good way for me to take notes on it) and articles, while also just testing stuff like I'm throwing things at a wall till it sticks and I pick up a lesson from that after wasted hours of trial and error that might have been avoided with properly knowing how to learn.

I need to figure out how to properly note-take and learn and properly go through all the books I've 'read' but never really learned.

I did one thing really smart, schedule my vacation and tell them no access to computer. I also did a stupid thing. I told them 2weeks ahead. So for the next 2weeks I’m going to work double everyday. Lesson learn.

Me: What if I use navigation props in EF Core, what might go wrong?

*tests API call*
*120 seconds later finally got result*

Me: I better undo my changes and stick with 2 seconds response time O_O

Today I learned what actually happens if you don't close your database connections (because you forget) after you've used it. Feck all happens for the first 9 requests, and after that error 504 😂

Story:
Useful lesson I learned in a JavaScript book:

"Classes are abstract data types in the sense that they are a layer around the complexity (encapsulation). Their singular nature allows them to be reused without being rewritten everywhere.

A good analogy is thinking of classes as appliances; the complex circuitry and components that an appliance comprises of are made by different people than the abstract shell around these components, of which (another) team only needs to know which buttons to access which parts.
A class abstracts away the internal complexity (components) and only exposes a public interface (the buttons) that the user (yet another group, comparable to the consumer of the class) is going to use."

It reminds me of how Google uses the Facade pattern to only expose the search box and the button as its public interface and all the complex architecture is hidden away.

This helped clarify classes better for me.

I often ask my colleagues about their mess ups on the job and that, to me, says a lot about them.

See, we devs have this unspoken rule between us (in my opinion) that we don't discuss our screw-ups whether it's the resume, the interview or at the job.

Are you really telling me that you've worked 5+ years in software industry and never messed up ONCE? Or were/are you in a position where you screwing up wouldn't create a dent for your team processes?

I can trust a dev more, who admits their screw ups because I know they have learned a valuable lesson and they are accountable for their actions.

So I want to inform my internet provider of my new phone number, but I can't remember any of my login info for their web interface because I never used it. Luckily, they have a "forgot my username" function, where I submit my email address and get a confirmation that my username has been sent to me.

Yet, I just don't get said email. I try again, but no avail. So I just guess my username and use their "forgot password" form, which – hooray! – confirms it just sent my an email.

But I don't get any email. I retry, I retry after a day, but no automatic response. I remember a incident a few years back when I didn't get some automatically generated mails from a company and decide to contact their support if they could just reset my password manually.

Nearly a week passes.

Now I received the answer. I just don't have an account.

Lesson learned: Next time I'll just input garbage first to check if those forms are sane.

Not sure if many people heard about nltk in python but I'm currently using a lot now for research.

So one day I was doing multiprocessing while using lemmatizer in nltk, for those who don't know, lemmatizer is a thing that change the word to its base form. So it is like, ran to run, bitches to bitch.

Anyway, the nltk package, to ensure it does not take too much memory, here's what it does: it loads a data file, and once it is loaded and accessed for the first time, it breaks the data file into CSV file. And since I was doing multiprocessing, the data file is accessed for multiple time while it can only be loaded once, hence error happened.

Instead of changing my code, which I think is good already, I went to the package directory of nltk and directly changed the source code from there and now the code works perfectly.

I'm very proud of my self at the moment, this is a very good lesson that I've learned: always look for alternatives. And suck it, nltk.

rant && !rant

so my company just relocated to another part of the city.

it took about 2-3 months of searching for a space till the management found a suitable place. then about one more month for settling on the details (price, when we move, etc). then another month of just waiting for the space to be ready ...
the actual move took 1 day ... just one day ...

so the new place
- is better placed (for me at least)
- has lots of nice pubs / restaurants around for lunch or just relaxing after work
- has great views from every office
- lots of extra space for everyone
- ok people (so far) working at the other companies in the same space
- everyone seems so much more relaxed and easygoing and happy at the new place

But:
- the ac is still not working (32 degrees Celsius outside, and our office is facing the sun almost all day)
- for the first days we were lacking blinds at the windows
- office was full of little stinky bugs and they still keep showing up when we open up the windows

So, overall pretty great ... so (rant part??) WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO MOVE HERE ??? (both before it was decided to move, about 4 years at the old place, and after)

also, relating to the topic of the week ... nothing code related was learned, much was gained, and a life lesson was obtained: if you don't like something, just change it as soon as you can

I don't know if this is a joke or a miracle.
I was pooping myself on a toilet, and beside me was a bucket of water, then there was a mosquito in my palm where I held my phone. after I snap it, I accidentally threw my phone at the bucket of water.

First and foremost. It's not a water-proof phone, so don't expect that I'm rich. I immediately grab it and it's so wet.

After a while, it gets a lot of touch bug and plugged in headset which is full of water in it.

tried to wash it after I'm done pooping. shut the phone and wait until it's all dry.

After that, my phone went to teamwip(bootloader) telling me that the custom OS is missing.

After some coding, I checked my phone and it's all normal now.

Lesson Learned: never shit when you have a phone with you.

Story time... (Not long though)

My current employment status is quite strange. Basically I'm a freelancer. My former boss asked me to throw a half paid job and include three days worth of work for free just because it would be convenient.

When I told him no way - he was very uppset and offended and told me how disappointed he was.

Lesson learned: If you work for free and offer to "help" someone out, it will mostly lead to more queries for free of charge gigs. Don't do it like I did. Fuck that shit, thanks for appreciating my effort.

Managing a small team - poorly.
I was in charge of testing a legacy calculations engine together with two scientists, for whom I set up a python and interop environment so they could test the engine easily.

The two were very excited at the thought of validating the calculations and in fact found many bugs.

I was very supportive, told them to fix the bugs and gave them a pet on the back.

All three of us were happy the legacy engine is shaping up, that's until my boss heard of it, and boy did he grill me hard for it.

Turns out our efforts were highly unappreciated by the client, whose only request was that we test the engine and report the bugs. Not to fix them. My goodwill cost the company a lot of money, since the client paid by the hour, and was now due a refund. Crap.

It took me a year to finally understood the moral of the story. Which is to always respect the client's wishes and convey maximum transparency to him.

Lesson learned. As a newbie to git and vcs in general, always verify a rebase to make sure you didn't accidentally delete your last days work before force pushing and overwriting the company repository. Also, don't get into a situation where you need to do that in the first place.

Last night's cronjob was the first time I broke everything on the network via my automation. Fixed it before business hours of our clients.

At least I learned my lesson? 😀😁😂🤣😃😃😄😅

Learnt a lesson today:

Never try out new hotkeys in a SQL query editor window.

Or if you do, at least make sure it's not connected to anything important :)

I was trying out new hotkeys and accidentally executed a SQL deploy script to rename something in multiple stored procedures in a large system.

Thankfully - so I saw after my heart stopped - it was only our QA db so not too bad, just a couple of devs set back.

Who woulda thought ctrl-l would execute :O

How many here have friends that are like
Friend:"hey, heard so much good about Linux, can you install it for me?"
Me:"sure. What do you intend to use it for? "
Friend:"Facebook. Mostly Facebook. And some Instagram."
Me:"mmm k. I'd like to show case a bunch a distros and you pick your favourite."

One week later.
Friend:"OMG Linux sucks, I bought {game} but it cannot install..."

Lesson learned?
Remember to ask about likely headache candidates (like games), before doing one such "favor"

Went for a hand surgery, the anesthetic doctor is learning swift and then he put the needle in the wrong hand.
Lesson learned: never trust a programmer with your life

Finally figured out why my team’s lab project was taking so long to compile. Named imports of material-ui icons. Lesson learned!

Today, in "Typos that wasted hours of debugging"...
PHP...
>:(
PHP is such a bitch when it comes to unset variables, why didn't it trigger a warning or something when I tried to $typo[$index]?? I may be missing something and my head starts to ache.
Fixed tho', lesson learned.

Perhaps as a tip for the junior devs out there, here's what I learned about programming skills on the job:

You know those heavy classes back in college that taught you all about Data Structures? Some devs may argue that you just need to know how to code and you don't need to know fancy Data Structures or Big o notation theory, but in the real world we use them all the time, especially for important projects.

All those principles about Sets, (Linked) lists, map, filter, reduce, union, intersection, symmetric difference, Big O Notation... They matter and are used to solve problems. I used to think I could just coast by without being versed in them.. Soon, mathematics and Big o notation came back to bite me.

Three example projects I worked in where this mattered:
- Massive data collection and processing in legacy Java (clients want their data fast, so better think about the performance implications of CRUD into Collections)
- ReactJS (oh yes, maps and filters are used a lot...)
- Massive data collection in C# where data manipulation results are crucial (union, intersection, symmetric difference,...)
Overall: speed and quality mattered (better know your Big o notation or use a cheat sheet, though I prefer the first)
Yes, the approach can be optimized here, but often we're tied to client constraints, with some room if we're lucky.

I'm glad I learned this lesson. I would rather have skills in my head and in memory than having to look up things and try to understand them all the time.

Lesson learned.

If you're planning on buying a MacBook and WWDC is ≤ 4 or ≤ 5 months away, JUST WAIT FOR IT.

Bought min almost 2 weeks before wwdc, and turns out they made a refresh of the same model...

FML

Life lesson learned:
Despite good intentions, don't overengineer the front-end, when time is heavily constrained and the release is scheduled and is communicated to media outlets immediately after.

A broken release just makes the client send around multiple emails per minute with tens of people in CC.

Shit happens... at least it was a bargain for them.

So, I encountered a classic case of the infamous "it works on my machine" excuse today. 🤦‍♂️ Seriously, folks, can we please put an end to this lazy and unprofessional behavior?

Picture this: I had just completed a feature in my code and passed it on to the QA team for testing. Confident that everything was running smoothly on my local environment, I expected a smooth sailing experience. But boy, was I wrong!

The QA team began testing the feature on different environments, and that's when the chaos ensued. What worked seamlessly on my machine seemed to transform into a monstrous bug fest on theirs. Panic set in, and I couldn't help but feel a mix of embarrassment and frustration.

Lesson learned: testing code thoroughly across various environments is crucial. No, seriously, it's an absolute must! That "it works on my machine" excuse is just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in your face.

From now on, I pledge to dedicate more time to thorough testing and consider the diverse environments our code will encounter. Let's save ourselves and our colleagues the headache and embarrassment caused by such oversights. Together, we can put an end to the reign of the "it works on my machine" excuse once and for all!

Fucking hell my insights are late ones...
So I am working with fluid dynamics simulation. I went home fired up the laptop and started the calculations. This is how the events went:

9 PM: starting the calculation
10 PM: checking on the graphs to see whether everything will be alright if I leave it running. Then went to sleep.
2 AM: Waking up in shock, that I forgot to turn on autosave after every time step. Then reassured myself that this is only a test and I won't need the previous results anyway.
5 AM: waking up, everything seems to be fine. I pause the calculation hibernate the laptop and went to work.
6:40 AM on my way to the front door a stray thought struck into my mind... What if it lost contact with the licence server, while entering hibernated state. Bah never mind... It will establish a new connection when I switch it back on.
6.45 AM Switching on the laptop. Two error messages greet me.

1. Lost contact with license server.
2. Abnormal exit.

Looking on the tray the paused simulation is gone. Since I didn't enabled autosave, I have to start it all over again. Well. Lesson learned I guess. Too bad it cost 8 hours of CPU time.

Spent 2 days optimizing SQL queries, and then I learned a valuable lesson.

If your database size is bigger than the RAM of the machine it’s running on, every query will take 5+ seconds ☹️

I hope my boss learned his lesson: dd if=/dev/zero of=[hdd storing DB about VM cluster]
- is a very very bad idea...

lesson learned...
never run yaourt -Syu --aur without checking the upgrade list.

reboot-> system doesn't boot -> F**k
reboot (runlevel 3)
discover that nvidia-beta and nvidia-utils mismatch version.
fix it editing pkgbuild of nvidia-beta to install lastest version.
reboot->everything works.

Results: succesfully wasted 25minutes.

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

Lesson learned today :

Don't get lazy and muscle monkey hanging out your laundry..

Like your code, you'll eventually regret monkeying it.

Lesson learned.
Don't update the WordPress theme.
Fuck you, "dev" that made our webpage.

My top lesson was realizing that I am a stubborn person, and that I was wrong to keep trying to implement unimplemented features past a deadline and that I need to understand when to give up. I also learned that I can't trust others to finish their part of something I start. There is nothing like seeing the entire backend you wrote be gutted by someone else because they "needed to learn how route handlers work by creating it themselves" and then seeing them not complete said route handlers.

Oh, Ubisoft

Relying on your UShit cloud saves was a terrible mistake

20 hours of AC Origins and 9 hours of Far Cry 5 lost because I trusted your piece of shit service would do something right

Ended up dong an internship for my school (not really internship, more along the lines of formal volunteering, but whatever) helping set up laptops for a statewide standardized assessment.

I made a program to log the machine's identifying info (Serial, MAC addresses, etc), renames it, joins it to the school's Active Directory, and takes notes on machines, which gets dumped into a csv file.

Made the classic rookie mistake of backing things up occasionally, but not often enough. Accidentally nuked the flash drive with the data on it, and spent a good while learning data recovery and how grep works.

Lesson Learned? Back up frequently and back up everything

Exp. when programming deeply inspired you?

I remember being inspired in school as I learned to program floating colorful circles in a lesson. They "bounced" off the screen borders

🟠⭕🟣🔵🟢

Lesson learned when I started working: never try to proove yourself customers will just try to abuse it.

Hey everyone, have you ever had a creative block right when you're up against a tight deadline? It's like your brain just decides to take a vacation at the worst possible time.

I had a project due yesterday and I was feeling pretty confident about it until I sat down to work on it. Suddenly, my mind was blank and I couldn't think of a single idea. I tried everything from taking a break to listening to music, but nothing seemed to work.

Eventually, I resorted to staring at the wall and hoping for some sort of divine inspiration. But all I got was a headache and a growing sense of panic as the deadline drew nearer.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, I started randomly typing words and phrases into my project, hoping that something would stick. And to my surprise, it did! I ended up with a project that was not only finished on time but also creatively interesting.

So, the lesson I learned from this experience is that sometimes you just need to let go of your expectations and dive headfirst into the unknown. Who knows, you might just surprise yourself with what you come up with.