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Search - "local environment"
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Long but worth it...
So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.
Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)
I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...
Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"
Long pause
D: "Uh... Apparently not..."
Another long pause
D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"
Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."
D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"
This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!
A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...
I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.
This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...
PS. First Post!26 -
Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜
Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.
First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.
Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.
Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.
Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.
Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.
linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)
How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!
One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)
Dealing with different kinds of attacks:
Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.
So yah, hereby :P39 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
So I was looking at the linux environment at my new job. Found 2 VM's in the local network, only one of them is documented. Noone knows about the other one or what it does, let alone usernames and passwords.
Spent over an hour trying to break in, only to find out that a couple of bored devs, that have long since left the company, set up a game server on there and noone noticed it for the past 3 years..5 -
Continued…
The company that I’m working for has done lots of subtle racist things surrounding diversity policy. There was a major blowout between execs and suddenly all went quiet. The guy that was hired against my recommendation was gone. Until early January when he showed up at our building to raid our kitchen. WTF. It turns out HR decided to move him to the other office and out of sight so my team wouldn’t see him. He isn’t working on a project and is getting paid on the bench for more than the 100% billable devs.
After I saw him bumming around, I replied to a recruiter that has been trying to recruit me to their company.
The position pays 25% more 😲 and comes with a an amazingly relaxed development environment. Developer time is managed and allocated by someone in a dedicated role. 80% of the time is sprint work and the rest is self-driven projects or learning. Teams are stable, mostly local, and there is very low turnover. Developers get Mac or Linux computers.
I’m doing an executive meet and greet at the other company tomorrow. They will be the ones that will make me the final offer. I feel pretty good about it too because they will let me sign up to start in a month and a half so I can give a long notice, work until the end, and my current company can hire me back as a consultant in a pinch. It softens the blow for my current company and it makes it easy for me.
Worst case scenario I don’t take the position but use it for leverage. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely jump ship when negotiation is done tomorrow.
https://devrant.com/rants/2338969/...8 -
Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".
You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.
Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.
So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.
Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.
There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.8 -
Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.
No dedicated tester means less expenses.
No personal parkspot?
No expenses!
And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!
Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.
Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.
You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.
Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.
It would be nice if you could build apps as well.
You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.
You finished the site?
Great!
But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.
All hail their crazy company!2 -
I showed a friend of mine a project I made in two days in Docker and Symfony php. It is a rather simple app, but it did involve my usual setup: Nginx with gzip/cache/security headers/ssl + redis caching db + php-fpm for symfony. I also used php7.4 for the lolz
He complained that he didn't like using Docker and would rather install dependencies with composer install and then run it with a Laravel command. He insisted that he wanted a non-docker installation manual.
I advised him to first install Nginx and generate some self-signed certificates, then copy all the config files and replace any environment-injected values (I use a self-made shell script for this) with the environment values in the docker-compose files.
Then I told him to download php-fpm with php 7.4 alpha, install and configure all the extensions needed, download and set up a local Redis database and at last re-implement a .env file since I removed those to replace them with a container environment.
He sent an angry emoji back (in a funny way)
God bless containerized applications, so easy to spin up entire applications (either custom or vendor like redis/mysql) and throw them away after having played with them. No need to clutter up your own pc with runtime environments.
I wonder if he relents :p9 -
A senior engineer with about 8 experience in my team and company for almost a year now. Believe it or not, still hasn't setup local dev environment.
Every time we ask this person to set it up / refer to guide in Confluence / or just use the docker image the person says ok.
Starts sending code for pull request. The code would not even compile in most cases just from a quick scan. When questioned how was this tested, answer would be more or less 'oh my local setup not working, could you test it out for me.'
Doesn't know how to write tests. Fairly recently instead of storing string values in a list, (I swear am not kidding) decided to come up with 20 string variables.
8 years plus experience! I think this is retarded even for a fresh grad.9 -
This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.
About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).
I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.
My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.
Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).
Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.
I'm going to have an aneurysm6 -
*Creates a rest api that runs on localhost:8080*
*Creates React front end that runs on localhost:3000*
*Sends a GET request to api*
*Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy...*
Thats my fucking dev environment and its my local fucking host! Let me just send a fucking request to my own fucking machine you piece of shit! Why the fuck they didn't add an exclusion to fucking localhost?!?11 -
Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:
Me:
Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files
Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software
Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP
IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files
Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp
Network: No internet access, internal company network only
Web browser: IE 6
Graphical design software: msPaint
Version control: Emails
Team communication: Emails
Software distribution vector: Emails
Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers
Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.11 -
My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!3 -
> Some unit test is not behaving well in my local environment
> Weird, I should print the response from the server, maybe the client isn't receiving what I think it's receiving
> see this
SAY SIKE RIGHT NOW9 -
Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.
First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.
Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.
Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.
Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.
Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.
What a shitty start to a career as a developer.
Anybody having a similar experience?5 -
at the begin of the year I started working as contractor for a company which development environment was a shit machine in the basement...shared by all developers via ssh, that's right, no local development.
Who the hell needs virtual machines, Vagrant, Docker?
You break something while working? It's broken for everybody.
A.D. 2017
The other developers seemed fine with it.2 -
Have a couple I want to air today.
First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...
Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).
Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.
The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.
One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.
To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:
switchport access vlan add XYZ
My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.
Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...
Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled. -
So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.3 -
Today in horror stories: setting up the local dev environment for a project I'm taking over creates changes and notifications in prod.
Oh and my local dev env is somehow receiving data from actual patients. I don't know how.9 -
Just learned that yesterday someone suggested putting the dev team on "workspace", when I was on leave.
My first question, "what the hell is workspace?"
"It's a remote environment..."
Okay I get it. Are you kidding me? Doing development on remote desktop?
My second question, "Why the hell did someone suggest that?"
"We have had issues with devs using MySQL but the target prod will be using PostgreSQL. That caused issues, inconsistencies... And we found some issues after deployment."
Okay so much for DB agnostic. I called it out that everyone now install PostgreSQL on local. Problem solved, hopefully.
Why we had MySQL in the first place? Yes DB agnostic is one of the reason. The other being I'm more familiar with MySQL so it's quicker to perform tasks (like "can you clone that environment for me" and "can you fix the data on XYZ"). But that's trivial.
Just some ridiculous suggestion that set me off.7 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Definitely Docker.
Do whatever you want, whenever you want.
The pinnacle of flexibility.
Try out everything, without installing anything.
Deploy with the same environment you're developing with on your local machine.
It's brilliant! -
> Laravel lets you create migrations to manage the state of the DB
> your colleague doesn't give a flying fuck, just raw SQL on the db to perform every change
> performed initial insertions without seeders, can't reproduce his db on my local environment
> can't even run migrations anymore 'cause it would break everything7 -
Today the struggle was real.
But damn if it isn't days like this where you learn real shit.
Fighting with a debian VM for half the day to make a local development environment. I'm tired, but everything works, the project looks good, and I'm just sorta angry/tired/proud now.
I learned so much, and now want pie. I am going to go eat some pie.3 -
So last week I really fucked up
I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.
So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.
Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"
FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!
Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.
Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.
Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert1 -
Today was successful. I deployed an app to a dev environment that worked perfectly on local. When I asked if it was ready for QA I said "no, there is issues that need attention"
I am now the proud owner of 75 QA emails of things that do not work. Luckily they're all duplicates of the same issue.
Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu1 -
Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.
Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!
Because Yes we can!
Beep boop.7 -
Follow up on a previous rant:
I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.
It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.
These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.
They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.
I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.
No one knows if they even have source code.
Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.1 -
About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.
When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.
My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"
Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.
Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.
The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.
Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now. -
Developing in your local environment? A few bugs here and there. Deploying it to production in a completely different environment? The whole app is a bug...3
-
Someone posted this to our shared channel. I'm so tired of people thinking that developers "just need to push a few buttons".
Am I crazy for believing that all I can accomplish in 4 hours is read their documentation (or there lack of), and maybe write few tests for the slew of things they'll be asking for??? And maybe, just maybe, get my local environment running.
Why does everyone think that developers know the location of the "magic button"???3 -
just discovered mailcatcher. love it! <3
can iterate over e-mail template in local environment now3 -
New twist on an old favorite.
Background:
- TeamA provides a service internal to the company.
- That service is made accessible to a cloud environment, also has a requirement to be made available to machines on the local network so you can develop against it.
- Company is too cheap/stupid to get a s2s vpn to their cloud provider.
- Company also only hosts production in the cloud, so all other dev is done locally, or on production non-similar infra, local dev is podman.
- They accomplish service connectivity by use of an inordinately complicated edge gateway/router/firewall/message translator/ouija board/julienne fry maker, also controlled by said service team.
Scenario:
Me: "Hey, we're cool with signing requests using an x509 cert. That said, doing so requires different code than connecting to an unsecured endpoint. Please make this service accessible to developer machines and lower environments on the internal network so we can, you know, develop."
TeamA: "The service should be accessible to [cloud ip range]"
Me: "Yes, that's a production range. We need to be able to test the signing code without testing in production"
TeamA: "Can you mock the data?"
Me: "The code we are testing is relating to auth, not business logic"
TeamA: "What are you trying to do?"
Me: "We are trying to test the code that uses the x509 you provide to connect to the service"
TeamA: "Can you deploy to the cloud"
Me: "Again, no, the cloud is only production per policy, all lower environments are in the local data center"
TeamA: "can you try connecting to the gateway?"
Me: "Yes, we have, it's not accessible, it only has public DNS, and only allows [cloud ip range]"
TeamA: "it work when we try it"
Me: "Can you please supply repro steps so we can adjust our process"
TeamA: "Yes, log into the gateway and try issuing the call from there"
Me: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
tl;dr: Works on my server -
Next weeks rant theme should be worst dev day.
Any how today I fucked up at a whole new level. First ran a script thinking I am deleting my local dev environment.
*An Eternity later*
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkkkk
That dreaded script ran on main dev server and fucked up the server used by a team of 15+ teammates. Dead.2 -
TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.
Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...
It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.
Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.
Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.
4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"
fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??
Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.
Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."
So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?
We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.
This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...
😢😭
Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐
/rant1 -
Worst mistake ever :
Didn't care for changing environment while pip or apt, always did sudo for no reason.
One day installed Conda and unity. Didn't realise it changed everything to python3-gi. Everything fucked up.
Tried to fix by started removing Conda removed gnome*, lost GUI.
For first time worked on tty, after a 6 hour redbull session. Got back the system working.
First thing then done is learn to install in virtual and local environments.1 -
The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.
The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.
I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.
I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.
We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.
"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"
"Duh of course -- but let me check..."1 -
When you finally have some servers racked and configured in VMware to build a lab environment for the team....
But to access VMware you need to run citrix receiver from a mac to launch Chrome on Windows to access the VMware ESX Web UI but only on the HTML5 version as Flash doesn't work....
Now to spin up virtual machines that you can only upload via ova images but not locally cos that tries to show you the Windows citrix local files....
Do I even dare ask if I can access this via API so I can actually provision this with Ansible like I want too?! -
A newly joined developer (who was supposed to be very senior) comes and asks me how to write a test cos for some reason the person didn't know how to mock.
In Java,
(same for any other implementation which has an interface)
Writes Arraylist list =.....
Instead of List list = Arraylist...
Deployed code (another engineer from another country helped to deploy since this new senior dev didn't have access yet.
But the new senior dev didn't update relevant files in production code which brought down the site for nearly an hour. Mistake aside, the first reaction from this new senior dev is 'WHY DIDN'T THE DEV THAT WAS HELPING DIDN'T DO THE FILE UPDATE?'
This was followed by some other complaints such as our branching stragies are wrong. When in fact the new senior dev made a mistake by just making assumptions on our git branching strategies and we already advised on correct process.
Out of all these, guess this is the best part. The senior dev never tested code locally! Just wrote code, unit test and send to QA and somehow the test passed through. I learnt this when I realised this dev... has not even set up the local environment yet.
I keep saying new but this Senior dev been around like 3 months! This person is in another team within our larger team but shares same code base. I am puzzled how do you not set up your environment for 3 months. Don't you ask for help if you are stuck? I am pretty sure the env is still not setup.
Am I over reacting or is this one disgusting developer who doesn't even qualify for an intern let alone a senior dev? It's so revolting I can't even bring myself to offer help.8 -
I try to change my workplace to a local coffee shop or library.
That new environment and a good, large coffee really boost me -
Context: New to typescript. Writing a thing, doing it for work, good opportunity to stretch my dev legs. Using a propriety lib, alternatives not an option.
Rant begin:
SOOOO, who the fuck thought THIS was a good idea:
1. Lib has minified react in dev (because closed source) meaning no downstream errors AND the entire premise of the lib is that a widget is a react component, so I'm writing typescript react the entire time without downstream errors
2. SHIT docs. By that, I mean there's an API reference page that's so sparse there's literally a set of CRUCIAL interfaces that only say the word 'Interface' on them. That's it. that's what i get. It's an interface. NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK, what the fuck is it though? What's its purpose? Is it an interface for a dog? A dog that has a 'shit' property? or a cat? or a cat eating dog shit? Nobody fucking knows - the docs sure as fuck don't care.
3. No syntax highlighting - editors, IDEs (i've tried a few) can't even find the lib inside this environment, so Code and everything else thinks I'm importing shit that doesn't even exist - so no error prediction, code completion based on syntax of the library, none of that.
4. There are some EXTREMELY basic samples - these samples exclusively use React classes - no function components, no hooks, nada - just classes and even perfect replicas of the sample code display erratic behavior like errors about missing props, so that's mostly FUCKING USELESS
5. And this... this is where the straw breaks the fucking camel's back... there's no... there's no hot reloading... Do you know what that (in conjunction with the previous 4 fuckups) means?
When I write anything or I fuck up (which of course I'm doing every time I write half a line because how the fuck?) I have to restart the client and server EVERY FUCKING TIME and manually test to see if the error (THAT ONLY GETS REPORTED IN THE LOCAL UI) is gone or different.
Then, once I see the error, it isn't an error: it's the minified React error-decoder link and guess what? It isn't really clickable a link OR copyable, meaning that every FUCKING time I get a new error, I have to MANUALLY TYPE A FUCKING 50 CHAR URL TO FIND OUT A GENERIC REACT ERROR MESSAGE WITHOUT A LINE NUMBER OR ANY FUCKING CONTEXT. I HAVE TO DO THIS CONSTANTLY TO SEE IF ANYTHING I'M DOING EVEN WORKS.
6. There's no github to complain to the maintainers or search for issues because it's NOT FUCKING OPEN SOURCE so there is literally nothing to be fucking done about it.
This is due in a week and a half, found out about it last Friday. How's your day going?
PS: good to be back after a long respite from dev ranting.1 -
Crazy deadlines> Director: "You need to design a new architecture that has failover, multi-AZ, automated deployments, CI/CD pipeline, automated builds/tests as well, for our new SaaS product. You have 3 days to complete it"
Me: "Ok cool. Do we have the new product developed? Can I have the spec docs of the new software, libs and packages required for the env?"
Product Lead: "No we dont have anything yet. The POC is on my local PC, but I dont know what packages are needed to run it"
Me: "So I cant design anything unless I have the minimum requirements to run the new software"
Director: "Just get it up and running in a live environment and we'll take it from there"
Me: *sigh*..this is going to be a big mistake -
Today’s text chat:
Me walking near the river in the middle of nowhere with a cellphone.
frontend developer:
- I need image from test server. Can you provide me that image ? I need it for my local environment to fix something ( writes details of how to get an image ).
me:
- Can’t you go to test server website and get it by yourself ?
frontend developer:
- But this image is on canvas element.
me:
- Because frontend is drawing in on canvas so go to network tab and get the url.
frontend developer:
- Ah yes I can do that
I have such small talks all the fucking time. They accumulate when I go out to chill during the day.1 -
Well, we have a designer/front-ender who's forced to work the same way the devs work (local development environment), yet he doesn't understand a single thing he's doing.
I'm pretty sure he's never going to understand it, and I feel like he's better off just doing UI/UX, he's pretty good at that!1 -
"If you would just switch to a Mac!" is a valid argument to solve local development environment complaints.
-
Had a 5 hour call today, where we wanted to set up a system from one of our subcontractors in our own environment. Struggled forever to get the backend up and running.
Turns out that some dependencies were hardcoded as local file URLs...
No, our linux machine does not have C:\Users\<username> 🙄 -
When the login form tells me that my password is too short. The password that I've manually set in the database in my local dev environment.3
-
!rant from a support guy
I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know
My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.
So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!
Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.
* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.
After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)
And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!4 -
Q: How instantaneous are these jobs? *referring to a Jenkins job to upload database from local to an environment
A: Well that depends on your network speed. Here in the middle of nowhere, I have a donkey carries the package up the mountain, so that could take a while.2 -
GitHub has launched Codespaces : A feature that lets you code directly on the web {as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud}.
According to the Github Blog: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.
In addition to Codespaces, GitHub is also launching Discussions : A forum-like feature that lives under your project that allows others to engage with you and other contributors.
Code scanning : With code scanning enabled, every git push is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request.19 -
That moment when you forget you're on the live environment and you git pull --rebase from an old repo because you thought you were on a local box and you set the wrong url for the git project.
-
Who the fuck thought java development is okay on a VDI ! Eclipse runs shit even on local environment and running it on a vm located in a different country with 3gb of vram?
You want to do a file search? Wait for 5mins
You want to. Build via gradle. Wait for 15 min
Fucking idiots.1 -
I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...
I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.
The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.
The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.
My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.
While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.
If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.
I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.
Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.4 -
Family? What's that? 🤔
If anything they made me go to my room/corner because I couldn't stand them and I was always on the PC because I could distract myself from the local environment. 😢1 -
A developer couldn't get a application performance monitoring (APM) tool to trace his application. They claimed that their libraries and their configurations were alright and that the APM tool was non-performant.
The developer then argues with sysadmin that the APM tool can't trace the application and that there's nothing wrong with the application or the configurations. When sysadmin questions whether the developer got the tool to work anywhere, they say, "No" and head off to make it work at least in one place. They come back saying that it works on their development environment (which is their local machine). Sysadmin claims that the system configurations on the server instances cannot be matched by the development environment and there could be a lot more factors to be considered for the problem. The sysadmin asks to prove it on a server instance on one of the test environments and then they'd agree that it is a problem with the tool. They also argue that this is not the only application that uses the APM tool and the tool happily traces other applications with no issues.
The developer tries the same configuration on a staging instance and fails. In order to make it work, they silently uninstall the existing version of the APM tool and then compiles an unstable branch of the tool. It finally works with this version.
They go back to the sysadmin and show that it works on the staging environment, but does not on production. After banging their head on the wall for a while, the sysadmin figure that the tool had been swapped out for the unstable branch that was manually compiled. When questioned, the developer responds, "It works with this version on staging, so deploy the same version on production"
WTF? You don't deploy an unstable branch to production. Just because you can't make it work on the stable branch doesn't mean that it is the problem with the tool itself. There's a big difference between a stable branch and a non-stable branch. How would you feel if the sysadmin retorted by asking you to deploy the staging branch of your application to production? -
As my first dev job, I took over role of solo programmer maintaining all kinds of custom-made software used by local ISP. It was about 10 years ago.
My first question was where can I find test environment and repo. Apparently there was none and I should learn and develop on production.
My sin was to quickly give up on setting up both test and repo.
My second sin was to continue using the same copy&paste PHTML with register_globals enabled, building over it without attempting to refactor it with templates. I did not use globals in any new code at least.
And I suppose my third sin was that I was playing games when I was done with my tasks. I could have used that time to refactor a bit.
But I think in the end I was absolved from them since I was the only one suffering from this. I stayed with company until it got sold and helped migrate data over (along with myself). -
So, I encountered a classic case of the infamous "it works on my machine" excuse today. 🤦♂️ Seriously, folks, can we please put an end to this lazy and unprofessional behavior?
Picture this: I had just completed a feature in my code and passed it on to the QA team for testing. Confident that everything was running smoothly on my local environment, I expected a smooth sailing experience. But boy, was I wrong!
The QA team began testing the feature on different environments, and that's when the chaos ensued. What worked seamlessly on my machine seemed to transform into a monstrous bug fest on theirs. Panic set in, and I couldn't help but feel a mix of embarrassment and frustration.
Lesson learned: testing code thoroughly across various environments is crucial. No, seriously, it's an absolute must! That "it works on my machine" excuse is just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in your face.
From now on, I pledge to dedicate more time to thorough testing and consider the diverse environments our code will encounter. Let's save ourselves and our colleagues the headache and embarrassment caused by such oversights. Together, we can put an end to the reign of the "it works on my machine" excuse once and for all!7 -
everyone glorifies ethereum and its smart contracts, but the actual build tools and overall development environment around it sucks balls.
when testing a contract locally with truffle develop and metamask, you have to reinstall metamask after every transaction because it gets out of sync with your local chain... people are seriously okay with working with this shit?3 -
How about incompetent management? Company absolutely murders any possible increase in productivity. Laptop provided? Slow as balls. Takes minutes to log in. I get a Mac for mobile development and that's OK. SSD and adequate memory but I'm primarily a .NET Dev. Can't get on the network with a virtual machine. They won't I stall even a managed image. So can't use databases because they're all AD authenticated. Got a virtual desktop environment and that sucks worse in performance than the laptop. Add the Assault on local administration rights and the monitoring software that constantly thrashers any memory and hard drive usage and im about to quit over all this... All this decided by a non developer and not asked for our opinions. Yay large Enterprises
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I'm getting really astounded by how little my co-workers know about anything about server setups. I've created a local Docker environment that is to be used by everyone to help manage the applications, but NO ONE seems to understand what I made let alone know what Docker is. For some reason they see it as another VM.
They're just content with it works, I can run my PHP application, and if they have a problem, rather than try and find out themselves, they just come straight to me.
I can pretty much tell that this team is going to be screwed when I move onto my next role. -
The importance of not using static salt / IVs.
I've been working on a project that encrypts files using a user-provided password as key. This is done on the local machine which presents some challenges which aren't present on a hosted environment. I can't generate random salt / IVs and store them securely in my database. There's no secure way to store them - they would always end up on the client machine in plain text.
A naive approach would be to use static data as salt and IV. This is horrendously harmful to your security for the reason of rainbow tables.
If your encryption system is deterministic in the sense that encrypting / hashing the same string results in the same output each time, you can just compile a massive data set of input -> output and search it in no time flat, making it trivial to reverse engineer whatever password the user input so long as it's in the table.
For this reason, the IVs and salt are paramount. Because even if you generate and store the IVs and salt on the user's computer in plaintext, it doesn't reveal your key, but *does* make sure that your hashing / encryption isn't able to be looked up in a table1 -
A simple CSS change turned into me trouble shooting my local environment for hours...next time I'm just going cowboy 😑
-
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.
I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?
I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."1 -
#! usr/bin/rant
Our Entreprise CMS at work (obviously):
- inconsistent UI : check (misplaced buttons, some pages are more developed than others)
- slow: check (average 6 seconds of waiting, with cache)
- loading screen as page transitions covering the whole page, making it impossible to click somewhere else if mistaken, adding +3 seconds to loading : check
- time-based session, inlined in HTML and wildly disconnects you, making you lose all changes : check
- sometimes objects are inaccessible and can't do anything about it : check
- "delete" button next to "edit", delete is bigger and I have already clicked the delete button by accident : check
- can't have local development environment, need to work with integrated editor which has no helping features: check
- first TTFB: adds +2-6 seconds to loading time
TL;DR : a pleasant, developer-friendly, frustration- and rantless CMS to work with, reliable and fast. -
I feel super discouraged. I just got a new job from being let go from my previous one, and I’m already thinking about quitting.
They really threw me into the weeds with a couple of complex tasks that require a lot of BE work and all I really do is FE. I’m still just trying to learn how the framework actually works. I think they expect me to become full stack. Now I find myself just starting at the computer screen most of the day because I have no fucking idea how to start working. The codebase and local environment is also fucked up super bad and barely runs on my machine.
Also, whenever I reach out these people they give the most minimal answers and have swollen egos. The frameworks they use have a really shitty community and bad documentation, so googling anything is really pointless. Working on this project, it has made me consider giving up development.
I am wondering if this is just a me thing though. Should I quit or stick with it for a bit?13 -
After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...
So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.
Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.
Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.
Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...
So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.
Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).
We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).
I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...
Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks... -
The hype of Artificial Intelligence and Neutral Net gets me sick by the day.
We all know that the potential power of AI’s give stock prices a bump and bolster investor confidence. But too many companies are reluctant to address its very real limits. It has evidently become a taboo to discuss AI’s shortcomings and the limitations of machine learning, neural nets, and deep learning. However, if we want to strategically deploy these technologies in enterprises, we really need to talk about its weaknesses.
AI lacks common sense. AI may be able to recognize that within a photo, there’s a man on a horse. But it probably won’t appreciate that the figures are actually a bronze sculpture of a man on a horse, not an actual man on an actual horse.
Let's consider the lesson offered by Margaret Mitchell, a research scientist at Google. Mitchell helps develop computers that can communicate about what they see and understand. As she feeds images and data to AIs, she asks them questions about what they “see.” In one case, Mitchell fed an AI lots of input about fun things and activities. When Mitchell showed the AI an image of a koala bear, it said, “Cute creature!” But when she showed the AI a picture of a house violently burning down, the AI exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”
The AI selected this response due to the orange and red colors it scanned in the photo; these fiery tones were frequently associated with positive responses in the AI’s input data set. It’s stories like these that demonstrate AI’s inevitable gaps, blind spots, and complete lack of common sense.
AI is data-hungry and brittle. Neural nets require far too much data to match human intellects. In most cases, they require thousands or millions of examples to learn from. Worse still, each time you need to recognize a new type of item, you have to start from scratch.
Algorithmic problem-solving is also severely hampered by the quality of data it’s fed. If an AI hasn’t been explicitly told how to answer a question, it can’t reason it out. It cannot respond to an unexpected change if it hasn’t been programmed to anticipate it.
Today’s business world is filled with disruptions and events—from physical to economic to political—and these disruptions require interpretation and flexibility. Algorithms alone cannot handle that.
"AI lacks intuition". Humans use intuition to navigate the physical world. When you pivot and swing to hit a tennis ball or step off a sidewalk to cross the street, you do so without a thought—things that would require a robot so much processing power that it’s almost inconceivable that we would engineer them.
Algorithms get trapped in local optima. When assigned a task, a computer program may find solutions that are close by in the search process—known as the local optimum—but fail to find the best of all possible solutions. Finding the best global solution would require understanding context and changing context, or thinking creatively about the problem and potential solutions. Humans can do that. They can connect seemingly disparate concepts and come up with out-of-the-box thinking that solves problems in novel ways. AI cannot.
"AI can’t explain itself". AI may come up with the right answers, but even researchers who train AI systems often do not understand how an algorithm reached a specific conclusion. This is very problematic when AI is used in the context of medical diagnoses, for example, or in any environment where decisions have non-trivial consequences. What the algorithm has “learned” remains a mystery to everyone. Even if the AI is right, people will not trust its analytical output.
Artificial Intelligence offers tremendous opportunities and capabilities but it can’t see the world as we humans do. All we need do is work on its weaknesses and have them sorted out rather than have it overly hyped with make-believes and ignore its limitations in plain sight.
Ref: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/...6 -
When it's faster to just deploy the change to the test server than it is to test on the local test environment that never fucking works. #JustProgrammerThings
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Intern spent about a week trying to set up a local ruby on rails environment. Yeah, this is not really on topic, it wasn't that bad, but it's what comes to mind.
I don't know who modelled the databases I've had to work with these past months but god damn it no fucking normalization anywhere. Inconsistent data just cost me my morning.1 -
[semi-rant, kinda-story]
Day two: Managed to persuade IntelliJ IDEA into, uh, functioning.
Although it still does funky stuff like trying to force JDK v6 for bytecode compiled from Kotlin (the project's not even legacy spaghetti and JDK v6 isn't even installed).
Still had a few problems while setting up the rest of the local dev environment of the project I'm assigned to (which has been caused by documentation accidentally being followed in the wrong order, which I updated in turn, in order to prevent other people from doing the same mistake), but now I can finally work on tickets!
I love that not all tickets are marked as urgent or important, only a few!
Now the fun begins 😎2 -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
It's a career suicide wanting to transitioning to desktop developement? I'm tired of fighting with tons of external dependencies (VPN, database, other microservices) just to test a microservice or a piece of front-end, I just want to focus on code.
My job description is software developer but I'm spending more time playing the sysadmin to keep my local developement environment working than what I spend actually coding.5 -
Do you ever have days where you get absolutely nothing done, because of a local environment problem. My xdebug would break on break points but once you stepped to the next breakpoint it would halt execution of the code... It worked fine yesterday!!!!! Arghhh1
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Coworker: "Hey, so I discovered this library that automatically brings up and tears down local containers to perform unit tests on data sources"
Me: "Sounds neat"
Coworker: "Yeah, I've been messing with it locally, and it means we don't need to have the data sources installed on our machines or rely on the ones in the testing environment."
Me: "That's good"
Coworker: "Just a shame I had to roll back our testing framework to a previous version and refactor the code in all our other tests as a result."
Me: "Wait what? *looks at documentation* It says they support the newer framework"
Coworker: "Yeah, but I couldn't get it to work. So I'm just gonna make a PR for it, okay?" *Proceeds to make a PR, approve and merge the code before I can comment further on the changes*
Welp, there goes all my motivation to get anything done for the rest of the day.3 -
#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails
Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end
While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)
Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request
While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!
I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests
For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me
Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements
While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8
My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working
I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4 -
Fuck you System dot fucking Value fucking tuple you stupid piece of shit reference. This garbage half the time won’t install properly on local, app works fine on local without it, then I fight with it for hours getting it to work on the server because the server is a different .NET environment. It’s always this one giving me problems, always.
So go fuck yourself System.ValueTuple -
Seriously !!!! I did not agreed for any data collection.
Welcome to .NET Core!
---------------------
Learn more about .NET Core @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-docs. Use dotnet --help to see available commands or go to https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-docs.
Telemetry
--------------
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to improve your experience. The data is anonymous and does not include commandline arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community.
You can opt out of telemetry by setting a DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to 1 using your favorite shell.
You can read more about .NET Core tools telemetry @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry.
Configuring...
-------------------
A command is running to initially populate your local package cache, to improve restore speed and enable offline access. This command will take up to a minute to complete and will only happen once.
Decompressing 100% 3803 ms
Expanding 100% 17279 ms -
Task on freelancer : There are (too) many adblocker detection plugins. I want you to select one, test it at your local development environment (we will not provide) that it does the following:
- reliably discovers an AdBlocker
- does not interfere with regular ad serving (AdSense) if no AdBlocker is installed at user's browser
****- shows alternate banners (coming from our servers, so they look like regular pictures instead) even when AdBlocker is active *******
OKAY Now reality was that pre thought, pondered by PM ?
anyway adblocks seems doing Acceptable ads* which might be payed for ;)1 -
Jesus fucking christ, fuck angular sometimes ... most of the times. just fuck it
And fuck me even more for writing such shit components when I started out with it.
Takes forever to find the shit that isn't working due to angulars magic change detection and the shittx performance of local dev environment.
Has to run in JIT because the app it too big, and then it takes 10 sec to build everytime you change something. And during that time i get a 100% cpu usage which kills vscode so I cant do anything properly
fuck it, i just wanna have a nice weekend now1 -
"Ultimate beginner" guides that leave you hanging, because it isn't a beginners guide!
Trying Firebase (coming from vanilla JS) and it works fine in local enviroment. Tries it on server: nope. That environment is different, with different paths and multiple "roots" (addon domains).
Google that? Sure. Nobody has had this issue. Stackoverflow doesn't seem to know (or care).
"Ultimate beginner" guides that leave you hanging, because it isn't a beginners guide..11 -
Microsoft announced a new security feature for the Windows operating system.
According to a report of ZDNet: Named "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection", which allows applications to use the local CPU hardware to protect their code while running inside the CPU's memory. As the name says, it's primary role is to protect the memory-stack (where an app's code is stored during execution).
"Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" works by enforcing strict management of the memory stack through the use of a combination between modern CPU hardware and Shadow Stacks (refers to a copies of a program's intended execution).
The new "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" feature plans to use the hardware-based security features in modern CPUs to keep a copy of the app's shadow stack (intended code execution flow) in a hardware-secured environment.
Microsoft says that this will prevent malware from hijacking an app's code by exploiting common memory bugs such as stack buffer overflows, dangling pointers, or uninitialized variables which could allow attackers to hijack an app's normal code execution flow. Any modifications that don't match the shadow stacks are ignored, effectively shutting down any exploit attempts.5 -
I spent ~12h working on a simple issue/bug.
7h was spent on rebuilding local dev environment which is a clusterfuck of maven profiles, tomcat, some autogenerated degeneracy, and 2 different build systems for JS.
5h spent on actual bug fixing, code reviews and so on.
FML2 -
So the first 3 hours at work on a Monday have been spent giving technical support to fellow co-workers on THEIR OWN local development environment. I have no idea how they've set everything up but they want me to fix their VM's.
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When you ask for a local dev server for ages so your not running on live environment and your given an iMac to use as a server /facepalm
And to make it worse... was asked if that iMac could still be used as a dev machine at the same time!
No I installed ESXi on it now (managed to get that working) massive facepalm1 -
Today our PM planned to deploy in production an e-commerce based on PrestaShop.
A colleague of mine mamaged to implement everything that was necessary, and I made a small script to add random sales on random products every sunday.
We tested it several times in our environment, on multiple machines, and everything was working fine.
BUT
Today we launched the script on production server, and we was a little mistake.
"A bug? Say no more pal, I'll fix it!".
Fixed, tested on local environment, deployed and.... The first steps weren't working.
"Fatal error".
That's what I got. No exceptions, no error messages, no references.. Just "fatal error".
We spent two hours looking for the problem, thinking it was a server error that was just outputting that shitty message.
And you know what? Some fucking fat cocksucker son of a bitch thought it was an excellent idea to stop the code execution with a simple and very helpful "fatal error".
"oh, wait, there is an error here, let me print die(" fatal error"), ao the other developer will be able to find what's going on", he thought.
FUCK YOU MORON.
TL;DR: Avoid French software, they are a bounch of asshole (except some goos guy..) -
I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:
- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough
despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.
*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market2 -
Local company has an API service that I'm interested in playing with. Most services would just have you sign up or just read the open api docs. But not this one. Wants me to jump through hoops because its part of their "KYC" policy. I just want to test something before I think of using it for real and they can't provide any test accounts/environment for that. Oh well, at least, I can document my rough experience and perhaps guide others to do and use (or not use) it.
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What are you using for local environment? I'm stuck on xampp for 10 years. I realized that I'm having terrible pipeline from developing to production.6
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Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?
I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?
Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out
Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from
I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off
Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well11 -
Not a rant, but seeking advice...
Should I abandon 2 years' worth of work on migrating a personal project from SQL (M$) to a Graph database, and just stick to SQL? And only consider migrating when/if I need graph capabilities?
The project is a small social media platform. Has around ~50 monthly active users.
Why I started the migration in the first place:
• When researching databases, I read that for social media, graph is more suitable. It was, at least in terms of query structure. It was more natural, there were no "joins", and queries were much simpler than their SQL counterparts.
• In case the project got big, I didn't want to have to panic-deal with database issues that come with growth. I had some indexing issues with MSSQL, and it got me worried that at 50MAU I'm having these issues, what would happen if I get more?
• It's a personal project, and the Gremlin language and graph databases looked cool and I was motivated to learn something new.
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Why I'm considering aborting the migration:
• It's taking too damn long. I'm unable to work on other features because this migration is taking up all my free time. Sunk cost fallacy is hitting me hard with this one.
• In local testing within docker, it's extremely slow. I tried various graph engines (janusgraph, official tinkerpop, orientdb), and the fastest one takes 4-6minutes to complete my server tests. SQL finishes the same tests in under 2 minutes, same docker environment. I also tried running my tests on a remote server (AWS neptune) and it was just as slow. Maybe my queries are bad, but can I afford to spend even more time fine tuning all queries?
• I now realise that "graph = no scalability issues" was naïve of me, and 100% wishful thinking. Scalability issues don't care what database I use, but about how well tuned and configured the whole system is.
• I really want to move on. My tech stack is falling behind and becoming outdated. I'm unable to maintain dependencies.
• I'm worried about losing those 50 MAU because they're essential to gaining traction once I release the platform. I keep telling them about the migration but at some point (2 years later) they're going to get bored I feel.
I guess partially it's a rant because I feel like I shouldn't stop now having spent 2 years on this, but at the same time I feel like I'm heading towards a dead end.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading:)10 -
Where can find an all in one guide to set up/configure a ELK environment manually from the tars (not yum, apt-get, docker image)?
I am following the component docs from Elastic but not sure how each component integrates with each other or how to set the mongo connection (DB is not local)5 -
Wasted over two hours today on a stupid bug: for some reason, every event was handled two times on my local machine.
Why? Because although all services are readonly after instantiation, the EventDispatcher isn't: it is modified when registering event handlers. Meaning the very same instance of the actual EventSubscriber was reused for the async- and sync event dispatcher. Which are just simple wrappers for primary and secondary use cases, but use the _same_ instance of the actual EventSubscriber in my dev-environment as I now know.
Thankfully a shallow clone did the trick. Of course it would be possible to simply create a new instance, but this is one of the few services which are autoconfigured by the framework.
Don't know what to make of this to be honest. "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes!" I guess... -
I have some homework todo:
1.- Install & config a lemp environment for testing
1.1.- Maybe mongoDB & nodejs
2.- Install & config a gitlab server
3.- Config a local DNS -
I wish there is an open source alternative to forge or serverpilot. Not to use on production servers but for local development environment.
Yes, I'm not a command line person.4 -
What's the most sensible way to build and use 32/64-bit libraries with MSYS on Windows? Specifically, I am wondering about zlib and libpng along with SDL2.
I know there are pre-built versions available, but I am inevitably going to need to build other libraries in future.
I'm expecting things to go into /usr/local (which they do), but I'd like to have separate builds for 32-bit and 64-bit. I know I can put things into "lib32" or "lib64" using ./configure options pretty easily, but DLLs (e.g. SDL) seem to end up in "bin" so I assume I should create a "bin32" and "bin64" for those?
Then there's the issue of e.g. libpng not being able to find zlib's headers when using its MSYS makefile... Should I be editing these makefiles? It looks as though I should (things are commented-out etc.) but when I want to update to a newer version, I'll need to modify the makefile again.
It probably sounds like a really silly set of questions but I've always found that building and installing libraries on Windows feels really clumsy and I just want to make sure I'm not making a really messy dev environment.