Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Fuck web dev.
I dabbled in many areas but I do web dev most often. And seriously: fuck web dev. Your site has to work on multiple browsers. Multiple screen resolutions. The code has to be tiny for load time. The images have to work for every resolution and still be small. The styling can look different in different browsers. So many useful javascript features are only supported by modern browsers. An on top of that: IE.
I’ve gotten quite good at all of this, but still: it’s such a fucking pain.

Most useless feature:

Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".

However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.

The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??

Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".

We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.

I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅

The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.

The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.

The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.

Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.

What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.

Unless of course either of them is < 1.

So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.

And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?

I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.

But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.

Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).

The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.

You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.

It turns out my intuition was correct.

Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.

I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:

if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1

This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.

And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.

So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.

i booked my first ever car and am having so many emotions... from scary to excited to anxious and mostly feeling super dumb.

i booked a very basic hatchback with minimal features and the lowest price. i was so not sure about the various terms that guy was using: mudflags, foglamps, tilt adjustment wheel ...

like, i read about them just a minute ago on google and next moment, this guy was asking me if i should pay this much amount to get it included in my car or not. i asked him many times and for things that i felt were useful, i got them included.

biggest things about this very first purchase is

1. i have learnt car driving from training school for 30 days. i got my license via some bribe money and did not gave the real test. I am basically a guy with no experience of handling cars. i was doing okay when learning tho

2. i am a single child from a very small, conservative and super anxious family. everytime i am gonna take this car, am sure my mom is gonna start praying to god for my safety. i too have this inherited anxiety and would probably be praying to god everytime i would travel alone.. the responsibility to keep myself safe, and the car safe, while not even knowing how to release clutch properly will be super scary

3. my friends are gonna love this but i want to become a trustful driver for them first. basically among 5 of us, only 1 had his father's car on which we have taken a lot of trips. that boy has my huge respect, and he is one of the best and most reliable safe driving person i know. he even enjoy the songs and pur conversations. i want to be like him, but currently my friends don't even trust sitting on the back of my scooty and feel scared.

4. our neighbours are probably gonna dug up their graves and roll in it. they are already very jelous and angry people, i hope they don't cause any damage to my new car.

5. i am super scared about this new car... how can i protect this precious baby... how to make sure that someone is not stealing parts off this..

so.many.fucking.scary.and exciting.thoughts!!!

I am overwhelmed in my mind right now and I kinda just need it out.

I'm incredibly divided. There's so much I want to do which is fine I can balance some of it kinda well but when it comes to the programming aspects of what I want to do is where my head gets tugged in multiple directions.

Parts of me really want to continue to dive into C# and learn it a lot more than I currently do so I can continue to write the tools I use for problems I come across.

And the other part of me just wants to go do lower level development with C because that's where most of my goals are being mostly embedded and OS development.

But so many people I know that are incredibly smart devs use C# and I see why it's an incredible language and I'm glad it's one of the languages I know but I feel like there's so much to learn about it and I there's so much shit I see that I'm just like I don't know when I would want to use this, or I can see X feature being very useful but I don't know where I'd use it in my projects. Hell even C#s version of structs I know are very useful but I'm not able to make good use of them

I'm just in that headspace where I'm not learning enough and I feel dumb when I look at someone else's project because there's a lot more complexity In their project that none of my projects have ever had and so many people make use of language features I've never used or thought about using (generics being a good example) and I'm constantly asking questions which I know is okay but too much is happening in life lately and it's just making it harder to handle.

Thanks to anyone that got through it hopefully I'm not alone in these feelings

Question, !rant

To all my fellow Java devs, what are some things that have come out in JDK8 and JDK9 that you think are the most useful?

I know very little about the new features, but after learning about lambdas I wondered what other golden nuggets there might be. Thanks in advance!

So, do any of your poor fuckers have the opportunity - nay, PRIVILEGE of using the absolute clusterfuck piece of shit known as SQL Server Integration Services?

Why do I keep seeing articles about how "powerful" and "fast" it is? Why do people recommend it? Why do some think it's easy to use - or even useful?

It can't report an error to save its life. It's logging is fucked. It's not just that it swallows all exceptions and gives unhelpful error messages with no debugging information attached, its logging API is also fucked. For example, depending on where you want to log a message - it's a totally different API, with a billion parameters most of which you need to supply "-1" or "null" to just to get it do FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Also - you'll only see those messages if you run the job within the context of SQL FUCKING SERVER - good luck developing on your ACTUAL FUCKING MACHINE.

So apart from shitty logging, it has inherited Microsoft's insane need to make everything STATICALLY GODDAMN TYPED. For EVERY FUCKING COMPONENT you need to define the output fields, types and lengths - like this is 1994. Are you consuming a dynamic data structure, perhaps some EAV thing from a sales system? FUCK YOU. Oh - and you can't use any of the advances in .NET in the last 10 years - mainly, NuGet and modern C# language features.

Using a modern C# language feature REMOVES THE ABILITY TO FUCKING DEBUG ANYTHING. THE FUCKER WILL NOT STOP ON YOUR BREAKPOINTS. In addition - need a JSON parsing library? Want to import a SDK specific to what you're doing? Want to use a 3rd party date library? WELL FUCK YOU. YOU HAVE TO INDEPENDENTLY INSTALL THE ASSEMBLIES INTO THE GAC AND MAKE IT CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.

While i'm at it - need to connect to anything? FUCK YOU, WE ONLY INCLUDE THE MOST BASIC DATABASE CONNECTORS. Need to transform anything? FUCK YOU, WRITE A SCRIPT TASK. Ok, i'd like to write a script task please. FUCK YOU IM GOING TO PAUSE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES WHILE I FIRE UP A WHOLE FUCKING NEW INSTANCE OF VISUAL STUDIO JUST TO EDIT THE FUCKING SCRIPT. Heaven forbid you forget to click the "stop" button after running the package and open the script. Those changes you just made? HAHA FUCK YOU I DISCARDED THEM.

I honestly cant understand why anyone uses this shit. I guess I shouldn't really expect anything less from Microsoft - all of their products are average as fuck.

Why do I use this shit? I work for a bunch of fucks that are so far entrenched in Microsoft technologies that they literally cannot see outside of them (and indeed don't want to - because even a cursory look would force them to conclude that they fucked up, and if you're a manager thats something you can never do).

Ok, rant over. Also fuck you SSIS