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I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:
I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.39 -
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!!!31 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Idea for devRant for April 1st:
User opens devRant. Greeted with the message: "devRant has changed the UI to make it more suitable for developers. From now on, the complete devRant interface is going to be command line. Read the man pages to get started."
User greeted with:
$devRantUser >12 -
No, I wont help you solve your stupid problem. If you are not able to read the wiki or the man pages - Arch linux is not for you.
You have only proven that you are stupid enough to listen to other people who likes to brag how good the are, but actually do not know shit.15 -
so,i made a website and uploaded it to my paid hosting...some pages were blank when accessed.did some testing and found out that was a php problem.contacted the support to enable error reporting for testing...he said that it can not be done...and that my code was the problem....spent 3h testing like a blind man...then my mother comes and sais this "maybe it's not compatible"she knows nothing about programming....then it struck me....fucking different php versions...i think i'm retarded sometimes...10
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"Git is useless, connect to the server and edit the pages" - My boss, 2019
And beleive it or not, he's also a teacher. What a great and wise man, we should build a statue for him!8 -
Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.
1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.
Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.
2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.
I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?
3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.
Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.
4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER
Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.
5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.
Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.
6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.
I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.
7) CLICK BAIT.
Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine
Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists6 -
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...9 -
"Need a single page website to be developed with about 3-5 pages including product page."
These clients man11 -
This here is some source code that i made. And I'll admit, I was a bit frustrated at the time of making. I just started learning to code in HTML and CSS a coulpe days ago. And a friend asked if I could make him a website. So I told him that I barely know the basics yet. And he says that it doesn't matter just as long as he gets a website. So now, a couple days of tryhard coding later, he raged about how bad the site looked and that he himself could have done a better job than I did. And yet the entire site had over 300 lines of code in it (perhaps not very much for you hardcore coders out there, but a biiig step for me) and several subpages, all with custom error pages and all. Although I'll admit, the design was a fucking ugly as fuck since i can design about as good as an alligator flies. But man was I mad after that, haven't talked to him since. The bastard. But to he point, in my rage i made this. An outburst of anger that I later refactored to fit a large amount of devs (since I reckon 99% of programmers deal with clients/customers instead of friends). And if anyone has a spare dns space to put the code on, then help yourself.
The link is:
https://pastebin.com/aFcK10YK
Have a good day!8 -
For some reason my manager freaked out after her non developer husband told her that each of the web pages for our main service would take months to build. Shit man its just static content with some animations here and there. It is a total of 15 pages and this dude estimated that I (as in yours truly) would only be able to do 2 per month. Bato stfu. Stick to banking (hopefully your time estimates don't suck ass there) and let me woo your woman with my frontend godspeed.
So what did I do?
Simple, asked her to show me one of the design models she already created on photoshop. Saved that thing to my computer and coded it at home. In 2 hours (It was originally one but my dumbass gor tab trigger happy with rm rf autocomplete so I had to do it again...fking dumb) and showed it to her this morning.
Eat a dick dude. The woman is already going apeshit over all the other shit we have to do plus working on her masters and attentind 100+ pointless meetings a day whilst still being able to be the best fucking manager I've ever had. I really don't need her freaking the fuck out over your dumbfuck estimates. Why in the wholy fucking world she listened to your dumbass is beyond me, probably stress made her freak out.
Its cool b.....I got it under control.
Fucking chill woman damn.
**drops mic2 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
Here’s how you deploy changes in Soviet Russia.
“Dear subscriber of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
The government scientific publisher “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia” recommends you remove pages 21, 22, 23 and 24 from book 5, as well as the portrait in between pages 23 and 24. Replacement pages containing new text will be sent to you.
You have to cut those pages off with scissors or razor, keeping a small area you have to glue the new pages to.
— The government scientific publisher “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia””
Context: this happened after Lavrentiy Beria, the man who carried on the great terror after Ezhov, was declared the enemy of the state and executed.
7 -
So here I am in class with just two weeks of knowledge in coding and this douchebag level 300 comes in like, 'Hey i'm a hacker and mid tier programmer and i can see you struggling with your basic code can i be of help?'... so I'm like, 'yh man. I'm a transfer biology student and i don't know a sh*t about coding but i have managed to buid a fine website of just two pages but i would also like to try hacking but first what programming languages do you know?' Guess what......the lil f*cker said HTML. I mean I may not know much but i know that can and will never be a programming language.11
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This was a straight-to-devrant moment...
Referred a work colleague to a man page for a command they were having trouble with.
Their reply: "I really hate man pages. They are not useful to me. They are full of blah blah blah blah blah. I just want 'run this' or 'run that'."
Then my eyes exploded right out my head, making room for my brain exploding right behind them.2 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
So I help out in a development forum for a framework I use at work. I learned a crap ton by seeing questions people ask, then learning to solve them myself. I have really enjoyed being in that forum that past 4 years.
Yet, I see people who cannot seem to reason themselves out of a paper bag at times. I see questions of I cannot run this linux executable because there are parenthesis in the filename. I mean most console interfaces are just tab complete even with special characters. This is for a developer in their 50s that has been coding 30 years. Or I see other programmers asking basic questions that 5 minutes with the docs would solve. Most of the ones that I have issue with seem to have been a part of that community a lot longer than myself.
How do developers survive without problem solving skills to understand the frameworks or tools they use?
I had another conversation with a dev in another forum about using "man" in Linux to figure out how to use something. They said something to the effect: "try learning awk from a manpage". I explained about how "back in the day" we learned EVERYTHING from man pages. That is why they are called "man" pages.
Is the industry flooded with idiots now?6 -
I wrote a scientific paper of six and a half pages.
This man wrote 60 comments on it.
I admire the dedication. 😐8 -
There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):
John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.
Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.
Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.
Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.
Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.
Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.
Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.
Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!9 -
I wanted to create a microcontroller website. It would feature simple circuits and microcontroller code to build things. The intent was to show absolute beginner concepts to people. Since I am older than the whipper snappers out there I thought I would have concept of some old man running the website.
I found cartoon artwork featuring an old man and I also got the domain oldmanmicro.com. I then created a bunch of pages featuring some really basic circuits. I setup an affiliate program with amazon to provide kits to people and embedded those into the website. This site was going to take a lot of creativity. I struggled with what to put on the site. This was going to take time. At this point I felt pretty good with my progress. It looked nice, the links were good, etc.
Then I did web search for oldmanmicro. I found my website in top hits. I also found something else... The 3rd or fourth hit down was some fucking old dude with a micro penis website. WTF! The worst possible combination of letters in my domain name produce this terrible experience. I was already struggling with content ideas, and this just demoralized my efforts. Thus ended the tale of the oldmanmicro.com. Perhaps the micro penis guy bought it, I don't know. I am afraid to look.
This was my very ignorant adventure with not researching a domain name thoroughly.6 -
As you guys may or may not know (or may or may not give a fuck), I'm currently part-time studying to get a diploma and get the fuck out of my country. Since I have to write a 40-pages long "end of study dissertation" about something we personnaly have interest in, I decided to teach myself about DevOps.
In order to prepare it, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi, install Docker and Jenkins (as a container) on it, and handle my multiples websites on it, and build a huge fucking website around which I would write my dissertation about.
But man, I'm starting to loose hope, I get to bed at 2 AM every night because I'm trying to make some basic shit work until I realize that I just CAN'T what I want because of tons of reason, so I try to lower my expectations, and it's frustrating. Yesterday, a Ruby on Rails image I created was perfectly working, tonight MySQL throws an "host not authorized for this mysql server" error, and I don't know what the fuck is happening nor if I can do anything about it.
I love teaching myself new stuff, but I have to admit, it's waaay harder than I expected2 -
Fun stuff from the few most recent pages in Dwarf Fortress bug tracker:
Human civilization's soldier is an Alligator Recruit.
Dead suspects confess to crimes
Crash due to zero-size weasel
Pets and other animals from retired fortresses appear as selectable 'workers' in request screen, die of old age on arrival
Some animal people have extra fingers
People dying twice?
Most confusingly, one necromancer shows as having died from old age twice, despite this not being possible.
My Nature Hating Adventurer Who Lacks Altruism And Is Very Cruel Isn't Happy After Butchering Animals
bat man males don't have geldables
Reanimated severed werebeast necromancer hand has a full body
Dwarf likes "cacao wood wood"
Dwarves turn hostile againt the player and defend their prison from raid sent to free them
Visitors giving birth during visit leave their baby behind
a water buffalo got stuck inside a rough tetrahedrite wall
Animals which retract into body parts forget to come out
Herbalist stuck on stepladder, starving to death.
Artifact has an image of nothing
Cave Dragons are sometimes intelligent, and sometimes join human civilizations
A goblin knocked over a workshop and now my dwarves are killing each other
Ambusher elves are being spotted, but the giant monsters they're riding on aren't.
runs with food from table to table. Can't eat
Intelligent Undead Sent on Mission Return as Ghosts
Horrified merchants immediately destroy their wagons, pack their goods and leave the depot
Dwarf king abdictates to become commoner necromancer apprentice
Internal body parts with certain tags can still wear clothing & armor, without being otherwise accessible
Necromancer marries zombie
Single dad dwarf with buggy dead wife leaves kid behind when he takes over holding
Large quantities of adamantine coins causes trade depot to burst into flame3 -
You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM. -
I just set up SSHFS so I can play my media library on my TV without moving all my data!
Basically my setup is something like this:
*Gaming PC (with a total of 10TiB - 6TiB being used for my /home) located in my office
*Home Media PC (with total of 150GB) located in my living room
Everything I have is on my 6TB HDD, and just my Videos folder is larger than the hard drive in the Home Media PC, so I decided to set up SSHFS. After about 15 minutes of reading man pages and trying different configurations, I ended up just needing "sshfs -o nonempty -o allow_other [user]@[location]:/home/$USER/Videos /home/server/Videos/"
This is so great guys; I love Linux so much!3 -
I am pulling my hair out on ducking low level stuff. This is why people (more importantly me!) should have the chance to learn, rather than assume how things work.
Has anyone of you detailed resources on how linking objects into shared libraries really works ? Especially Name Resolution. All those ducking tutorials and bloody blog post just have simple examples and explain shit not in detail!
Even ducking man pages on gcc/ld don’t help me out! Maybe I’m too dumb to type the right words into me search engine. I’d even love to read a bloody paper book.16 -
A question here reminded me of how websites were made long ago. Frames! Remember those little jewels? <frameset> and <iframe>, I still remember them. Man, even then it felt terribly wrong to use them. I remember using them to create web pages with header and side bar.
The only alternative was using <tables>, which, well, we know how they ended up. Frames today have been silently forgotten, but tables have been loudly hated for many years!
Ahhh, those were the times. So much has happened since then.
(Is "website" still a word today, btw?)7 -
I've been asking myself this question for a while lately.
Can I combine the music coming out of my phone with the sound from games on my PC?
"Why?", you ask.
Because I want it!
So I started reading man pages and documentation about ALSA and PA. A couple of hours later it just works. I don't know how or why, but I did it, all by myself, because no one does such weird stuff.
I'm way too excited about this.11 -
Anyone else ever had to install Jekyll on Windows?
Man, what a displeasure the last four hours were. SSL errors everywhere because Ruby versions have differing SSL certificates for downloading gems or something, having to install the devkit three times, messing with Linux Subsystem and finding out the Ubuntu repos do not have a new enough Ruby version to support what you're doing.
All this to have some fun with GH pages. It's physically exhausting.2 -
Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.
But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.
And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.
Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.
And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...
The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".
Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!
"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.
And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...
"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "
"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".
But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "
"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.
That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.
Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!
And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.
And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.
[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?
We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?
Look no further than BloodCurse, the ancient hex that will haunt your family for countless generations! With BloodCurse, you may crawl the earth as a mindless, shameless, piece of shit cockswallowing JUGGERNAUT that craves nothing BUT the consumption of scabbed human ass!
BloodCurse is easily contracted through consumption of the GENITAL fluids of highly-lecherous succubi, conjured through [EXTREMELY CENSORED]! This forbidden arcana allows the user to debour HIS OWN testicles in no time!
Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!
Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>
:~11 -
- scripting some unix helpu script
- searching google and stackoverflow for simple solutions:
"Just use 'sed --akeib )-£?"/'/#'. Can't you read man pages ffs?"
"Dude, awk is totally the thing you want to use for this kinda thing!"
"Honestly, have you ever heard of perl?"4 -
I have a pretty successful project on github
Which I don't think is necessarily my best achievement but all the stuff I do at work is not open
I used the project as a way to learn bash scripting and it kinda caught on.
Sadly I'm not a sys admin or anything I'm more of hardware/embedded engineer but it's still cool to have one of my projects being so used. And I got to learn a little of bash along the way 😁 I now feel super comfortable in a terminal and reading man pages to figure things our which was a skill i lacked previously. I definitely learn better by doing and fixing mistakes along the way -
Ugh. That may have been a mistake.
I'm deep in a large effort to refactor my project. It's a one man deal and something I've been working on pretty much every day in some fashion for nearly 10 years (five years ago I started a scratch rewrite to move from a fully CGI server rendered application to a browser rendered asynchronous version built around JS) and that took me three years.
I started this refactor about 8 weeks ago. Turns out I've been tackling the largest modules and progress has been decent. So that's good.
But I got to wondering ... Just how much code is there?
So I whipped up a quick script to do some calculations. Read each file and get a line and word count, skipping empty lines.
In JS it turns out I have 83,973 lines and 467,683 words.
On the back end, 86,230 lines and 580,422 words.
Average publishing stats say the are about 250 words/printed page.
That means I'm confronting refactoring 1,870 pages of JS. That's the size of several decent sized novels. (I think I've done the equivalent of Maybe 400 at this point).
Makes me feel like the walls are creeping in to know how much is left to go ... -
So my manager mentioned off hand that we might look at updating our company website to look a little more modern...
Me being me jumped right into action and now that I've finished I remember why I haven't built my personal site.. Fuck static web pages man...
Don't know why I did this, not even happy with it but I think it'll do, CSS and HTML is messy but fuck it, it works...1 -
On a digital marketing course.
Teacher:
"Web pages are made of structured content and style, that's HTML and CSS. There are also many programming languages, like JavaScript or Python, but we are not discussing those here because it's computer freaks stuff. Now let's talk about cookies..."
Me: Should I kill myself now or wait until that man stops saying shit an die killing him too...?1 -
I'm not sure if he's mentioned already, or if he's"famous" at all, but I'm a fan of Joey Hess.
Once I saw his name on some of old debian man pages and for no apparent reason, I looked up his name and found his home page.
He was a motivation for me to start learning Haskell, and also I was damn envious of his awesome lifestyle.
See shy jo at https://joeyh.name
-
I just wanna find docs
I search for my problem
why the hell are there 300 links to random people with outdated methods trying to tell you how to do something
I just want the man pages, ffs
I blame @SidTheITGuy saying we are all sitting on gold mines of information and should really become YouTube celebrities dispensing such knowledge10 -
Used to Google all my `man` pages... Don't really know why. Formatting maybe. Then I typed `man date`... I use `man` for my `man` pages now.3
-
My last rant did not go down well 😂
I need to clarify.
If you have no communication directly to another dev.... And your creation directly impacts theirs .... And you don't tell the middle man ... You are a twat especially if your aware of the launch that's basically right now !
To be clear.... This guy built their site and database everything .
I had to connect part of their new app to the site... A few pages they wanted in the app.
He changed the links ... On purpose I think to screw over the launch of the app to make me look bad
I can not communicate with him... The CEO hates him and won't talk to him either
So what am I to do?
Not be pissed off about a spiteful dickhead?
Of course I'm pissed
To make people understand you don't send out a lethal update that can fuck up the servers without telling no one... That their might be technical issues -
FFS, fucking Fuckbook and their fucking new wall system
I have posts from pages I am particularly not interested in at all (ie, all pages I see), I get a post with the recent Khimbho app story, I proceed to hide all posts from this page, and keep scrolling. The fucking next post is, guess what, another one with the Khimbho thingy, from another page. Hidden again. I have 4-5 more posts like these on my wall, among other posts which I also hide.
I then close my FB tab, and when later on I come back on it:
"ÜBERHOT WHOOPY CONTENT: KHIMBHO APP WAS TAKEN DOWN FROM THE PLAY STORE"
...
<take a deep breath>
...
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU STFU GET OFF MY LIFE FUCKING RUBBISH SPAMMY FUCKPAGE TURD CRAP SHOVE YOUR WALL UP YOUR RECTUM AND THROUGH YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, TAKE IT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH AND REPEAT UNTIL YOU'RE TRANSFORMED INTO A FUCKING PILE OF MESS READY TO BE THROWN IN A TRASHCAN SO YOUR CORPSE WILL BECOME HOME TO A SPECIAL BREED OF FLIES THAT WILL HUNT DOWN PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND FUCKING EAT YOU ALIVE
Man I'm pissed. -
woman(package) definition by Emacs:
-"browse UN*X manual pages `wo (without) man' "
-"woman is a built-in package."
Emacs, pls... :D1 -
Here’s Today’s book, a little late in the day but we had a storm here and lost power. Powers back
Anyway Programming Pearls, this books isn’t so much a tutorial book, or like “how to program book” it’s more an influential book and thought book. Similar to the mythical man month book.
It’s short book little over 200 pages, of short essays on problems that have irritated programmers over the years. Hence the amage to pearls as a pearl is developed from grains of sand that irritate oysters. This book is a collection of irritants of programmers. (No not the social or business side of things) but technical problems we all face.
These articles are compiled from the original postings that occurred in the Communications of ACM journal, back in the late 90s.
This books offers workable solutions to these “pearls”.
Think of this like one of the precursors to what we have now as stack overflow .. information was shared via journals since the internet wasn’t available but not so much question then respond like we do more of hey I had this problem here’s the solution sort of system.
It’s the type of book, when your bored and you don’t want to read some “how to book” you read this, just like mythical man month and others.
This book references items from knuths books. As well as references to others.
So here’s to the pearls the plague us all.
1 -
Hey! I wrote "Memories of writing a parser for man pages" what do you think about it?
https://monades.roperzh.com/memorie... -
So I was browsing the https://travis-ci.com website and was bothered by the weird gradiants, familiar layout and awkwardly timed animations (normally I only use https://app.travis-ci.com).
I navigated to all their top-level pages and paid attention to the incoherent/ sluggish design (see screenshot). So I got this feeling that it was a cheap-ass Wordpress template purchased from Themeforest and implemented by a webmaster with little to no dev-skills.
Sure enough, I checked the Wappalyzer extension and it is using Wordpress. Compare that to the old https://travis-ci.org which was custom-built on Ember and looks professional.
I'm aware of the negative PR they have generated over the past year but gave them the benefit of doubt and they have been good in their support and credit allotments, but man... that WP site looks so amateurish and marketed to the wrong target group. I don't know maybe I'll be forced to reconsider
4 -
People usually use their phones in portrait mode. People often taking vertical photos and videos. People read books, and every book has portrait pages. Almost every website has unused space on left and right.
But when people see my vertical monitors they all like: oh man, you are weirdo, that's awful and uncomfortable.5 -
Drawing might not be inherently software-related, but this particular sketch IS software-related. Additionally, the depicted character looks a bit pissed. As such, posting this thing to devRant SHOULD be all right.
Of course, "random" is a stupid term; this post is at best pseudorandom. Every man who is worth a highland midge's urine sample knows that KOOL KEITH is the one true source of entropy.
Actually managing to draw a decent-looking three-quarters pose demands a celebratory ginger ale!
This drawing or a relatively refined equivalent should eventually be used as an image on the 5XX error pages of VARIK's Web servers.
Detailed criticism is welcomed -- not knowing that stuff sucks sucks.
The lack of a standard APL logo is a damn shame. Luckily, the light bulb is handsome and recognisable for APL hackers.
-
For f*cks sake, why can't I just remember certain pages I visited some time ago? It drives me nuts! Am I getting older or what? I am just in my thirties, what the heck should I expect from myself in a few years? I'll sure be a drooling old man as soon as I get 40. Dammit!
This time it was some JSON API for reverse lookups of phone numbers, it was a blue-ish site and you could take a test drive just by entering a number, and it told you the name and some details of the caller. And it was cool, and not for free, but still cool.
NO IT WAS NEITHER NUMVERIFY NOR TWILIO. Does it ring a bell? No?13
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