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Hello world! I'm new here. Discovered devRant randomly and I'm so happy I did 😊 Problem is, I can't seem to get any work done now that I'm reading rants all day long 🙃10
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Rant && story time
When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:
TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.
Next lesson, he just said:
TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.
And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.
And then the cycle repeated.
However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.
Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.
The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).
A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.
I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.
ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.
It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.
ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.
Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms
ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)
At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.
ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.
From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.
However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.
Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.
Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.
And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.2 -
The security blog is up again, I fixed the bug.
Just wondering, why did it work in the first place? I simply required a composer autoloader twice but I've been doing that from the beginning and it didn't play up until last night...
I guess it shall remain a mistery 😞82 -
Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!
So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).
Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.
There was no optical tracking tech at the time.
One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...
Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.
My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.
Surprise! It's working again!
My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.
I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.
At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...
I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.
Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!
To this day I have no ideea why.
I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.
Fin.7 -
Current project:
A fairly simple and basic single page-ish project with no framework at all.
No backend or database.
No jQuery.
Plain old Gulp task, npm scripts and Webpack.
Some parallax and other scrolling effects.
Client is actually a pretty simple, cool and understanding guy.
This is too easy.
What is this madness??4 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
I don't know if I'm mentally connected to the other developers in the world, or maybe I sleepwalk and read devRant at night while I sleep, but every time I think something someone else has posted it a few hours before.
Even something stupid like "why the left is called left hand side? Doesn't make sense"1 -
Some little piece of shit fairy messed with my code.
Made some modifications in a tamplate file, tested in dev everything worked. Pushed it to prod and in one of its cases it displayed the array key of each element. Checked the code, an that was what written in there in prod and in dev too. However that shit in dev (and previous versions in prod) displayed key[0]->name as intended.
So I thought git blame and check where it went wrong... Guess what... That fucking line is the same age as the file itself....
How that motherfucking shit worked, and what had I had in mind when writing that shitcode is a mistery...
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