I keep forgetting people's birthdays and thereby I forget to wish people, and wishing people everyday can become a chore. As somebody once said, if you do something more than once, automate it.

Spent two hours and ended up building a bot that consists of four functions: login, checkIfAuthenticated, postToProfile and getBirthdaysToday using mostly axios and cheerio.

Currently works perfectly and I've been thinking of writing a blog post about it for my 'Automating Your Life' series.

I'll post the link in the comments soon when I'm done with the blog post.

Me: So i've cloned the iOS project, i've run carthage, but it won't build.. Have I done something wrong?

Devs: Oh read this doc on github, we do loads of custom stuff. The depenedncy manager can't do it all by itself. You need to run `./scripts/boostrap.sh`

Me (another day): I've switched branches and i'm getting all these errors. Any ideas?

Devs: Ah this happens when someone modifies xyz. Read this pinned slack message. Run `./scripts/bootstrap.sh` again.

Me (another day): I've switched branches again, getting different errors, re-running boostrap didn't fix it.

Devs: Ah yeah, this happens when someone modifies abc. You need to run `./scripts/nuke.sh` and then boostrap when this happens.

Me (another day): Guys When I try to run the prod app its not building any ideas?

Devs: Ah yes have a look at this confluence link. You need to run `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`, then nuke, then boostrap and you'll be good.

Me: .... ok

Devs: Oh btw very important! do not commit any changes from `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`. It will break everything!

Me: ... no i'm sorry we have a much bigger problem than that. We need to talk ... like right now

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

I was building a personal website and my friend oversaw it. He said “that looks cool, can I help?” I agreed, why couldn’t he help? Ten minutes in I asked him if he liked our 404 page. He said “what’s the link to the 404 page?” 🤦‍♂️ He’s not on the team no more.

Colleague: Hey want to get access to our repo so we can see each others code, collaborate, discuss design patterns etc?

Me: Yeah sounds like a great idea. Would love to get to know a bit more about how others are building mobile apps in the company.

Colleague: Heres the link to the iOS app: xxxxxxxxxx

*Opens link*
*looks around a bit*
*Opens cocoapods folder*
*Sees 89 dependencies*

Me: .......... actually, you know what, I have major deadlines coming up. I can't look at this right now. Lets talk in the new year.

*closes slack*

Hi Dev Ranter,

My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?

Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends

You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.

We care about you though (as long as you deliver)

Looking forward to talk to you.

John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 2020

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.

I did it alone and with almost no help.

I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.

-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding

I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-

got given the job of removing a menu link on a site my company hadn't built today.

biggest pile of dung ever! the site had folders for 5 different back end languages all full of random files not in use.

I dug around and found it was using a big framework that produces a massive single variable and outputs it as the page.

Eventually I realised this wasn't in use either but was still being loaded in the site! in fact the site even has a database and an admin login but the stupid original dev hard coded all the content in and runs includes to files in the admin folder directly from config!

such a confusing, pointless, shit site! Its like building a car and driving it like Fred from the Flintstones....

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

Copy paste from the internet, usually stack overflow without knowing what the fuck the lines do.
I saw this girl who was tasked with building a spring mvc application and she literally googled(yeah googled) "spring mvc web app" and copied from the first tutorial site and pasted it.
When errors showed up she copied everything from the second link and pasted it ... Wait for it... Without deleting the old copy but commenting it out so each file had 100 lines of code and 100 lines of comment

Can't believe it's 2021 and building websites is still such a pain..

Do we really need to build a login page every time? have a refinement session to break it down to tasks?
("Oh right, we need a forgot-password link!")

Can't the damn thing align and look the same on two/three browsers?

2008 problems for life...

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
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.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

Q: How do you know Xcode 16.2 is a mess?

A: The code it generates for a new project is rejected by the compiler.

You generate a framework project, and besides having to manually sign the damn thing (really, can't setup for success?), it won't compile and link due to some other obscure error IT generates.

/<pathToFramework>/<ProjectName>.framework: resource fork, Finder information, or similar detritus not allowed
Command CodeSign failed with a nonzero exit code

Yes, boys and girls, Xcode is broken right out of the gate on building a framework template it creates!

I'll tell you what is "detritus", it's Xcode. Hint to Xcode team: "Just Say NO" - Nancy Regan

Today in Windows Clang misadventures from one past wtf

I have 0 fucking clue what is happening, so I am starting to think that this is a windows 11 only bug.

If I (say for example) compile all of my headers into a .dll and then link them to my executable program, an executable will be generated.

If I use the dll to be linked into my executable, but DON'T use any of the code inside, then no executable is generated.

I need to at least use something from within the headers that I create into the main program for it to build and actually throw out an executable.

I could argue that doing this would be the proper way to setup a project in some scenarios, managing your headers and what not.
The only bad part is that it essentially removes the ability for newcomers to just install clang and hello the fucking world into existence.

Mind you, using the Mingw installation is possible still. I-just-don't-fuckig-understand-why-the-fucking-official-build WORKS

THIS is why people are trying to jump into other languages. My dude's shit is solved, but this fucking infuriates me. ANd go on, try googling "clang not building executable" and see how this shit is nowhere to be fucking found sdfksakjdfa

Some older woman in my building tried to cyberbully me. She found a back door because the building’s online message board emails everyone in the building and those emails have a link to email the author.

You bet I snitched on her to building management after she continued to email me after I had asked her to stop and told her that her email was offensive. I don’t tolerate people who make assumptions about my ethnicity and use that as a reason to send me demeaning messages.

And you bet I contacted the developers of the building’s message board about the backdoor. And of course they implied that I could have prevented this and sent me instructions. No, I could not have prevented this and those instructions they sent me would have never applied to my comment on the message board.

So today my colleague is installing new dependency to our react native project and do something cool with it.

Him: I already push it in new branch and make a pr, would you review and merge it to master.
Me: ok let me try first.
.
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Me: it is not working, i get this error.
Him: try change these xxx in xcode.
Me: ok, wait.
.
.
Me: now I get this error
Him: hmm... Try 'react-native link xxxx'
Me: ok
.
.
Me: I get same error like first error.
Him: now try 'react-native unlink xxxx'
Me: hmm... Wait.
.
.
Me: I still get same error, what's wrong?
Him: I don't know, it's working in my mechine .

*Me 'git reset - - hard' and try to build again.
**After building

Me: hey it's working after I git reset lol.
Him: nice
Me: let me clone it and try 1 more time.

*after cloning and building
.
.
Me: I still get same error like 1st error hahaha.
Him: so try to 'react-native link xxx' again.
Me: OKkK
.
.
Me: still get same error
Him: try git reset and build again
Me: hmm
.
.
*after git reset and build again
Me: I still get same error. I think the correct steps is :
1. Clone
2. Do something in xcode
3. React native link
4. React native unlink
5. Git reset - - hard
6. Build

I can't stop laughing 😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂🤣😂

A few months back I was talking with our web team and we determined a ticketing software would be useful for clients to submit website updates. Rather than request we buy one, because we constantly get told to stop spending, I spent my free time building it out. We tested it and decided it was ready to present to management.

Management tells us that clients aren't going to use something like this (4 fields and optional file upload). The project sits in a repo untouched for some months.

<Time passes>

Company-wide email come in announcing our brand new ticket system for clients to submit issues about our software. Then a second email comes in to me asking why the web team never thought to do something like that and went on about how useful it would be if we had something similar. I link them to the one I built and my notes from our previous meeting.

Manager who told me clients would never use this: Let's talk about this next week and see if we can get people to use it.

It's been 3 weeks and the meeting has been rescheduled 5 times.

So, i'm trying to get linkr (a pretty cool short link service) to work in a docker container since 4 hours now to host it on my server. There is no official container because it needs a working database connection and stuff during installation which can only be done via console and (for whatever reason I couldn't find out yet) need to be done while building the container. The problem is, I can't connect it to the database while building the container so there is no database during installation to create tables and stuff and the build will fail. ARGH.
Why the hell would you do this????? Theyre actually saying in their readme there is no dockerfile because the config options are specific to your configuration...?!?!
The thing is entirely written in python, so reading and parsing configfiles on the fly should not really be a problem.

Of course I could ssh into the container and run the installation script but that's not the point.

Docker is not about being lazy.
It's about portability.
Maybe I don't want to bloat my server with your 39579372639 npm dependencies? Or I don't want to install a freakin apache, because I have every other site on nginx and therefore wouldn't work with apache.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHHGGGGG

in the end, I'm probably going to modify the thing to install tables when running the container and giving the first user admin rights instead of prompting to enter credentials for a new admin user.
And yet I didn't even speak python.

Just wondering, so many people are building extensions for devRant but I didn't find any APIs anywhere. Can someone help me with a link where I can find these? Thanks :)

So let's do a "community building" exercise.

What was your biggest tech pet peeve?

I'll start:
I hate it when people (especially teachers) give us a printout with a link to a website (like a good docs link) without shorting it.

I mean, we have to type out that 100+ character string of random numbers and letters. Then you make a mistake and have to retype it. (I.k,. First world problems)

Let's here yours. It can be about employers, teachers, or anyone else you can think of.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

Building a click/link insight tool. Might leverage geobytes.com. Nice API's, geolocation data and free/low cost pricing.

My last post entails how my company moved me to a freelancing role upon completion of my task (VoIP micro service: incoming and outgoing calls, voice mail drop, voice mail greeting, call forwarding, sms, and a couple more features) — app is now live and used by company’s agents to contact leads on our other products (designing), so boss tells HR to tell me (I realized this from HR’s slack screen when on huddle with me) to add WhatsApp integration. I responded that since I’m a freelancer I would charge $30/hour for it. HR said he’d get back to me and it’s been 3 working days now.

They are also trying to have the app on Apps*mo so they cash out for other companies to use the app.

It’s been 2 weeks and a day since the end of my probation (I’ve been with them for 3 months) and no one has acknowledged this — I also wrote to my boss asking why management won’t acknowledge this but three days after probation they changed my role. Same company that held off my offer later to two months later in the job to offer a Senior Python Developer role as “HR has Covid and could not send it until now”.

He has not responded to my message. Pretty much no salary for me these past few days.

I’m now looking for other jobs. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch AGAIN a VoIP micro service and I plan on making it public and free upon completion.

BUT I feel the company might take action against me. Do note that I did not sign the offer letter as the link had 3 days expiration and HR said he would send a new one but never did, even after I reminded him at least 2 days in a week.

____
While typing this, I got the urge to proceed regardless any circumstance.

#Suphle Rant 1: Laravel closing the gap

This is the first of a series of long overdue rants regarding Suphle, because I have had so so much to grumble about over the last ~2 years building it. A bit of introduction: I compiled a list of all the challenges I faced in my time as a salaried PHP developer. I also gathered issues complained about by other developers in a laravel group I'm part of, and decided to solve them at the framework level since they're avoidable. I also borrowed impressive features encountered in my time working with other languages and invented a new one, as well. I quit my job last July, still haven't get a new one yet cuz office workload kept conflicting with Suphle development. I concluded all work and testing on it back in August/September but it's yet to be officially released since the docs is still in progress.

Anyway, yesterday, I stumbled upon what is IMO the most progressive /tangible update I've seen in all my time following Laravel updates. It's called [precognition](don't have enough rep to post the PR link but you can search on their repo), and contains features that are actually beneficial to both developer and end user. It also turns out to be functionality that was part of Suphle's bragging rights. Their DX is still tacky but I'm devastated cuz it's a matter of time before they work it out. Makes me wonder what the quality of all I've built would be in a year if it doesn't become big enough to attract frequent contribution. I guess there's only so much one can do against a community.

Later that evening, I found a developer from my country on twitter who claims to be making a decent living. A little snooping around his profile informed me he's building his own back end framework but in NodeJS. I know with every degree of certainty that what he'll eventually do can't hold a candle against Suphle in overall functionality or thoroughness. Not a dick measuring contest but when your motive isn't significant innovation, you'll neither plan properly nor even know what exactly to build. You'll just reinvent the wheel as an academic exercise

Yet, I can't help but have that sinking feeling he's winging it, while making a windfall with his dozens of freelance projects. It kind of feels like I shortchanged myself, and Suphle's shelf life will suffer the same fate as a hobby project for 10 stars (which I don't even have yet!!). I reached out to him to rub minds together but he ignored. More pain.

I'll get over this and return to work on the docs, but from the look of things, the end isn't an appealing or expected /deserved one

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