As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Professor: "Who here regularly backs up all their data?"
*Some people raise their hands*
Professor: "Who has at some point lost their data?"
*The exact same people raise their hands*

Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

A "support" guy my boss got in. I had told my boss numerous times, "Get rid of this guy, he's only wasting our time and money. And he's going to end up doing something where we will end up having to put out the fires."

Sure as a pair of nuts on a squirrel, this crazy bastard goes and DELETES a client's database. Yes folks, in fucking production. A live database. The heart of the business' transactions are... *poof*... GONE!!!

No backups for the day! No synchronisation beforehand! No nothing... just GONE!!! Fucking flat-lining!

Well, when I realised what he has done, I had to remove myself from the room before shit got outta hand!

I told the boss man that is the last straw and he needs to go...

The long and short of it...
- The client had luckily only lost about half a days data.
- I'm no longer at the company.
- This dumb fuck still is.

Got into the monday tech meeting, CTO be like: we lost 10% of users due to last version, terrible I know, but that's really valuable data, I want you to find out why they left.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.

Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.

I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.

They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.

I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.

I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.

I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.

At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.

One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.

I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.

I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.

TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.

Live long and prosper. Peace.

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

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

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

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

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

What an awful day :(

The server where I host my 4 clients websites crashed.

Unable to reboot from the console.

I contact the support. 15 minutes later: "we'll look at this"

No news for 1 week despite my messages.

Then... 1st ticket escalation... 2nd ticket escalation... 3rd ticket escalation...

Answer: "Sorry, your server is down and cannot be repaired."

Fuck.

I ask "is there any way to get my data back?". Answer: "No, because we would shutdown the whole bay and all our clients would be impacted".

Fuck.

I subscribe to another server, at another provider.

I look at my backups... shit, the last one is 4 month ago!!

I restore the first website: OK

I restore the second website: OK

I restore the third website: My new server is "too recent" and not compatible. with this old Wordpress. Fuck! I'll look at this later...

I restore the fourth website: database is empty!! What??? I look at the SQL backup for this site... it failed...

I lost ALL my 4th client data!!!

I'm sooooo piece of crap!

(The exact opposite of a rant, yay)
My school gave everyone in my class (and the two other 10th-grade CS classes) these neat 64GB USB sticks.

They are our property (paid by our fee every student has to pay every year so the school can afford paper for the printers, school books, and other materials such as USB sticks for 10th graders), but we have to keep some files for a lesson on the root of the USB (currently ~900MB).
That's not an issue, personal files go in my _Personal folder anyway.

Of course, I wanted to VeraCrypt all my USB drives I use at school, but since I don't have admin rights at our school and they use Windows 10, I just used BitLocker. Good enough, the only thing I want to achieve with encryption is other students being unable to read data off a lost drive (such as my _Personal data)

Also this stick is hella fast even with BitLocker enabled, 200 MB/s (minus 13 MB/s with enabled BitLocker) sequential r/w speed according to CrystalDiskMark.

Saw a video of an interview on Cloud Computing...
That genius guy says: "Cloud computing is highly risky. Because if it rains, all the data will be lost."

My 1.5 year old 1tb SSD just died unexpectedly. (Samsung EVO 850). It might be under warranty yet.

Fortunately the only data I lost was my debian install, some steam games, bookmarks, and a few unfinshed projects.

I kept everything important on a backup spinning drive -- which is also dying. Joy. But I might be able to save its data.

What I did wrong during my home office cleaning session this morning:
- put soap on my mouse mat
- snapped my enter key
- vacuumed up my F8 key
- absent-mindedly cut my ethernet cable
- lost my zero key
- dropped my backup hard drive (data was recoverable, but I need a new drive)
- lost one of the nose pads on my glasses
- got a cocktail stick stuck in a USB port
- exploded my mouse by using the wrong type of battery

Things I did good:
- nothing

Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

One:

Had a stack of harddrives with my important data, two USB drives and a 4.7gb disc, two or three cloud storage accounts.

Needed a restore:
Knocked the stack of hard drives onto the floor (all broken), stood on one of the flash drives, found the other one in a pocket of a pair of trousers which just came out of the washing machine, dvd too scratched to read and couldn't verify my cloud storage account because I lost the password to the connected email account and the backup email account to verify that one didn't exist anymore. Fucking hell.

Two:

Production database with not that much yet but at least some production data which wasn't backupped.
Friend: can I reboot the db machine?
Me: yup!
Friend: what's the luks crypt password?
Me: 😯😐😓😫😲😧😭

End of story 😅

For the record, the first one actually happened (I literally cried afterwards) and that taught me to update my recovery email addresses more often!

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

Some data get lost during copy.The limit of clipboard exceeded so that's why pasted data is smaller :D

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

Fuck yes for data hoarding! Wanted to start on a project again but thought I lost everything.

Code is sill in git, (took me a while to find but whatever) database is still on my own laptop (due to ex/importing my entire local host as for databases every time I do a new installation).

Let’s get this fucker going again 😎

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

I had a manager who was a complete incompetent idiot (other than a fucking backstabber). He left the company ~3 weeks ago, yet I believe it would take 5 years to get rid of his legacy.

Today I discovered that one of his "genius ideas" led to the loss of months of data. This is already bad, but it's even more upsetting given that the records that have been lost are exactly the ones I needed to prove the validity of my project.

That fucking man keeps fucking with me even when he's not here, YOU DAMN ASSHOLE!!

I studied ancient languages, because of corruption in my home country, I couldn't find any place in academy although my scores were above 90%. Moved to another country and taught myself web development. Naturally in time I lost almost all my knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek, the whole ancient literature, history, philosophy and culture (everything from historical evolution of tremmas in letter i in ancient Greek to honey fish recipe in ancient Rome cousine). I'm super happy with Webdev tho but I think that also counts as data loss.

Today I announced to a customer (a shitty one) that we had lost all their data. When I was done explaining what happened, one of my employee turn to me and said :"oh! I know where the data are. I did a backup there". It was after 1 weeks of searching that the tech decided to tell us he knew where all the backup went... Now I have to call the customer again...

Probably the most rage inducing data loss story...
When it comes to my cellphone I'm a data hoarder, I store each relevant meme, conversation, video, contact, nudes, etc. Had to replace my phone? Easy, change the SD.

I did this for about 4 years, had over 11GB of almost everything and anything in a 36GB SD, one afternoon my buddies and I went to a small tech convention and on our way to my car we got mugged by 5 armed men.

They took my brand new phone along with my wallet and all my cash, luckily I had GPS tracking enabled and we were able to pinpoint the exact location of my phone within 30min.

So far so good...

We called the cops and went with them, we found the car with illegal plates and weapons inside (knives, a bat, gun) so I tell the robbers were in there inside a closed cyber cafe and showed him the point on the map confirming this.

Cop: oh we can't do that we don't have an order...
Me: are you kidding me, here's the GPS, there's the car, there's the weapons, doesnt that count as at least probable cause or some shit?
Cop: we don't have that in this country, you can file a report and after 3 business days we can come here to inquire.
Me: (fucking lost it) do you fucking think they'll be here in 3 days?! I'll give you 500 bucks if you go bust their ass now.
Cop: (thinks about it) but what if they are armed? [4 patrols, 8 cops, 4 rifles and at least 6 guns plus vests] Maybe if you had contacts within the bureau we could have an order now...

(┛✧Д✧))┛彡┻━┻

I lost a lot that day, including respect to this fucked up system.

t(ಠ益ಠt) FUCK THE POLICE go eat a dick.

Lost two machines with 10years+ of my work and files to the police after a raid some years ago...

They were used in a "crime" cuz I was chatting with my hemp supplier on one of the machines...no chance to get them back...

Oh man, I miss my data...

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

Best:
1. Get into Linux
2. Quit Med studies after 5 years and jump into the IT train.

Worst:
use windows tools to resize partitions on a dual-boot laptop. Lost all my data on Linux parttn. :(

So my in-laws got a new computer 😑
Yup you know where this is going. Ok so after I transferred all of their data set them all up etc.
They wanted to use "word" and could I set it up for free for them. I said no Microsoft office is not free you lost your license and disk and your old computer is trashed so the better choice would be Google services . So I explained the value of using Google drive, docs,sheets etc.. today and told them how much better it is everything would be on their Google drive so if I got hit by a bus they could get a new computer again and still have access to their data etc... So they said great and so I did.

Two weeks later... Can you set up word for us on our computer. Me annoyed at this point " sure no problem"

I made a shortcut on their desktop to Google docs. Them: oh boy this is great see John all you have to do is click on google docs to go to word! Thanks so much!

🤫🤓

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

I backuped my htdocs folder
Uninstalled XAMPP
Installed the new XAMPP
I realised I havent backuped MySQL database and lost all the data
:(

Yep. So the dev teams boss says it's fine to run a production environment on a single Windows instance with the db on that same instance, which they already totally lost once from a reboot after an auto update before I came along tasked with fixing the cluster fuck they created.

This from a man who somehow runs a dev team while using gmail via the web because he can't use an email client, uses email to track tasks but can't because they get lost amongst his 3000+ unread emails, has a screen dirtier than a hookers vag on half priced Tuesday, and got a new laptop but had to get his daughter to set it up and transfer his data because he couldn't.

But ok... you have a degree, You must know what you're doing.
It's ok though, I'll keep covering your incompetent ass while you keep raping the company because no one listens.
Peoples ignorance and arrogance astounds me.

--- iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia" shuts down ---

This Friday, Jay Freeman, the maintainer of the iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia", announced that he will shut-down his services.
"Cydia" is a app store for people that jailbreaked their iPhones and allows them to buy and download apps. Apple's AppStore doesn't allow jailbreaked apps, that's the reason it was created in 2009.

Jay Freeman, also known as "Saurik", explained that he wanted to shut down the service at the end of 2018 anyways.
Now, a recent security issue, threatening the data of all users, caused that the store no longer existed with immediate effect.
In addition to the security issue, "Cydia" was said to be no more profitable.
To calm you breakers down: Previous purchases can still be downloaded!

The software itself will continue to exist, but without a back-end for payments and stuff like that. Users are still able to do payments through third-party repositories, which already happened anyway, so that lowers the impact of the shut-down.

Just like "Cydia", other services are shutting down too.
One of the three big Cydia-repositories, ModMyi, said they wont allow any new apps and archived all existing ones.
ZodTTD and MacCiti will also be discontinued.
"Bigboss" is the only repository remaining.

Jailbreaks just lost their popularity over the last years. There's still no jailbreak for iOS 11! This shows that Apple is getting better and better at preventing jailbreaks.
On the other hand, it shows that the need for jailbreaks is not quite as high anymore and therefore the developers don't spend too much energy for breaking up iOS anymore.

Did you use Cydia, or any of the other services? Write us in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.

Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.

A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*

(shorten but you get the Idea)

At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.

Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.

What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.

And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.

I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

😐ctrl/cmd + s to sacrifice file.😑
Teacher: always save your file or else data will be lost. ctrl + s

Me: in word
__________
| |
| |
| |
| page 1 |
__________
ctrl + s ( 10 times)💾

Next day I open this file, my data is lost.

I sware to god i hit ctrl + s 10 times.

Windows u suck.
i lost all my data after restarting my laptop!!!!!
😡😡😡😡😡

So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.

This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).

UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.

Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.

I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.

It wasn't an image. It was the host server.

In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.

Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.

The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.

Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.

I am interviewing people for a job position with python knowledge.

My first question is how to reverse string and second one what’s the difference between set and list.
So far no one knows.

Fairly speaking I am asking only basic questions about what is decorator, generator, lambda. Also some basic data structure questions.

Is it to hard ?

I lost my faith in humanity.

One of our existing clients who used to pay for two of our products but now only pays for one just called us. The one he canceled is a loss prevention product that tracks internal theft in stores. He canceled it because he didn't feel it was worth it.

Now, he's calling us from a police station because he's trying to press charges against one of his managers because they were presumably stealing from him.

"Hey I need to know how many times this person stole from me over the last few months and I need to know it now because I'm at the police station."

With just a few clicks that would be an easy figure to retrieve for him had he not canceled our product.

My stance is he can get lost. I don't even think he sees the irony of canceling because "it isn't worth it" and then "asap" needing the data that the "worthless" product provides. Of course, he wants it without reactivating the subscription.

Unbelievable.

OK I live in lithuania, small country, my grandparents live in silute, super small city, the internet is shit here, I need to use my mobile data to program, next day I wake up to this graph explaining me how I lost all of my fucking data😤

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

DELETE FROM Invoices;

I am on test, right? OH SH!T

had a recent backup tho and no data were lost.

Happened once and never again. I was still pretty much junior in a senior position to be fair 😅

Just had Windows pop up with a notification saying “We’ve turned on storage sense for you”. Love it how the default is “When Windows Decides”. Was that why countless users lost their data back in October 2018???

I think I’ll turn that off permanently 😂😂😂

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

Last week I was erasing a 2Gb USB thumb while copying some really important shit to my backup disk. I look at the terminal and see it's taking a lot of time to did zeroes on dev/sdb.
Then I realized that dev/sdb is the backups drive and I just erased the firsts sectors of my only fucking backup.
It's ok, I said, let's see what can TestDisk do for me. And it only could find an empty sad partition that had useless shit on it. Whdd couldn't even find the drive. Cat and dd vomited 160Gb of nothing to a file that couldn't be read. I was lost, because I failed doing something I'm really good at. And I did it because I was to stupid to check fstab...
It's the very first time I couldn't recover data, so I'm thinking about delete "Data recovery" from my resume skills and put "Data cleaning. Really effective. I can send you 160Gb of pure horse shit to prove it" instead.

Oh gosh.. i can finally understand the CV and application nightmare stories... We're getting new people in, and there are quite a few interesting ones.

0) pages of randomly placed info. PAGES. I'm lost in there!!

1) no basic info whatsoever. Like, no nationality(we're recruiting internationally), no birthdate, barely his name and email. I know that the first ones are not really needed for the job, but they're still customary.

2) entry level back and/or frontend job. This guy's a phd graduate, working research with big data in a bio-something department. We're a web startup.

3) there are some listing so much unrelevant stuff, I'm not even sure if they meant to apply to us.

4) (my favourite) email subject: application, email body: empty, attached: short_application.doc ("hi, this is an application to the posted job. Best regards, Name") WAIT WHAT?

So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)

He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol

So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.

What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst

well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol

btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear..

Fucked up the Ubuntu partition while upgrading to 18.04 . Lost data. Fucked up the system further by doing random stuff and seeing what happens. Had to reinstall. Redo the customisations. Install all the ides and softwares.

That was fun. 🙂

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

fucking piece of garbage postman!

WHY THE HELL do you auto-update yourself when i explicitly DISABLED updates?

why the hell is it just a "minor" update to switch to a version that FORCES you to have an account, even if all you do is use offline features?

and why is there no option to disable syncing your data to their server, even if it's not needed at all? YALL EVER HEARD OF A THING CALLED PRIVACY?

and why the fucking fuck of all fucked fucks DO YOU DELETE MY PREVIOUS OFFLINE DATA SO I CAN'T EVEN CONTINUE WORKING BY INSTALLING AN OLDER VERSION?!?

some dumb-piece-of-garbage-waste-of-oxygen managers decision to screw their userbase cost me several HOURS(!) of work already and probably will cost some more due to the lost collections.

Today is a sad day for me.
I lost all of my data today. My phone was in my pocket and the Iris scanner was looking for a face. I guess it did it multiple times because I found that it had completely reset my phone.

I'm pissed mostly because I knew I had some control over when I could have backed up my phone... I could have at least been pushed back a month but now I'm pushed back by a whole year!
That is a fuck ton of time for things to have happened.

I'm just sad right now guys. There was some good stuff that could have been saved.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

I lost all my data from a terrible accident. By using recovery software over the course of a week (because the computer I had to use to recover it was less than adequate), I managed to recover most data. Upon restoring the data to the SSD, there was numerous corruption issues, strange glitches, etc. I tried running many system recovery tools, repairing the registry, disk check, everything. Today, I could not install Visual Studio Community updates because... it couldn't. It just popped up a blank window and that's it. I tried everything. Eventually, that combined with every other issue I've had, apps not working because of corrupt files and having to reinstall basically everything I've tried to use anyway, I decided to do a clean install.

So I'm waiting for many many many installers, right now. Nanite was only the tip of the ice berg. I guess what I'm trying to say is...

How's everyone doing? :)

when I was a newbie I was given a task to upload a site.
I had done that many times before so I thought it wont be a big deal so I thought I never gave a try uploading through ftp.
Okay I began work on it the server was of godaddy and credentials I got were of delegate access.
right I tried connecting through ftp but it wasn't working thought there's some problem with user settings why shouldn't I create my own user to stay away from mess.
Now I creater my own user and could easily login but there were no files in it saw that by creating user my folder is different and I dont have access to server files I wanted to take backup before I do upload.
now I was thinking to give my user access to all files so I changed the access directory to "/" checked ftp again there was still no file.
don't know what happened to me I thought ahh its waste of time for creating ftp user it does nothing and I deleted my ftp account.
now I went through web browser to download data and earth skids beneath my foots. Holy fuck I lost all the data, all were deleted with that account it scared the shit out of me.
There were two sites running which were now gone.
Tried every bit to bring them back but couldn't do so. i contact support of godaddy they said you haven't enabled auto backup so you can't have them for free however they can provide their service in $150. Which is 15k in my country.
I decided to tell my boss about what happened and he got us away :p I wasn't fired gladly

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

some dickweed changed his MBR to GPT without reading anything about it cus someone (falsely) claimed that GPT was faster.
dickweed lost his data and is whining that he doesn't want to spend even 50 euros to get his data back (but he does want it back)...

I feel so empty.

I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.

2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.

I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.

Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.

I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.

To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?

If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.

One of our employees set up a RAID 0 (by accident) on the MySQL server years ago and a drive decided to fail....

Why did the system administrator not do their job :’(

24 hours of data lost, clients will be mad especially since its running a CRM.

Last year =>
Upgraded to windows 10 from 8.1
Got a new phone in October. Backed up all the data from previous phone to PC. ( Saved it on desktop )

Restarted PC few hours later to transfer data to new phone. Windows failed to start. Failed to reset/recover
Had to factory reset PC

Lost all the data

MacroShit

One of our customers asked us (a while back) to create a nice interface for their label printer (preferably integrated in their web cms)

So we started developing and after two weeks (we were almost done) they canceled the request, payed for the worked ours and said that another company was willing to do it faster (even though we were almost done)

So that was about half a year ago, meanwhile I've migrated to Ubuntu

Today I heard we have to do it again because the other 'faster' company wasn't faster, and didn't live up to the expectations

I do not have the code anymore... My colleagues also do not have the code anymore... It was removed to keep our coded clean, not sure if it's on git (the guy who workers on the part that's has a repo doesn't always commits...)

I've worked on on a standard node js script (which I didn't create a repo for because the project was canceled)

... Amazing

I have never lost data before, I lost my memory once instead.

Sales was about to close what I thought was supposed to be a basic WordPress project with a pretty steep delivery time (two weeks). I thought to myself: "well, ok. It's going to be rough for us to fit it into our existing schedule, but I guess the budget (unusually high) compensates." After I say OK, I find out that they were actually about to sign a FE application that takes data from various document management applications. I lost my shit. I hope there's a special place in hell for sales reps that don't get the specs before accepting projects.

The everything is Data science craze trend.

Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.

It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.

Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.

Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.

Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

I accidently lost a whole tables data today. Lucky me I also created a XML-file on the server which was for printing.
I parsed the files back into a simplexmlobject and recovered most of the lost data. 💪

I just tried to install Linux mint on a SD card from a live system for a friend.
I managed to break his windows partition to the point that neither Mint nor the Windows recovery​ tool could read it and the SD card still won't boot.
I feel like a useless piece of shit and a bad friend.
At least his data is backed up but some of his licenses (Win, Office, ...) might be lost.

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

Issue in production. Multi billion dollar enterprise. Complex landscape. We sort of make things.

Turns out there is a single point of failure at a specific integration point. Kind of a lot stopped. When I reached out to the people knowing anything about it and I raised the issue that maybe we should make a slight change in how we do things they just brushed it off. Like it was nothing… 😬

No data was lost but everything was delayed for many hours. The _truth_ varied in different parts of the ecosystem causing potential wrong or suboptimal decisions to be taken.

When I asked why this LOS was not detected they told be they have no means of detecting it. 😬

I’m like, yeah, it’s 2023, we’re going to land on Mars and you can bet your ass we can detect it and you are just LAZY DEVELOPERS!

Anyway, I escalated (nicely) and they are now implementing a (more) resilient system and we’re helping the team detecting THEIR LOS in minutes instead of downstream services hours later (they are bad also but it’s not their fault!)

Stay safe!

I kept piling on hard drives at home and you know... One day I'll setup some redundancy.
Then a 5 months old full 4TB drive gave up and I lost that data.
After that I've upgraded to having a ceph cluster storing everything.
At the beginning of this year one hard drive in the cluster gave up. I didn't notice until I wondered why available storage was low. Cluster had already rebalance itself and were running flawless.

Right now, I'm tracing a bug that causes some of our data to be lost.
and I found a table with 'xxx' field on it. ohhh. what is it for?

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

Warning: This contains spoilers for Silicon Valley S4 E10:
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At 5:35 Gilfoyle says: "In order to hold that much data we would have to go RAID 0. [...] If we lose even one platter, we lose Melcher's data. Permanently."
But my question is: Why use RAID at all? Just storing the data without RAID would reduce the complexity, and if one disk fails, only the data on that one disk is lost. Also, I doubt speed is a priority at that point, since the whole thing is running on a home broadband connection, which something like a WD Gold data-center-harddrive (200+ MB/s) can easily max out.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to pay the broadband bill out of their own pocket, instead of moving tons of server equipment to Stanford?

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

About today when I was trying to migration 2 million+ records simultaneously!

Ran two migration @ once and this happened!

PS: On restart everything is back to normal but lost 2 tables data which needs remigration!

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

I never knew that I was a good mentor at SQL , specially at PL/SQL.

I gave a task to a new member of my team, to fill 5 tables with data from other 15 tables.

I informed him well about data table info and structure. He spended about 3 days to create 25 different queries in order to fill 5 tables.

After I saw the 25 queries, I told him, that he could do it with 1 main query and 5 insert statements.

So I spended 1 hour of training, in order to build,run and explain how to create the best sql statements for this task.

(First 5 minutes)
It was looking so simple at the beginning from starting with 1 simple join, after some steps he lost my actions.

(Rest 55 minutes)
I was explained the sql statements I 've created and how Oracle works.

Now , every time he meets me, he feels so thankful for learning him all those Oracle sql tips in 1 hour.

Now he is working only with big data and he loves the sql.

Okay, so there's this thing I've noticed. Whenever I find another job the old job suffers very hard very soon. So far there were these cases:
- goes bancrupt wthn a month after I left
- the department gets closed due to reorganisation next week after I left
- a sinkhole opens up right under the 14 stores building I left 2 months ago
- and today... 10 minutes before I go to a job interview on my lunch break prod db pulls a failed-hdd-and-all-data-is-now-lost stunt...

Every single workplace I've left suffered a lot. Is this some kind of a superpower? Can I fight evil with it? Should I put it on my cv? Should I let my manager know...? Or ask for a raise? :D

Maybe if you started actually fucking backing up your bullshit MONTHS ago when I told you your system was dying, or replaced it when I told you it was failing, you wouldn't have lost 6 fucking months worth of fucking work when it finally died today.

I setup a file backup system since you never had one, I gave you detailed instructions a fucking 40 year adult she be able to follow, I even offered to walk you through the process the first time after I set it up.

It shouldn't be my fucking problem you're too fucking stupid to listen to the tech person YOU fucking hired and lost data.
I was hired as a damn programmer, setting up the server wasn't in my job description, backing up emails because you refuse to pay for more GMail storage isn't in my job description, fucking 70% of what I've done this past fucking year working for you isn't in my job description.

Fucking hell, I'm fucking glad I'm working on leaving. The fucking employee shouldn't fucking care more than the damn owner. This place is not going to grow, and most of your employees are working on applying elsewhere because of your short-sightedness and petty bullshit drama you bring everywhere, everyday.

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

I lost 2TB of family photos and videos a few years ago by dropping a single hard drive. Nearly all of it was later found on people's computers who forgot to clean them up when we got the NAS. I'm not so eager to delete data once it's backed up ever since.

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

So I just used Google analytics data from my sites to reverse stalk someone who google stalked me today. I got a whole bunch of information including their mobile model, their city and bunch of other data to confirm they did actually stalk me and understand their psychology.

Backstory: I had deactivated my instagram a couple of weeks ago account without any notice. It was the best decision I made this year. I feel more focused and found myself with plenty of time which otherwise I would have spend on lusting over those sexy ig girls.

Thought nobody would even notice or care. But apparently this one girl, my 2020 covid long distance lover whom I haven't talked to in over 8 months noticed it and decided to Google me.

She spent over 25 mins on my main site and also somehow managed to discover my dead travel blog from Google. I was thinking that I did a good job with the pseudonym I used for the travel blog. Apparently that's not the case!

She must've then proceeded to my linkedin account listed on the site and then sent me a connection request. That was then the notification popped up in my phone earlier today and made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I hadn't felt those butterfly feeling ever since I figured out that we can't be together or possibly even meet for once in real life.

I was curious how she found my linkedin and why sent me the request. We are not even in a related work field, same country. I never thought I'd be thinking more than 5 secs over a linkedin connection request.

That's what lead me to check out the Google analytics data to find the chronology of the events that lead to this connection request.

Anyways, it warmed my heart to learn that she still remembers me after all these months and that she bothered to Google me. Maybe she worried if I blocked her in ig? Or maybe she wondered if I lost my life in the recent covid wave?..

I wanted her to think that I was dead by not responding to the linkedin connection request. But it is possible that she checked out my GitHub profile and found my recent activities.

It fucking sucks knowing that I might never meet her in real life. If we meet, I worry it will lead us to doing things that might hurt others.

I guess at least I can die knowing that there was some truth in our love and someone cared about me and that it was not some illusion I felt..

Maybe the least I can do for her is to just accept that connection request.

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

I don't work for Walmart, but they almost put my job in jeopardy today. I have a console app in production that pushes Walmart orders from their marketplace into our system for fulfillment. For half a year, I have handled thousands of orders, but overnight, all customers were getting massive price cuts on products in the Walmart feed! I looked at the data and initially thought it was my error due to using a quotient instead of a product in the code. But upon closer inspection, some fool at Walmart had changed code on their end without telling my team! Broke all the things. Lucky we were able to pull a full stop before we lost disgusting amounts of money, but you would think that a big player like Wally would at least announce a breaking code change to their users. 😲😡

Opened my PC today...found my local disk empty...170gigs of data lost...
Feel like crying...hope Recuva works

I wrote some ISO my 8GB flashdrive, then I realised what I did (fuckfuckfuckfuckfuuck) and formatted it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

its day 4 of updating documentation and consolidating data.

The webclient has broken on average 4 times a day.

The database took 20+ seconds on updating a password entry.

I explained to my boss the real cost of interrupting my attention with these pauses. I figure it's caused my productivity to go from record high last week to being literally losing about 4 hours a day lost, plus extra time in having to go back through and verify things worked.

The technicians and developers who are working on fixing the database system are apparently quitting left right and center; their company acquired it awhile back, so they don't actually have native developers on it. Yet they still are pushing out new integration features rather than fixing anything.

Yesterday, one of the other people on the documentation project lost half a days work due to the angular updating the local cache, but it never reaching the backend. He came back from lunch, reopened his browser, and all his work was gone. (at least thats what we think happened). So we are hard resetting the program every 10 minutes or so just to make sure it is updating the backend.

The good news is that when it is done, we theoretically will be able to use this to cut back onboarding time and update times by about half, and it'll mean our new nano-server deployment project should be able to spin out with standards that can be referenced properly by everyone, not just the guy with the powershell script that he tinkered with for a particular project and never told anyone else what he did.

Theoretically.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

Lost all my Data, due to electricity loss. Lost about 1.8TB of data, didn't have backup as I didn't have any other media to backup to. :/

TL;DR - (almost) childhood trauma due to Wesrern Digital crap products lead to lot of data loss and a plege to not trust or purchase their products for the rest of my life.

....

So, I got my first ever Wester Digital 2TB Mybook, back when 2TB was a really big thing. While in the midst of moving (not copying) a LOT of data to it, the damn disk just.. died. There was no fall, no power outage, no damage, it just stopped working. I was out of words and out of options. Tried yanking out the disk and connecting it directly to a system, but no luck because it looks like it's the HDD mobo that died.

Also stupid young me did not realise back then that, even if a "moved" the data, the original data is still most likely in their original location, and so, never bothered a recovery.

Lots of good stuff lost that day.

And as with a lot of you, my disaster recovery system kicked up 10 fold. Now I got redundant local and cloud backup copies of all critical and otherwise unattainable data.

As you may have guessed, I never bought another Wester Digital product ever again. My internal HDDs are Segate, and external is a suprisingly long lived Toshiba Canvio.

Hello World! Told my son to press "ok" for all questions. So now, I have to look for backups of projects. Not sure id git push

Can some drone operator please end my suffering existence?
I just got on a bus from Berlin to Munich (8h trip) and apperantly some fuckwits thought it was a great idea to destroy the GOD DAMN FREE WIFI. ONLY DRUNK ASSHATS COULD BE SO STUPID. I need a podcast to sleep well but since I already used up my mobile data volume, I'm stuck in here, surrounded by idiots and lost to the world.

Fuck whoever is responsible for the backup and restore features of ADB. Luckily I had a backup in a different format, but if it was up to ADB's shittyness I would've lost all my data.

@dfox, @trogus, would you consider adding the topic for next week to be "Near miss: how I almost lost all my code/data"?

It sould be fun, and people can also learn something. Like what not to do, how to recover and how to prevent this kind of stuff...

So, when I was like 18 I made an app for a guy who stole a phone book database in paper and was paying people to pass it to access.
He asked me a program to make it easier to add data, he was paying people to do it one by one to an access db.
So I made that and a module to join all the dbs and check for existing ones (there was no way to join access db back then).
When he told me he didn't want it anymore...
So I deleted the sorce code and gave the binary to an uncle to use as a phone book for work.
Two weeks latter the guy called because he didn't know how to join the dbs. Well the source wasn't lost... I just deleted it and told him that if he had paid my software would take care of it...

Big data loss... idk
I once lost a semicolon

>Client: Hey, I lost my Facebook password but it's saved on my old laptop
>Me: ...alright, i'll look
>Laptop: won't boot - "No bootable devices found!"
hoo boy
>opens 'er up to pull drive
this is really heavy for an SSD, Corsair, and especially for only 64GB
>plugs into other PC
nothing
fuck me
>sees jumper pins
>jumps them
>BAREFOOT-ROM RECOVERYMODE SSD DEVICE - 128GB
that's twice the size of the disk, wtf?
but ok, i'll take it, any data?
>Win10: *crashes because driver chokes*
>Win7: *crashes because driver chokes*
>WinXP: *doesn't see it, TestDisk doesn't run because Kernel32.DLL issue*
>Linux: *Issues the instant SSD plugged in, they stop instant removed*
fuck it
RMA

At first glance, this week's group rant seems perfect for me since I have drunk coded at least 2 to 3 times per month (my TGIFs are usually followed by Saturday morning demo meetings).

However I cannot say I have had any particular "worst" code that I have done so far.

Yea I once formatted and installed some linux distro while drunk and couldn't remember the login info the next morning.

Yea I once exported, imported between dbs from prod and local while drunk and lost this and that data.

Yes I once decided to organize my repositories and somehow deleted some repos without any backup while I was drunk.

I was fine. I somehow solved my way out by either bullshitting or being quiet or fixing without any sleep. Most of the times nobody really comprehend the extent of my actions. So I was fine. Hence I really don't have any particular worst drunk coding experience yet.

Best drunk coding experience?
Well I do not agree that coding while drunk is a pleasurable or fun thing to do. So I don't really have that either.

This week's topic is actually a very tough one although it might seem easy.

When I hit the endpoint from Postman it works. When I hit the endpoint from my application that pushes data to the endpoint it doesn't work, returning a 404 status code. I KNOW the endpoint is there and operational and that both Postman and my application have the same endpoint configured, letter for letter.

So lost. So confused. What the hell is going on.

I decide to install Fiddler to monitor the traffic to see if I can see anything helpful.

I initiate the request again from the application and immediately see that the request size is huge. BAM. It immediately hits me, the payload to the endpoint is too big and the server is "rejecting" it with a 404. I post a smaller request with the application and it works fine.

Yay, saved by Fiddler.

Why does the endpoint default to 404 in such scenarios. The definition of 404: "the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested"

In my case, the 404 returned was a red herring. I understand that the substatus code gives more information on why the 404 was returned, in my case the request size being too big, but 404 in general feels like the wrong status code to return because the endpoint IS there. It made me troubleshoot the wrong thing.

Thanks, IIS.

When I rented my server I uploaded my webpage (including resources like videos, images etc) which is about 150GB as .tar and extracted and setup all that stuff and deleted the backup from my PC. The uploading process took me about 4 days. I opened the site of my server provider and reloaded it.. Aaaaannddd whoops. All data gone.

On my server hosters webpage when you click the reinstall button for installing a Linux image you get returned to the main page of that server after it finished installing. If you then reload that page which basically only shows some monitoring diagrams and shit the server gets reset again.

Damn. I lost so much good porn on that day...

This was more than 15 years ago. We migrated a bunch if data (home to a new server and repurposed the old one, the same night. This was not the first task on that allweekender, so it was around 3am on Sunday, with very little sleep, when I had to copy the data. I did that by logging in as admin and copying with Total Commander. Obviously, even admin did not have the permissions to some folders, so a lot of financial data were lost, as the users found out on Monday morning. We had no backup. Old server was not only reformatted, but the disks were used to build a different raid set. Luckily, one of the users who had access to this data kept a backup on a flash drive. (If you're wondering, I should've used robocopy with backup mode)

Mine: not listening to early warning sings that shit won't work. As a result we implemented the wrong technology and had to roll back after a month in production. Lost some customers data, though we had backups, so it was just a delta of a day or so. Still, not pretty, had a rough night writing scripts at 3am to check data validity after.

I will throw in another one from a colleague of mine. He was running some database migrations and ended up pointing the DB migration tool to production by accident. Oops. That one required a restore as well, if I remember correctly.

Experiences of owning a private server with JFK!

Dropping a prod db: 1
Misplacing passwords: 3
Config errors: Over 9'000
fail2ban banned me: 2
Not reading the docs first since: Forever
Setting up a sever again because I fucked up: 4
Formating the wrong USB stick, which had needed data: 1
Resetting lost DB root password: 2
Server crashes due to insufficient psu: 3
Not knowing the firewall is enabled again, so near to nothing works: 2

Guys, I think they are asking about Big Data Loss. People thought it's about Data Loss.

My Big Data Loss experience is when everyone in Hong Kong starts talking about big data using spreadsheets. So lost.

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo

I have a few projects on the go at work at the moment which could be successful, but only time will tell:

1. We have a requirement to monitor or SQL servers for any long running queries (anything that runs longer than 3 minutes). Company didn’t want to pay for enterprise grade solution so as the only SQL Developer I created a small system that involves a database, 2 tables a stored procedure and scheduled job. It goes off every 10 minutes queries some system tables etc and write the results to the tables. Still waiting for it to be deployed to one of the test servers. I have plans for a web front end in the future.

2. My company currently use source safe for version control. They’ve lost the admin password so only 1 person can log in. I’m running he project to plan the migration to GitLab. It’s getting close to completion and soon someone is going to be tasked with creating 100s or projects etc.

3. We use an ERP system which is huge with thousands of tables, but no FKs or anything like that. The current data dictionary is a spreadsheet, as a side project I’m creating a web app so that this information is easily available and searchable.

All 3 projects have the potential to be successful, for my team at least, but stuck waiting for other people to do their stuff first.

!dev

Today's world has gone so corrupt and full of crime that its almost impossible to be identified as honest/right, even if you are one. We thought that power of Internet would help identify the correct things but on the contrary, the internet is being used for declaring the wrong as right.

Thanks to sheer volume of duplicate data and social media's unverified content, we can no longer trust anything. Plus the effect of government and powerful people is so much that any big company you believe in would be forced to do whatever these big guns want.

Today if government wants to declare that "banana is a god fruit", they will simply generate enough news articles, social media tweets and rumours to do so. They know they can't proof it, but they can generate enough resources to change enough mindsets that what they are saying is not right but not completely wrong.
Even GitHub, which i once believed to have the ultimate method of preserving the truth is no longer a real thing. US govt has shown enough power to tell the world, that if we don't like something, then not even github is strong enough to preserve it

Our Indian government is also no less. Yesterday i heard the news that Gujrat government is slowly replacing the junior school's history syllabus to remove important historical events and replace them with chapters on hindu supremacy.

Currently i am not sure if its a real news but WHAT THE FUCK!?! They are going to erase the history? If the new generation gets the biased version of history, won't they grow up hating a particular commodity?
And forget the new generation, what about our generation? Did the books i read on history were also biased? Is this all political agenda why i like a particular commodity and hate the others? And how can i know if the facts i read are correct and truth? Who is the person verifying them and on what grounds is his decision correct?

Clearly no one can answer that because at the end, its highly opinionated.
If a newspaper A says "this guy is good" and newspaper B says "this guy is bad" , then after a 100 years, we would only believe the newspaper whose fossil remains in the museum and not the one which people believed to be correct 100 years ago.

And this is the problem. Corrupt people are generating enough content to make sure the biased version of history remains preserved while the original version gets lost with time.

I sometimes think that i should be buying a server deep below some glacier in the Antarctic ocean , hosting the real version of history. But there is no guarantee that government won't be tracing it back or make attempts to down

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

This one was from my Tech Lead, She had to update phone number of a customer in Database on production server. And guess what she forgot 'WHERE'. Next we were facing each other with poker face. :|

p.s: fortunately we had backup of just 4 hours back. Still we lost data of about 100 people.

After all the rants I've written on this topic, no, no, fuck no. I ain't answering jackshit. The trauma is very real. I'm trying to not have a panic attack just remembering few of the times I've lost work, personal data, side projects, accounts, you name it.
Oh dear God it's hard to breathe...

This was in 1st semester and our CSE course went under some major course revision. Python was to be taught in place of C. Now the professor we had was very famous and we were excited to be in his class. But little did we knew he had no knowledge of Python at all. He used to tell the lab assistant to teach.It was so bad that I lost all interest in programming!!
But we all studied python later in our winter holidays for further courses.
Next semester we had OOP and this is what happened:
1st lab:
Professor(different): I expect you have basic knowledge in programming so I have uploaded.
Every question was related to structures in C.
In the same semester, we had data structures where we were 'expected' to know C or C++.
Later we came to know that Python was not going to be of any use in any course ! First semester went into dustbin.
/*
It was pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/

How can Javascript, one of the MOST WIDELY used and MATURE languages with A MILLION CANCEROUS FRAMEWORKS, NOT have a basic collections class? Are data structures not important in Javascript?

I've been struggling all night trying to get Sets working - surprise, they're utterly useless in Javascript cause you can't define the set comparator.

I just lost it when I found out THERE ISN'T EVEN A QUEUE. WT-ACTUAL-F

Fack I hate this CMS we have. Using Fetch and sending data as encoded JSON doesn't get parsed nor recognized by the CMS. I was pulling my hair out, understanding the differences, switched back to XHR... and then noticed the buggar:

XHR sends data as "FormData()".

I switched everything to FormData and TADAAA IT WORKS MOTHERFUCKA

Lost a whole fucking day on this trying to understand whether it was my code or the CMS the problem.

Ah yes, of course, I had to reproduce the CMS on my machine, instead of having the developers lend us a "development" platform on it, so obviously I don't know what's happening under the hood :))))))))

Lost my temper at one of our volunteer moderators the other day. We had to do a test using live data, our sysadmin warned him, but not far enough in advance and not really by the right channels. So that was on us. sorry not sorry. But so then he didn't believe us. He must be a geek too cuz he responded with some stupid math problem for me to solve, as if that would prove we work here and aren't hackers or scammers. I replied "how about if i just kick you out of your own group and delete your account, would that convince you?" And so I did. Asshole. Of course I had to apologize later and get a lecture from the boss, but it was kinda worth it.

I just can't stand that dumb senior. Everytime one tries to change the size of the window, all the data from the quite lengthy form is lost. Ofc he will not fix that. How is that even possible? Wtf?
I would not give a damn if I did not have to fill these forms.

to all those Lenovo guys who are wondering how to bypass raid for installing linux:
boot from live usb and rewrite the partition table from raid to something else using gparted. and done. I had this issue long time ago.

p.s. try at ur own risk. data will be lost.

Was working on a game with some friends a while ago and had a HDD fail before I could back it up and lost 48 hours of progress so spent all night hammering it back to how it was before the data loss...

Never stressed so much in my life tbh

The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.

The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.

Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.

Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.

Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.

Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.

In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.

I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.

Has anyone worked with US census data api ? How would you rate it ? I just saw the first page of documentation and I am lost.
Am I the only one ?

Wanted to work from home as usual. Logged in in citrix with my credentials and totp, started rdp to connect with the bank.
i try it for the first time: failed to connect
I try it for the second time: error 0x112d (some thing about two programs that have an the same port open)
I ask my colleagues to look after the pc in the office and what was it:

FUCKING WINDOWS UPDATE FILLED THE RAM COMPLETLY.
Luckily no data was lost, since i had everything important commited and pushed.

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

Today I was orders to check out one of our applications. Accounting said that the Twilio bill was constantly increasing even if we do not get any new clients. In 10 min I found out what is the problem. All calls are recorded and stored in Twilio, which charges handsomely for such service.
Developers instead of downloading those recording to our data lake, use Twilio as storage, because no coding was involved.
Company lost around 30k dollars this year and around 10k-20k in previous ones, because someone was lazy to spend few days to download mp3 from url.

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

Hi!
I was trying to format my backup drive (/dev/sdb)
Was focused on eating also at the same time
Wrote sudo fdisk /dev/sda and didn't notice and changed the partition type to GPT(although it was already like that)
I gave me message that will do on next reboot
My dumb mind didn't suspect, instead rebooted (facepalm)
Lost all my data
Instead of trying to recover was quick to install OS
Permanently lost my data
Help me I need hopes and tricks to move on

How did you cope up with yourself once you lost all your data?

How to destroy all table data:

* Get a database;
* Add the first table;
* Add the second table;
* Create a foreign key in second table that delete a record where there is a delete in the first table;
* Update all data in the first table with a REPLACE command.

Miracle: all data is lost

It was about 2:30am.. The darkness had been dominating the outside for a while, and I was having issues with my partitions on my CentOS server. Yup that's correct. I think.

I really wanted to go to bed. Last thing I had to do, was re-allocate some space from centos-home to centos-root. But I fucked up, of course I did.
After about half an hour of making food and trying different stuff to solve the "Can't read superblock error" error, I found an answer that just lead to "Can't read secondary superblock error, sorry".
At least they apologize now lol.

I ended up trashing the centos-home volume (is volume and partition the same ?) and just smashing it all onto centos-root. I lost some data, but screw that, stuff is working and I'm not going to bed.
Yeah, stuff is working. I hope. No errors encountered yet.

Moral of the story: Home partition isn't needed and it's okay to kill it

ASP.NET Web Forns?

Can't tell how many times I printed out the page lifecycle diagram for myself or a coworker. So many hours lost trying to figure out which lifecycle hook to use for a specific scenario and then have it all break down because something new was added to the feature. Or figuring when data can be bound, or doing some hack because things break when handling a POST event or some shit.

Overly abstract piece of technological excrement. Might as well express the thing in contemporary dance and check that into source control instead of that ungodly mess.

The switch to AJAX and API calls was such a huge relief it's almost hard to explain in words (I can do a dance tho). And then upgrading to AngularJS, man, worlds apart...

I don't care how much they pay me (okay, you got me...), I'm never touching Web Forms again.

New developer drop the production database. Thank god the daily backup was made only couple hours before. 3 developers spent the rest of the day recovering the lost data

I design 3D CAD models in my office system. I need to keep saving the files every few minutes because software licenses are floating and once lost, I may lose data.
But another bigger problem is that we need to disable proxy to connect to VPN and work online. And the proxy always turns itself ON, every few minutes and if by chance you saved the file without turning the proxy OFF. Well then OFF goes all the work since you last saved. Because then CREO just stops responding.

First year on the job. Was already good at writing software, but bad at practices and administration. One such software was being tested live, while still in development. I was developing on the production database... .
Yeah.
I was working on an edit feature of sales records, in a table that already contained hundreds of subsidized sales of very expensive products. Based on that, the supplier had to compensate the shops with half the price of every item.
I forgot to add a where clause to the update. Lost all sales data. On production.
Asked the admin if there are backups and he says yes, checks to discover that the backup script failed for the last week (since it became live)

Whole thing was incredibly stupid. I made a ton of stupid mistakes, and so did the other people involved. The loss was around 1 year of my income. Luckily the client decided to brush it off as losses and claim some tax benefits and it all ended well.