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Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)
My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.
Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.
PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)22 -
The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?
The hospital's recovery room after my second child.
I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.
Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.
Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.
Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.
But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough6 -
I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!
I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!
I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.
So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.
I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.
This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.
I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.19 -
Stop asking which Linux distro is best. Seriously there is no "best" one. Arch is best FOR ME. Debian or Fedora might be your cup of tea. But I have great news for you, they are all FREE and there is free virtualization software you can try them on. Stop asking a stupid question that only gets opinionated answers and flame wars and go try them for yourself.
Also, while I'm on the topic. Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu XFCE etc. are all the same distro, they just have a different DE (desktop environment for you noobs). It's like on Monday I wear a suit but Tuesday I wear shorts and a tee shirt, it's still me, I'm just dressed differently.8 -
Blabbering co-worker rant.
So this bonker who speaks non-stop for 15 minutes without even a breather break is more annoying than I thought.
1. She used to work for a project A and then they moved her to my project. She kept cribbing she wants to continue working on A because that's where her expertise are. So management hired a new team member so she can continue on A and new member can work with me.
Now next week, the new member is joining us. As we prepare the onboarding plan, bonker comes crying that she wants to work on my project and NOT on Project A. She is forcing us to give Project A to new team member.
Manager upfront rejected her proposal and told her that she'd be working on A.
2. She literally gives orders. Her tone is rude and blunt. The other day ordered me to review her presentation and kept following up even when I said I was busy. Same tone and attitude with manager.
Then she complained about my behaviour saying I was a bossy person even when I used the most polite tone (because I have actively worked on and built my social skills).
3. Knows shit about the product, has no skill set, asks the same question 10 times, and isn't able to deliver bare minimum.
And then evidently everyone follows up with me because I am on top of everything (because I have to as bonker can't function).
4. She lied to me that company gives good hikes and easy promotions.
She was kicked out of her previous project because of her incompetency.
Fortunately or unfortunately, my manager saved her ass. But she literally is the most stupid person I have worked with me in my entire career.
5. She has no communication skills, something that is highest valued skill in my profession. And when I do my normal, it pisses her off. She keeps complaining that I am overstepping.
If I don't then product will just fall apart and everyone might get fired because of no work.
And that is causing her insecurities and she starts fear mongering about both of us being fired.
I told our manager upfront that I want to lead the product and she was more than happy about the proposal. What sucks is that my manager is leaving this month end and I'll have to build trust with my new line manager.
Ugh!! She is annoying..8 -
TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.
I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.
I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.
Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.
Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!
So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.
9 -
It might be a stupid question, but:
Do the full-stack devs of you actually have that function in the job contract or does it just say "(junior/senior) software developer"?
Mine says just "Software Developer" and in my opinion it sounds just too generic and undervalued for what I'm actually doing...22 -
i asked my senior "why we need a develop branch" and his reply was "-_-" , literally an emoji.
Ok ,well this might be a stupid question, but i have been in this organisation for 6 months and all this time these guys have not been able to make a proper release. either they miss commits while cherry picking, or they end up reverting stuff, or they are delaying the releases due to QA disapprovals, backend issues or management issues.
i proposed a simpler vcs :
1. `uat` is the source of truth
2. for every release we create a temporary branch `release-x.y.z` from `uat`
3. then we develop every feature in a branch cut from `uat` as `feat-abc`, code in it , and merge it back to `release-x.y.z`
4. finally we merge `release-x.y.z` into `uat`
where is develop branch supposed to be cut?
which branch is supposed to be cut from develop?
which branch is supposed to merge into develop?
where is develop supposed to be merged?
no one has answers to these fucking questions. but still they wanna confuse the whole team of 15+ android and ios devs about how to use which procedure
fml :/10 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Just tried to read this the frequently asked questions about article 13.
I don't think you need to read it, since you learn nothing from it besides that these people don't even care anymore. Everything is written in a "wishful" mode, even their goals.
You can just go to the next trash can, take an item and compare it with that. Unfortunately, you will have to realize that the item you just picked up was more useful to society than everything you'll read in these "answers".
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single...
They basically dodge every single question vague to the point that someone as the amount of drugs these people take in order to think they are making realistic proposes.
"We aim to blah blah", "Our aim is blah blah", "We want to blah blah". Might as well sue me for copying their content in that paragraph.
If anybody ever tells you that you have unrealistic, stupid goals or dreams just remember: there's a whole continent lead by people who have no fucking idea what they are doing and still think they are doing a good job. And because they have no idea what they are doing they just offload all the work to companies.
Plattform: Ok, what do we have to do?
EU: lol, just "put in place, in collaboration with right holders, adequate and proportionate technical measures." (#2 P4)
Plattform: can you be a bit more specific?
EU: Look, this proposal just "requires platforms which store and provide access to large amounts of copyright-protected content uploaded by their users to put in place effective and proportionate measures." It's not that hard to understand, you dummy (#3 P3)
Plattform: So we need to monitor all user-generated content?
Eu: are you stupid or something? You "would not have to actively monitor all the content uploaded by users", just the copyrighted content. (#4 P1)
The rest is more or less the same, just them imagining the outcome, without taking turning on their decomposed brains in order to apply common sense.
Jumping off this "union" seems be pretty lucrative 🤔1 -
Please explain. I liked it when there was just one 'thing' to do here. I want to post some stupid screenshot and then point out how it's silly or awesome or just whatever... where does that go? It might be a little jab - and a question... and a story...
32 -
UX and Game Design: "Keep It Simple" Is Stupid.
Presentation, Content, and Structure
Often when designing a UI, I stumble across blogs and articles that discuss it and focus far too much on the structure. Wordpress is terribly guilty of this and I see it fairly often in the game industry.
In web design you might use flexbox for a content-centric design and not worry too much about the layout, or css grid if structure seems important. But the broader question is why? Why is structure important and why is it wrong to focus on structure over content?
First, structure *comes* from content. Even where over many years, we've taken certain kinds of content, be they the various genres of games, or the sundry type of websites or apps, we've learned to take all the various patterns and categorize them, to extract the commonly repeating idioms into what we call structure.
But if you're experienced, and a fan of UI design in general, then I bet you that you can name a number of counter-examples, those that broke the mould, or broke the 'rules' of good design and still somehow worked. And that follows *because* structure is derived from content. This is the same reason idioms, patterns, and best practices change over time, as we codify exceptions into their "own" rules, new best practices emerge which mostly everyone follows, and then yet more exceptions break them. And so it goes.
So we see content before structure. But isn't there something to be said of style? Why yes, there is.
To read the full article, all 14k words of it, head over to medium for more:
https://swcs.medium.com/ux-and-game...
5 -
Hello council of elders.. or should I say "console"? Heh? Heh? I've been up for a long time sorry.
Anyway. I've started learning framework stuff. Angular right now. Been long overdue tbh. And I found a free course on udemy and followed it. It's cool and everything but I gotta ask...
Why can't I just use vanilla js and everything from scratch? I'm not sure if its the course I'm using (I'd appreciate more resources. Thanks) but I feel like it's a lot of effort. Is there something I'm missing or haven't learned yet?
It might sound stupid please let me know why it's better to use that than regular methods. Apparently it's meant to make stuff easier but I feel like it's just a lot linking files and making various things in different places.
Also. Other stupid question which might just be cause of the course but like... Is it mostly just for manipulating json??
Thanks. More questions to come soon!!3 -
Hello, I have a question for anyone familiar with multithreading!
I just started working with threading for the first time, I mostly write powershell scripts 😅, I found that certain conditions make using multithreading an absolute time saver. And of course in some tasks it's not such a big deal.
I am currently working on a project that runs multiple threads and each thread might invoke one of my functions that also threads the work.
I'm a total newbhat when it comes to this stuff, but if my main process is 4 threads, and I can spin up, up-to 4 more threads to run one of my functions, does the math equate to a possible total number of threads of 16 or is it possible to have the threading go ape-shit bananas and utterly thrash the cpu with rampant threads getting created?
I've looked online and based on some of the info that I've managed to come across on my own, the answers elude towards being safe because I'm creating pools for running the threads first and the pool is responsible for maintaining min/max threads, but I can't seem to find good info on running a pool+threads inside another thread.
Just to let you in on what the function does that requires threading in the first place, I need to basically query CloudTrail based on ARN's to find events, but I can only pass a single ARN to the find-ctevent cmdlet. So I'm essentially making 1500-ish really really small calls to AWS just to get back event data for the ARN.
Serially, this takes like almost 20 mins, on my laptop using stupid settings like 24 threads, it completes in about 95seconds. On the actual server that will be running this code, I'm going to limit it to 4 threads and try to figure out a way to cache the info locally and update the info on a cron or schedule so only the initial scrape takes forever and then the updates can be done nightly or something.
thank you in advance for your help, I'm not too sure if the question is dumb but please let me know either way!8 -
This might be a stupid question but due to the rise of services like Wix and Wordpress that make creating websites a breeze, will web design and development die in the near future?3
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How to use git rebase when working with master and staging branch?
It might be a stupid question, but I really like the idea of creating a feature branch, work on it, if there are multiple commits squash them, rebase in top of master and then create a pull request from that branch to master.
It keeps the gut log pretty clean.
However, how would you do this, when not only working with a master branch but a staging/testing too?
Would you just rebase onto staging, merge to staging and when everything is fine, rebase onto master and merge again? Is there a netter way?6 -
Um.. If you mute rant.. and someone ++es a comment of yours..any way to actually see who was it?!
I thought this just doesn't make notif icon spark up and supresses bolded stuff in all but that you are still able to see it under ++ tab if you switch, but nothing is there.. o.O7
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