Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

Dude, stop trying to cram your crappy open source library into all our projects. No-one uses it, it's buggy as hell, and even if it did work properly, it adds virtually zero advantages.

Seriously, if you Google this library, the results are: a blog post this guy has written about it saying it's awesome, the same guy answering people's questions on Reddit by saying that all their problems would be solved by using his library, and someone else raising an issue saying it doesn't work 🤦‍♀️

My last special snowflakes teacher story. This happend last Friday.

Background: we had to do a "little" project in less than 2 weeks (i ranted about that) and got our degree on Friday. I did a perfectly fine meal suggester, with in my opinion one of the best codes i've ever written.

After getting my degree (which is totally fine and qualifies me as IT technician/ "staatlich geprüfte Informationstechnische Assistentin") i asked him what my grade for the project was.
Me: what was my grade for the project again?
Him: i left it at 90%
Me: why exactly? You seemed to be really excited and liked it obviously. And there was no critique from you after my presentation.
Him: yadda yadda. I can't give you more. Yadda yadda be happy i didn't lower your grade.
Me: why would you lower my grade? This doesn't make sense at all. I matched all your criteria. You wanted a program everyone loved, everyone wanted to buy. There you go. I made exactly that.
Him: i can't give you a 1 (equals an A)
Me: why not?
Him: you wrote to much. I didn't want so much (he never specified a maximum). And you used to advanced code. And there were so many lists and ref - methods. The class couldn't benefit from it.
Me: Excuse me!? The only "advanced code" i used was a sqlite library. And i explained what i did with that. What do you mean by "so many lists" and ref-menthodes. In which methodes am i using ref?
Him: I don't know, i just skimmed through the code.
Me, internal: WHAT THE FUCKING HELL!?
Me: so you are telling me, you didn't even read my code fully and think it is too advanced for the class? And because of that you give a 2 (equals a B)?
Him: yes
I just gave him a deathstare and left after that. What the hell. Yes, i used encapsulation - which is something we hadn't done much in class. But the code is still not more advanced because i use more files -.-

Interviewer : So what frameworks and library you usually use?
Me : i use volley for networking, gson for parsing, livedata/architecture components for architecture and observability , room for database and java for app development

I : ok so make this sample app using retrofit for networking, moshi for parsing, mvrx for architecture , rx for observability , sqldelight for db, dagger2 and kotlin for app dev. You have 8 hours

Me :(wtf?) But i never used those libs or language!
I : we just want to check how easily you adapt to different surroundings.

Me : -_-

Honestly i don't know of it was a great experience or a bad one . I was stressed the whole time but was able to adapt to almost all of those libraries and frameworks.
At the end i got selected but decided not to go for those ppl. That was just a lucrative opening of a venus fly trap, they would have stressed the hell out of me

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

Really, I hate this composer / bower / npm shitholes!

Why the hell is my app 300MBs?!? Because that shitty pudding composer decided to download the ENTIRE git including README.md, examples, 5 hours of assembly-giraffe porn, my granny's pajamas and two wraps of kebabs!

How hard is it to define the folder that contains the REQUIRED library so that our project might stay at 5MBs instead of 300?

If you write a tutorial or a book with code samples please take the time to ensure that (a) you cover everything that is needed to get your samples to work properly and (b) that your samples actually to work.

It is frustrating the bloody hell out of me typing your code character by character into my machine just to have my compiler screaming at me.

On that note: just wasted a week on rewriting a whole bloody library that was "broken" just to discover that the library works just fine but the freaking tutorial on the very page was faulty.

you fucking idiots

why do you always base your library components on some dumbass clown fixed width / height system?

everything should be flex by default, anything else is absolute amateur clown town pile of dumbass horseshit...

...i'll brawl and take down anyone who says otherwise

you waste my time, you waste other's time, when everyone has to go hunting around for your stupid library's unorthodox way of styling

thanks again for wasting and making my evening a living hell

Why the hell does every single frontend job on Earth require expert knowledge of React, a fad JS library that will be forgotten in 5 years?

For extra credit: when was the sage advice of "keep content, appearance, and behavior separate" overruled in favor of "use JavaScript for literally everything"? Have I been in a coma for the past 3 years?

Look, I understand the appeal of separating code into repeatable components. I just don't understand why essentially the same thing can't be accomplished with vanilla JS, which is ten times easier to understand and doesn't require an entire website to be written in some make-believe offshoot of Ecmascript that will look like hieroglyphics a decade from now.

There are also seemingly no positions that offer people a platform to start applying React to real world scenarios. I've seen the "understand React in 5 minutes" articles. Wow, super cool, you used 30 lines of JavaScript to render a "Hello world" div. The possibilities are truly endless.

But seriously, how does this shit work? Where do I go to learn the mystical art of offloading every single one of a website's responsibilities to JavaScript? How do I use React to build an actual functioning website, and at what point will it save me time or increase my productivity instead of just pissing me off?

I feel like the web frontend landscape has gone to hell...

It used to be a priority to develop lean front end applications that load fast and work the same on most devices. If resources are required you try to share them. I have always liked the way this was solved using CDN.

Proper workflow: include some small libs you might need, script your interactions, test site, deliver.

And now our friends of the Javascript community have discovered the nuclear science called npm... It started off as this great benefit allowing frontenders to complete entire projects in the language they know and love but I feel like it has grown into an abomination that produces bulky applications with more boilerplate configuration than actual active code...

Surely I can't be the only one who is completely fed up with the direction this is going? Is anyone else looking for a lean way of developing javascript again using only a couple of small libs instead of those monstrous frameworks.

I have even considered to develop a library that makes it easy to develop with CDN (and dependencies) in mind but I don't even know if it will be worth it as more and more people tend to move away from it.

I'm sad

Today a junior dev from the company I'm working at as consultant, suddenly shouted:
😤"why the hell my software behaves differently on every pc here in the office ... But it works on my machine? I'm sure there's something wrong with the OS/Framework"

🤔 let me think for a moment ...
* is it because the whole office keep developing like the ancient romans did?
* is it because that software is such a mess that requires a wizard in order to manually change all the magic configuration strings ?
* is it because every damn developer there has his particular environment and the word "container" reminds you only the show where the people bid for unclaimed shit ?
* is it because the "guru" at your company decided it was a super cool idea to wrap EVERY single external library (that just works out of the box) into some obscure static helper without even a single trace of documentation and clue of what's wrong?

🤗"I don't know... Must be a bug in the OS or framework for sure"

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

Java. AGAIN. 😡

so, I am trying to get a csv opened and read, and then search through it based on values. Easy peasy lemon squeezy in python, right?

Well, damned be java. You need a buffered reader to read the file. Then you have to "while(has next)" the whole damn thing, then you have to do something with the data that you read one by one, right? Well, not to be disappointed, they do have json libraries, but you **have to install** the plugins for it. Aka you have to manually add the libraries or use some backwards manager like maven.

Gotta admit, jdbc is neat if you're anal about your sql statements, but bring the same jazz to csv, and all the hell will break loose.

Now, if you just read your json data into multiple objects and throw them in an array... Kiss shorthand search's ass goodbye, because this mofo can't search through lists without licking the arse of every object. And now, you have to find another way because this way, you can't group shit you just read from csv. (or, I haven't found a way after 5 hours of dealing with the godforsaken shitshow that java libraries are.)

Like, I'm devastated. If this rant doesn't make much sense to you, blame some java library for it.
Shouldn't be too hard.

I really like Kotlin as a language, but Gradle makes me feel nauseated.

Pulling in deps without getting errors, then the library won't resolve because of some version mismatch (still, no error or warning on build, until I try to import the dependency in the code, and then just "unable to resolve <library>" without details). All of the documentation on the internet is either super specific for Android projects, or for an ancient Gradle version. Feels like I'm back in Haskell's "Cabal Hell".

*runs back into the loving embrace of Cargo*.

What was I thinking, trying to write an application in something that's not Rust.

Fucking hell everything in java is so annoying, confusing and hard to get working. I just want to use JavaFX, why do you require me to sacrifice a lamb in order to do so? It might be my fault though, but c'mon, I don't want to spend 2-3 hours reading through shitty documentation in order to understand how maven works and what the hell Gradle is. Why can't it be as simple as adding a module name to a config file, like in Rust's Cargo? Even using intellij to acquire JavaFX and set it as a dependency doesn't work, it gives me some weird "JavaFX not configured" bullshit error. What the fuck, you're a library, you shouldn't need anything else ffs

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

<rant>
I fucking HATE the Arduino environment right now.

First of all: you can't fucking put your project files in a sub folder to the main file. I can't write #include "src/motor.hpp" because it doesn't fucking know what that means.
Turns out you have to put all your header files in the fucking library folder common for all Arduino projects!

Secondly, you can't call your cpp headers hpp, they HAVE to be called h, or the Arduino environment throws a fit and begins whining about being unable to find the fucking files.
Not just that! You can't reference other Arduino libraries from within your library because the environment doesn't know what that means either.
To get around that you need to fucking include the library in your main file, AND THEN you can include it in the library file that uses it. After all, it should be the programmer's job to soon feed a so called IDE, right?

I'M SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT! 😤

I'm ready to either program the Arduino directly with an AVR programmer or even port the entire project to the raspberry pi where I have a proper fucking Linux environment with a proper fucking directory structure so I can code proper fucking C++.
Hell I'm even fucking willing to spend all weekend porting all the code myself if necessary.

It's not reasonable that correct fucking C++ code is invalidated because I called the files something "wrong" and put them in the "wrong" directory.
</rant>

"user friendly project board" my ass

Fun issue

Swedish client is unable to enter a currency conversion rate in a field and submit. 'Not a float' well we can clearly see that it is a float when he does it (0.5 for example), not an issue for us though.

Reproducing was a nightmare, eventually it boiled down to the fact that the framework we were using had automatic locale checks. Now because our numeric fields are actually weird text fields (front end nonsense), it was converting the period to be a comma (Swedish people would write 0,5 normally). And if you actually entered 0,5 the range check (0.01-1000) failed because it couldn't parse the comma (no locale check on that one)

Godamn facepalm. Really confused the hell out of us when we saw the error, had to go diving through library code. To top this off, locale checks are supposed to be disabled as of about 2 years ago

In revenge against our oppressor :PHP: on slack is now an alias for the shit emoji

-Writes an algorithm that randomly generates a dungeon for my RPG game I'm writing in C++ with SFML library-

after 6hours of reading papers about algorithms, writing an algorithm myself, at 4 am I decided to give up and re try tomorrow and fix all of the problems, but all that I had in mind is, what the fuck did i just write here.. I'm sure the next day me will not understand what the hell is going on-

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

Me: I have so much to do! How the hell am I going to get all this done?!

**hears someone say something about some framework/library I don't know**

Me: hmmm let me google that real quick then I'll get back to work...

**3 hours later**

Me: damnit! I'm never going to get my work done!

“This reminds me of the Warp Train in Library of Ruina. It can travel anywhere within 10 minutes, by jumping through another dimension, but in one incident it seems to malfunction, and doesn't arrive at its destination. The passengers are stuck in warp space, and oddly are in a 'stasis', wherein they don't need food or drink, or need to use the bathroom. It turns out they can't die either, as people start trying to commit suicide after being stuck for weeks. As the weeks turn into months, and then years, the passengers resort to brutalizing each other just to feel something, eventually turning into quivering lumps of flesh through their violence. After 2000 years, the train finally arrives at its destination, 10 minutes later in our universe. The company hits a button, and like loading a savestate, the passengers are returned to normal, none the wiser, with no memories of the 2 millenia of hell they just went through.

The train was never malfunctioning. This happens every single time.”

Why won't you just approve my PR???

Whats wrong with you?!

I don't understand your cryptic one-sentence feedback. I'm not even sure you understand what you're asking yourself.

What the hell does "make it a transaction" mean? Don't give me pseudo-code examples that don't even work fucking asshole!

Its a small change that does NOT need a canary build dammit. Don't go testing the ORM, its a goddamn standard library. Why does working with you make everything so complicated?!?!

The code fucking works! There is no need to make it comply to your specific tastes goddamn it. Working with you is like pulling teeth!

/endrant

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

Sorry, need to vent.

In my current project I'm using two main libraries [slack client and k8s client], both official. And they both suck!

Okay, okay, their code doesn't really suck [apart from k8s severely violating Liskov's principle!]. The sucky part is not really their fault. It's the commonly used 3rd-party library that's fucked up.

Okhttp3

yeah yeah, here come all the booos. Let them all out.

1. In websockets it hard-caps frame size to 16mb w/o an ability to change it. So.. Forget about unchunked file transfers there... What's even worse - they close the websocket if the frame size exceeds that limit. Yep, instead of failing to send it kills the conn.

2. In websockets they are writing data completely async. Without any control handles.. No clue when the write starts, completes or fails. No callbacks, no promises, no nothing other feedback
3. In http requests they are splitting my request into multiple buffers. This fucks up the slack cluent, as I cannot post messages over 4050 chars in size . Thanks to the okhttp these long texts get split into multiple messages. Which effectively fucks up formatting [bold, italic, codeblocks, links,...], as the formatted blocks get torn apart. [didn't investigate this deeper: it's friday evening and it's kotlin, not java, so I saved myself from the trouble of parsing yet unknown syntax]

yes, okhttp is probably a good library for the most of it. Yes, people like it, but hell, these corner cases and weird design decisions drive me mad!

And it's not like I could swap it with anynother lib.. I don't depend on it -- other libs I need do!

Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.

But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.

Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.

So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.

Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook

Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper

Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

FUCK YEAH! FUCKING HELL FUCK YEAH! IT FUCKING WORKED! THE FUCKING CODE FINALLY COMPILED PROPERLY!
What happened:
I was trying to use the Adafruit Feather HUZZA esp8266 with the AdafruitHTTPClient Library... and it didnt work... then I downgraded THE FUCKING FIRMWARE FROM 2.5.0 TO 2.4.2 AND THE BLOODY THING COMPILED!

Translating win32 calls to whatever the hell there is in Unix and Unix-like OSes (well, most of them) in order to port a certain game net code library and dear god why did I volunteer myself for this task

At least pevents is there to help, but too bad cmake doesn’t want to compile it with the flag I need (“-DWFMO”) in order to make the “WaitForMultipleEvents” method to work at all. Instead no matter what options I give it on the command line or how I tell VS Code to do it, it seems to give me the finger to my fucking face.

Doing it for games on the cooler OSes... doing it for the community... come on...

Not sure if it's the worst code review but it's a recent one.

We don't really do code reviews where I work unfortunately but my coworker used my framework for the first time (build some nice composer libraries for cmdline projects) and asked if I could make them do autoloading.
He never used namespaces before so I was glad to help him out.

What I saw was a dreadful mess. His project was called "scripts" so good luck picking a namespace...

Than it was all lose functions in the executable file. All those functions are however called by a class in another file (if they where not calling eachother as a cascading mess). That class was extending an abstract class from my library as instructed. However I never imagined my lib being raped like that.

The functions themselves are a horrible mess. Nothing uniform completely different style (our documentation states PSR's should be used).
Parameters counts higher than 5.
Variable names like Object and Dobject (in calling function Dobject is Object but it needs a fresh one.

If statements on parameters that need basically split it in two (should simply be to functions)
If else statement with return of same variable as a single line (sane people use ternary for that)

Note that I said functions. All of it should have been OO and methods. Would have saved at least some of the parameter hell.

I could go on and on. Do I think the programmer is bad yes (does not even grasp interfaces, dep injection, foreach loops). Is this his best work no. He said that for a one of script like this it just has to work. Not going to be used elsewhere. I disagree as it is a few thousand lines of code that others have to read too.

If it weren't for poor documentation I'd be retired by now.

We didn't all write your library. In fact, only you did. So, some helpful documentation would really help us all out. Can't believe the number of times I need to read source code to figure out what the hell you are doing.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Difference between 2023-01-01 00:00:00 and 2023-12-31 23:59:59 is 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds ; so almost a year (by one second)

Difference between 2023-01-01 00:00:00 and 2023-01-31 23:59:59 is the same, almost a month by 1 second.

Same for february (even with 28 being the last day).

But then, 2023-03-01 00:00:00 and 2023-03-31 23:59:59 gives me :
1 month, 2 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds.

WHY, are there fucking 34 days in March ? Is this a bug ? Is it confused with February being the previous month ?
Why would PHP do this to me ?

Why the hell is it always so painful to work with dates, it's not even like I'm stretching the standard library or using raw timestamps to hack things together

I used the diff method of PHP 7.4 DateTime, is someone wants to try it

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

Me: Ok lets make a simple chrome app wrapper for devRant just for the hell of it... Oh i really don't like how there is a split line between the title bar and window content...

*2 Days later"

Me: Fuck it! Let's build a title bar library and allow for devRant theming options...

Why must I do this to myself...

Today I spent hours trying to figure out how the hell to add a Material-UI tooltip onto the ClearIndicator for a react-select multi-select component to warn the user that it would clear _all_ of their selections. Followed the examples in the react-select docs on how to make use of replaceable components, but all of their examples used a different library for the tooltip component, and there was no way I was going to bring in _another_ library that was going to add even more dependencies to the application.

In the end, my problem was that all of the examples were with components that could carry a ref and the component _I_ was targeting was a <path> element, which apparently can’t.

Solution? Add a div between the tooltip and the component I was replacing.

*facepalm*

hey devs, quick question:
does rust support branchless conditionnals and jump tables, and if yes where to look for syntax?

i found no example for branchless so far and jump tables are scary in rust (and i need a library to use them, it seems).

inb4 "why in the hell/ what possible use those have?!":
i use branchless to make a looping array and jump tables whenever there's more than 4 if statements with equal probability, and the deciding factor is a numeric value, so quite often.

So,
Im coming from PHP. I feel comfy around PHP.

I needed for other project GO lang (there is no library for what I need to do in PHP, and it's low level thing anyway)

I need dependency that is in form of modules.

Okay, so importing it (just writing import "github.com/blah/blah/v3/blah" as suggested in docs did not work. something something, not found)

Some googling later, I created go.mod file.

And all the hell broke lose. So I am trying to fix that using random stack overflow, IDE highlights entire project on red, go complains it can't find "./" while it looks for it in gopath not project files and claims it's remote repository.

Among other WTFnessness after adding go.mod it suddenly stopped fetching ANY dependencies (including stuff like github.com/pkg/errors ), so, that's fun...

I added go.mod before 9 AM.
It's 13 and Im still wrestling with this

I fail to connect the dots why go lang get's so much praise for it's apparently awesome or something package managment... I find "composer install", and have pretty much guarantee it will work, much easier to wrap my head around.

[edit]
forgot to mention that Im literally starting to learn go. Just cherry on top

So LUA injector to Payday 2 requires on Linux certain library (libcurl3). So you know, sudo apt install libcurl3 and there you go!

You would think.

Apparently while you do that, the installation of libcurl3, it completely nukes your Steam installation... For some reason.
Can some please explain me, what the hell just happened? Please?

So i'm visiting the JavaScript bubble every now and then when i'm writing on the userscript i develop to fix bugs in our ticketing system or fix some clients website they negelected. Every time i'm searching for answers to the weird problems that inevitably turn up i have to filter out all the threads that derail with the classic 'google jQuery basic arithmetic plugin' craziness to find an actual vanilla solution to my problem.

All the time i wonder why on earth people put up with this framework hell. This is part serious question and part rant but seriously, how did we come to this? With all that jQuery, React, Node, whatever stuff i'm kinda losing the overview over what's even todays standard. I always try to keep my code as vanilla as possible without using external libraries. But it seems the entire web development industry is heading the completly other way. I tried to look into a few frameworks but i never really see the appeal. Just now i looked up react native because the last 20 rants talked about it and immediately noped out because they fucking create a DOM in js, why the fuck would you do this?!

Worst thing about this framework shithole is that some frameworks are beeing pulled into the mix for very weird and unnecessary reasons. Best example is a charts library i recently used to visualize a database of temperatures that was completely written in native js but pulled jQuery in for the equivalent of window.addEventListener('load',function(stuff)) and i was furious. I rewrote the code and could throw out the jQuery dependency with no problem. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Alright since you made it here: I'm not trying to throw any of you under the bus for using frameworks. I just fail to understand why you would use these. To each their own and unless your site has the performance of the ticketing system i use at work that takes like 15 seconds to load one fucking page i won't complain at all. But pull in a framework just to do a task you can easily do in native js in remotely the same timeframe you are on my list.

My workplace is still using xml based configuration, and non-spring boot projects.

So every spring boot tutorial I find feels like "Look at how easy you can get this running" and then it's just actually a toy you can't get into production.

Also it kind of bugs me that you need to be online to actually be able to initialize/create a spring boot project and every single tutorial says so.
You can make a local network m2 repository, but can one make a spring initializer service?

Either way, migrating every single project to Spring boot is a no-no,

And I'm stuck with like 5 prototypes of SSO integration from which only 2 work, and the other 3 have their own problems.

One does redirect to the login and all, but the SAML endpoint gets 404 on response when you log in.

One is on OpenID Connect, but I would need to update the project from Spring 3 to Spring 5 to get it working, which upon attempting to do seems to break everything else.

One has an external library handling the security context just the way we are accustomed to, but it only does a 401 forbidden when you go without logging in and I'm starting to think it is actually one of those that require you to extract the token or something manual like that, which wouldn't work for us

The other two are spring boot tutorials that worked out of the box, both SAML and OpenID, still can't use those for the main projects.

I'm tired of dealing with this configuration hell, been two months at this, I want to get features done as usual, not be stuck configuring stuff that might or might not work.

Rant aside, I think I figured I need to use a different Security adapter, but I needed to vent.

During my classes, I have to recode the almost-entire c standard library. That's hell.

Finished a validation library and knowing the common excuse for not using code already written (devs come down with 'not invented here' syndrome) is "I would have used it, if there was documentation". Spent this week documenting each class/method, diagrams, scenario based code examples, sent to my boss for review ...

Boss: "Wow...this is fantastic. All our libraries should have this level of documentation. You even updated the project's Nuget package to include a link to the documentation. Devs won't have an excuse now. I'll clear your plate for the rest of the year so you can get started."

What the hell did I just do to myself? FML.

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

Kinda often, the ecosystem around C/C++ kinda sucks

Compilers will give you hieroglyphs instead of readable errors.
Including a separate library, or a code generator, into your project is generally hell on earth to set up.
The language server often needs several seconds to come up with suggestions, some of which are complete nonsense.
The language itself lacks many basic features. C++20 will give us so many fancy things but we still can't convert an enum to a string.

I've programmed in C# and lately in Rust, and damn the developer experience there is just so much nicer overall.

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

I hate when programmers never want to go out their comfort zone. They should be relegated into a hell spinned inside a Virtualbox instance.

I have this *** angular setup. We want to try to keep the dev environment congruent between all the colleagues.

The decent programmer would use a node version manager, or try to keep up with everything. LOLNOPE THEY FUCKIN' SPUN A FRIGGIN' VAGRANT VIRTUAL MACHINE RUNNED WITH ADMIN PERMISSIONS which is slowing everyone down. A single "npm i" now requires half an hour.

I tried to use YARN that is faster and makes a mergeable lock, NOPE WE SHOULD KEEP USING THAT STUPID NPM INSTALL that is slow AF and sometimes messes up the versions.

I tried to make 'em use the peerDependencies correctly but LOLNOPE WE SHOULD RELY ONTO THE AUTOMATIC PEERDEP RESOLVER INSIDE NPM7, SO YOU DON'T KNOW IF YOUR VERY SAME LIBRARY IS INCLUDED OR NOT.

Thank god i'm changing job.

When they decided to deprecate the old app that went back to early DOS, they decided to use VB.NET because they'd used some VBA and were familiar with it. Except they had a vague idea that C# was faster and decided to write the OpenGL code in that. Also they had some C++ code and decided to write more of it, accessed by the main program via COM.

I come in and the decision is made to integrate some third-party libs via a C++/CLI layer. On one hand screw COM, but on the other we're now using two non-standard MS C++ extensions. Then we decide we need scripting, so throw in some IronPython.

I'm the build engineer for all this, by the way. No fancy package managers since almost all the third-party dependencies are C++; a few of them are open source with our own hacks layered on top of the regular code, a few are proprietary. When I first started here you couldn't build on a fresh SVN checkout (ugh) without repeatedly building the program, copying DLLs manually, building again, ad nauseum. I finally got sick of being called in to do this process and announced that I was fixing it, which took a solid week of staring at failed compiler output.

Every so often someone wants to update that damn COM library and has to sacrifice a goat to figure out how the hell you get it to accept a new method. Maybe one day I'll do a whole rant just based on COM.

Why is it that every time I want to make some dead simple script with Python it turns into the utmost awful programming experience?

Ah no you see you have to install this dependency but even if pip doesn't give you an error your script will still crash on import and vomit up some ugly back trace that doesn't tell you anything.

And then some retarded sub sub dependency wants to run on Python 2 and that has its entire own shithole of dependency hell.

And then for some unknown reason the Python installation wasn't compiled with zlib and some library wants it so you either you compile the entire thing yourself or idk go fuck yourself?

Why is this hot mess of a language still in use? I dont get it, it's easier to set up a cmake project with C++ for gods sake.

Holy shit I don't understand Rust's module system. Package I have not a single clue what it is... It "can contain one library crate and multiple binary crates". What? Okay so a crate is a collection of modules. Great, now how do you define modules? `mod whatever {}` probably. Then what the hell does `mod whatever;` do?? Import a module from a file with the same name (ignoring the fact that modules and files don't seem to have anything to do with each other). But why `mod` to import? How does that differ from `use`-ing a module? What is any of this??

Google Play Music uploading songs to the library with Chrome is a cpu killer, it was at like 97% and laptop was lagging as hell

Please don't use OS specific libraries/binaries/build tools...etc

I'm talking to C/C++ users here. once in a while I see something on github maybe im just curios maybe I find your niche code useful but then you use make (who the hell still uses make?) or your library depends on another library than can only be mindlessly installed in a unix environment. and the most obscene of all a solution file...

thank god for rust.

Why do you lil' shits keep making LAYERS and LAYERS of unnecessary abstraction and then call it goddamn progress???
Dude what the fuck is this UEFI shit?!
Why the hell do I NEED to import a frigging library and read tons of boring and overly complicated documentation just so I can paint a pixel on the screen now uh??
Alright alright yeah so the BIOS is a little basic but daaaamit son if you want something a bit more complicated you make it yourself or install an OS that provides it! Like we've been doing it for years!!!
Dude, you don't get to know what a file system is until I tell you!
The PC be like:
"You wanna dereference the 0x0 pointer? There you go: it's 0xE9DF41, anything else?
You wanna write to the screen? Ok I have a perfectly convinient interrupt setup for that.
Wanna paint a pixel yellow? Ok, just call this other interruption. Theere we go.
And it only took four bytes and a nanosecond to do it."

That shit works, and if you want something more complex, but not too much, that still runs efficiently install DOS.
Don't mess around with the hardware pleeease.
We can still understand what's going on down there. Once UEFI steps in, it'll be like sealing a door forever. Long live BIOS damn it all!

Was tasked to write a utility library for work that automates and streamlines a lot of the API related bullshit we use. But it's grown so big that I now need to read my own source files to figure out what the hell it does when I actually need to use it... 🙃

Which encryption library do you people use with c/c++? I'm trying to use openssl but well there is more documentation about how to replace my own heart in the dark than on that. Also most of the structs have missing declarations hell yeah its nice to have a EVP_PKEY but what's that? Oh I know it's a evp_pkey_t and what's that? Nothing apparently. Comments? You kidding??? A proper library doesn't have them...

Help
Recently I've decided to start using music streaming services insted of my local library
It's because I use ubuntu and setting up iTunes through wine is hell

So the thing is that, although Spotify supports using local files ubuntu 20.04 client crashes when I try to add a music source
Also i"m afraid i"m unable to add local music to my playlists

I live in Belarus and some music is blocked (or censored only) for me, so I really need to have access to local files

Is there even a point of using Spotify then? I like the UI, the automatic playlists and the speed, but music availability is crucial for me

What the hell is wrong with the CLang standard libraries? Whose crazy idea was it to put memset and memcpy in the string library?

I simply hate d3.js. This thing is a night mare. stupid svg and canvas and d3.js
Fuck this charting library. Burn in hell!