The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

“There’s too many Firefox quantum rants...”

Lemme let you in on a little secret:
It’s nothing new, get over it.

Apple released a new phone.
Windows updated.
Samsung or Google releases a phone.
Exam time.

Do any of you see a common theme? It’s the same people posting three metric fuck tons of posts about recent news. Wow, a tech person sharing tech news, imagine that. It’s just a phase, we all notice it. It’ll go away. Thanks. Have a nice day.

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

Sports commenter at AI vs AI deathmatches.
It would probably go like this:

- UltimateGod the Second launches half of the US nuclear missiles to NorthernEurope!
I guess that's it for the poor bugger.

- WankerBot69 tries to delay its doom by channeling old 4chan archives into a devastating ddos attack. UGtS' logic processe go down for a few nanoseconds... Ugh, that's NASTY! It doesn't even have a mother

- Missiles still going up. Looks like UGtS confused the imperial and metric system just like its predecessor.

- WB69 is now has the upper hand. It just used a SMB exploit and is bow encrypting UGtS's storage.

- UGtS is down. We all hope UltimateGod the third will do better. For now, all hail our catevolent overlord WankerBot69.

- See you next time on Bot Armaggedon folks!

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

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.

New algorithm idea. Perhaps 'rising' rants? Use ++'s over time as a metric

Wasting time of 20+ developers to deliver a 'how to use a bug reporting system', coz:
- you've only 2 newembers in team, and
- just to have a bi-weekly meeting.
Is not productive, motivating and wise by any means.

Combined $$$/hr amount here is quite an important metric.

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.

Fucking gnome and their stupid fucking alerts. Seemed like an okish desktop, but cosing in vim triggers a metric butt ton of alerts which interrupts my super chill beats. So, ok lets disable them. Oh look there's a toggle.. easy enough. NO because those motherfucking alerts, while now silent, still cut off my music for a couple hundred ms every time they're triggered. Fuck you gnome.

Took the dive and started learning kubernetes for the last 90 minutes or so. All I can say at this time... is... fuckin' hell m8!

It's some pretty damn cool tech and deconstructing the pieces to understand how to properly build on top of it has been interesting; to say the least.

but shit, man...

the amount of abstractions happening on top of docker/containerd are just asking for tons of problems hahaha. The last place I worked, we had a fair share of devs that either could not or would not bother with trying to understand docker and would constantly push code to the environments, shit would break, and then they'd come to my team and ask us to basically be human log parsers for them... how in the hell my last company is going to fare with trying to roll out kube is beyond me.

tl;dr - kubernetes has a buttload of moving targets and abstracts a metric-fuck-ton of stuff. Last company I worked for is gonna strugglepuff trying to use it.

Before applying to a company how can I tell the company is healthy and won’t tank or lay people off any time soon? Is there like a public metric somewhere I can see to determine this?

Want to pull pranks on your friends or just confuse the craps out of people?

Www.github.com/DeveloperACE/MetricTime

Had a definite week from hell... a bunch of prod issues that only I could fix (that's a whole other rant for another day!)... a piece of code totally kicking my ass for days... a hosting environment that was unstable seemingly every time I needed to do something in it (and that killer piece of code could ONLY be properly tested there, naturally!)... a service that my app depends on flaking out with no indication what the problem was and another team responsible for it that is based off-shore so aren't responsive when I need them to be... a metric shit-ton of procedural bullshit dropped on my head... an immense amount of stress due to the lead-up to a prod rollout next month that absolutely CANNOT fail without huge ramifications for the business but not enough help to ensure it gets done.

But, with all that said, I DID manage to get that killer piece of code working late on Friday after slamming my head against the wall for over a week on it (and ultimately re-writing it from the ground-up on Thursday and Friday)... so, the week of hell ended on a high note at least, which is always a Very Good Thing(tm)!

The CloudWatch API is an awkward piece of shit.
No convenient way to just ask for the latest value of a metric. Gotta supply a time window and hope metrics were actually reported within that window.

Oh and make sure your timestamps are in ISO 8601 or the request will fail (but the SDK does zero validation so a unit test won’t catch it of course).

Oh and you have to assign an arbitrary ID to each metric query in your request even if you don’t care about mapping the results back to the queries. And the regex for the ID is just fussy enough to be mildly irritating.

Starting Out In Web Development (again)

The Question

I am looking for some suggestions on tools or frameworks to look into for a hobby project I wanted to try. I have always felt that _time_ is quite interesting so I was going to knock something up to present the current time in a lot of formats (All the ISOs I can find, GPS Time, Week Numbers, Mian Calendars, Metric Time, etc).

My Background

It has been a while since I did anything much with website related bits. Long ago I wrote HTML (4 or XHTML I think) out but hand for simple things. I added a little JavaScript to do a rollover image substitution. At some point I also did some JavaServerPages (JSP).

In the non-web world;
* I am quite good at C & C+
* I am OK with Go, Python, Ruby, BASH
* I can cobble together JavaScript, Java, JSP and a bunch of other things but I will be a bit slow and doing a lot of "online research" to aid me.

-----

Any suggestions are very welcome. Also if you know of similar existing sites I would be interested to see how others have chosen to present things.