Uploaded an app to Appstore and it was rejected because the Gender dropdown at registration only has "Male" and "Female" as required selectable options. The reviewer thought it was right to force an inclusion of "Other" option inside a Medical Service app that is targeting a single country which also only recognizes only Male/Female as gender.

Annoyingly, I wrote back a dispute on the review:

Hello,
I have read your inclusion request and you really shouldn't be doing this. Our app is a Medical Service app and the Gender option can only be either Male or Female based on platform design, app functionality and data accuracy. We are also targeting *country_name* that recognizes only Male/Female gender. Please reconsider this review.

{{No reply after a week}}

-- Proceeds to include the option for "Other"
-- App got approved.
-- Behind the scene if you select the "other" option you are automatically tagged female.
Fuck yeah!

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

I suddenly realized all the technical debt shit I told my boss would happen years ago given the way things were done/heading then... Just occurred pretty much all at once last week in the form of critical production issues...

The teams like:
-we need real time server process monitoring
-structured logging for apps
-containerization so one app didn't affect others

Me thinking: yes.... I told you so like 3/4 years ago when I first joined the team and kept repeating so much I got tired of saying at every annual review...

This is exactly what happens when you let technical debt grow and have no free time for developers to look into and fix then while they were small and not critical production processes... Or properly document and peer review them... (Got a shit pile of projects that no one knows how to use or even exists because the devs left the team) and they'll have a lot more when I finally leave... Hopefully this year.... If I can find another role and not need another medical procedure... (Doubtful)

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

So I've had a shoulder surgery to fix my problem always losing my left arm, I'm on a medical leave, so no work but i get payed, nice and dandy ... Yesterday my old colleague/friend calls me that he arranged an interview for me for a project ... Excuse me but wtf, I'm happy getting payed and not working 🤔

I vent to the interview, and all they want is to add Romanian and Hungarian translations to a site and mobile app they have, technically they don't even have access to the server or files to add the other languages.

Now explain that to a non tech guy.

We agreed that they get my answer when they have approval and access to the needed stuff 🤣

Edit: this also fits this weeks question

I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.

At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.

At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).

At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.

So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.

The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...

I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!

Im gonna turn this topic on its head a little and mention the MOST NECESSARY feature that was never implemented in one of my projects.
It was an iOS client for a medical records system. Since it contained actual confidential medical information, some patient records could be “restricted”. Thos meant if you tried to open them you would be prompted for a reason, and this would be audited.
We already had 2 different iOS apps with this feature in place matching the web app. But for some reason with the 3rd app they just decided not to bother. I discovered that it was because the PO in charge of that project didnt consider it important enough for the demo. So we have one app where you can just bypass the whole auditing process and open restricted patient records freely.

I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.

I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.

Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.

I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.

At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?

I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?

These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.

Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?

Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.

These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.

You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

well now that I put my wallet through the wash and these "very important" vaccine passport cards were in there that disintegrated (also by the way the email with the digital vaccine cards they sent me doesn't have a PDF attachment but has a link to a PDF file -- that is now 404! whatcha trying to hide, fuckers?). evidently fake vaccine passport creation is the only sort of fraud the Quebec government cares about, since there was a news story recently how the council for discovering fraud is just 95% faking vaccine cards fraud (kicker I've never heard of this council, seems they've only been active in the post covid era), nevermind that that shit fucked me up and I've had dementia at 30 for 3 years now, with my body having self heating / metabolism issues, pink blood or clots showing up everywhere issues, a fucking purple toe (actually I would just randomly turn purple on and off, and once yellow! I'm sure my liver is fine), numbness in my left side, hands, feet, mania / feeling like you're dying... but anyway it's all in your head and fuck off stop calling 911

I decided I would take a photo of the papers (since they're so important and came at such a cost!) and evidently now my camera app crashes anytime I try to take a photo. rebooted. somehow my photo viewer app updated with a reboot but the camera app is still busted.

I think this is a sign I should root my phone

but I'm already doing 4 things right now. on top of being reminded of my fucking medical trauma making this post RN I guess

fuk

I just pulled an all-nighter to write an usability testing protocol in Microsoft Word for a medical mobile app.

- statement of consent and privacy declaration; easy: 1 hour
- structuring the protocol and writing the different use cases; easy: 1-2 hours
- layouting the document so the tables don't look like utter shit and adding dotted lines into the columns so the user can write in it without fucking up the whole document when resizing a simple column width; a fucking nightmare: 5 hours

Why is the creation of a nice layout so inefficient to the point where I'd rather design a form in CSS and send it to my printer, get your shit together!

Probably the autosave feature in our medical eForm application. You might think that doesnt sound unnecessary, but it was built to solve a problem that shouldnt have existed in the first place.
Autosave was put in place to rescue as much data as possible in the event that the app randomly crashed while a paramedic was filling in a form.
So in one sense it was a necessary feature because the app was so unstable. But on the other hand, if the app was built properly it would never have been needed.

Coolest bug is less of a bug and more of a feature. I've been working on a medical app and I used an open source backend which had almost everything I needed. To be hipaa compliant you have to encrypt all sensitive data - full db encryption was not something this backend was capable of.

So my solution was to encrypt the data on the client side and create a secondary server - that can only be accessed on my app server - to store and retrieve the keys.

If anyone's thinking of working on a HIPAA project - you're welcome

holy shit I swear taxes are like the government trying to tell you you're a peasant to them

my medicare card is about to expire and FOR SOME REASON now the process to renew is a fucking interrogation about various documentation the government has given you. before it was just your damned name, date of birth, and a new photo for the card.

evidently they were supposed to send you snail mail 3 months before expiration. evidently also the only way to renew is get this said snail mail.
and evidently I have to go through this "catchall" change your address with everything in the government process
which is a little ironic
because
to use this service you need to give them something called a notice of assessment, which is when the government accepts your taxes they send you back one of those
well I haven't had access to my tax portal for years. I keep filing them and getting excess money back but I can't actually see any of my returns.
so I tried this time
12 pages of verification and more verification... you do one step, it says wrong info because if you have to write in 2,474 well turns out the , fucks it up and your info doesn't match what's on file and if you fail more than 3 times you'll be locked out. repeat. page after page. how many fucking pages are there? what format are they expecting? nobody fucking knows. you'll get to find out if you pass just this one more!
after about 4 hours of this shit
and they have 2 factor authorization now?! wtf.

then this next step is id verification or we snail mail you a code (WHICH AGAIN IS IRONIC)

I chose id. health card doesn't count, it notifies me later. thankfully I have a passport. bad news, passport expires this September so guess who is gonna be having more fun later
the app of course can't use my camera in the browser I have, so I start downloading fucking other browsers and finally hit one that works
also they lied. they also want a selfie. then it tells me I failed to look like myself. if you fail to look like yourself 3 times you are denied.

ok. so I try snail mail. the page says if I revoke consent to id I can go do the snail mailed code. they lied. if you revoke consent it exits the whole wizard. you enter all the verification steps again.

I try to get them to snail mail me the code. they want some basic info they asked me like 16 times now, and a postal code. ironic. well this is the tax people, so by this point I found all my previous sent in tax returns (though I can't access the government's replies). checked. yep. address all the same. put in the postal code. nope. somehow it's wrong. 3 times I put all this random info in in different ways. 5 times and I'm locked out.

now fucking what.

THE FUCKING IRONY OF
I NEED TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING
AND TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE I HAVE TO CONFIRM WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING FUCKING ELSE

the government just fucking dunks on you

guess we're all not having fucking medical cards anymore. all we do is pay taxes, and can't even see the paperwork to those taxes we pay.

An App/service which would help doctors and patients to schedule consultation hours. Also an patient would always have medical relevant documents as digital documents. No more waiting for faxes, no more lost diagnostic sheets everything is always in reach. No more search for an MRI appointment and no more overfilled waiting rooms. Better programms for docs! The ones ive seen in hospitals and doctors offices looks horrific..

#justathought

What do people need? What will be the requirements of future?
App development, webdev, blockchain,.. snapchat, tiktok, insta... These are all just careers and apps whose sole purpose is to engage people with their phones... Every new app/website in the market wants to make the youngest of the young and oldest of the old to keep their eyes fixed on this glass screen for as long as they can... For the current decade, this has been the most successful market and profitable scheme of business in the world, leaving other careers like medical, astronomy, mechanics., Etc far behind.

So is this the future? In the next generation too we will be having users who are addicted to smaller and smaller and larger and larger screens, with their spectacle width thickening ... Or are we going to shift to some other form of business?

Any native iOS devs want to help me finish my app? It's a medical app and I estimate that I'm at least 70% done with it. But I guess since I'm supposed to be posting a rant WHY CAN'T I FIND ANYONE TO HELP ME?!

Hi guys,

im developing a medical app which is able track and remind you with your medication intakes. The app lets you scan the barcode of your pills.

For testing of the scanning i would need pictures of french (CIP) and spanish medication barcodes.

Would be super awesome if you guys and girls could send me a quick picture of the barcodes ❤️

Thank you

How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).

The situation is as follows:

1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.

What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.

------------------------------------------------
TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
------------------------------------------------

What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!