My dad found a phone a few weeks ago and asked me what he should do with it. Knowing how much it hurts to lose personal data, I said I could try to find the owner and send it back.

My first attempt was to search through the files on the SD card in order to find an identifying document (CV, bill, address...) but there were only family pictures.

My second attempt was to unlock the phone and check the information about the owner and the accounts linked to it. But for this to be possible adb has to be enabled. Good thing is that that particular brand shows an option for activating adb on the recovery menu.

But then, it's Android Oreo and I haven't found a way to lift the lock pattern. I thought I could bruteforce it over the shell (as I found there could be about 1300 possibilities for 2 to 5 point patterns), but there is the same attempt throttling as on the screen so that would take ages.

Finally, I found the owner in the most "social" way : The phone was displaying the weather for a particular place. It turns out that there are only 3K inhabitants in that city, si I thought that a big enough Facebook group might help me find the owner. So I posted a message on a 500 people FB group dedicated to this city with a selfie of the owner : someone identified her within 20 minutes.

Mission accomplished 😎

Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

In an effort to deal with the number of “top priority” tickets, management has come up with a new priority level, “urgent”, to help differentiate between tickets that are “top priority” and tickets that are actually “top priority”.

So as you can guess all tickets are now codified as “urgent”.

I’ve suggested management downgrade some tickets back to merely “top priority” as we’re clearly right back where we started with it being difficult to determine which order to do tickets in.

They’ve ignored my request as the bletherings of a clearly unenlightened peon, and have instead came up with a new priority, “mission critical” which will be reserved for the most hallowed of emerg— oh no wait everything is now “mission critical” who would have guessed?

So “Top priority” is the now lowest priority a ticket can have…Naturally.

Not so much screaming as staring in disbelief, mumbling profanity in his direction...

When my department lead said "I don't think this unit testing hype or code reviews make much sense, it's more efficient to just make a checklist and test the application yourself"

This was the QA department of an aerospace company, we wrote NDT software to do image recognition on xrays of alloy welds and micrometer laser measurements on fuel tank surfaces. Software which is quite mission critical, a single misrecognized welding fault could literally cost up to half a billion dollars — not to mention that it's a very sabotage & espionage sensitive industry.

After raising some hell he was replaced though.

My Mission Control where it all happens. Who'd like to share theirs?

There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

My whole team was a circus:
- Dev 1, the senior: he will be spent his days coding his personal projects and will convince management that everyone else needed to prove themselves so he will have nothing to do and we will do all the work.
- Dev 2, the junior: he was convinced that his mission in life was to be friends with his team. He's desk was far from the rest of the team so he will show just right after lunch EVERY FREAKING DAY with a list on his phone of random things he wanted to talk about like music, artists, art, news, etc., he really thought I didn't notice the list.
- Dev 3: the vegan: you will hear on every chance how she was so awesome for being vegan.
- Dev 4, the expert: if you ask him anything he will stare at you in silence to make you feel like you are a stupid for not knowing the answer and then turn around like nothing.
- Dev 5, the ghost: he will show early every day, code without mouthing a word and leave at 5pm, I think I heard him saying "hmmm" once but I might be wrong.
- Dev 6, the coder by accident: he was a graphic designer and ended up doing front end so he hated his job.
- Dev 7, me: the one who didn't care about anything but doing his job and leave.
- The project manager: she didn't knew anything about technology but will attend meetings with clients on her own, commit to deadlines and then inform us that the project that we estimated for 8 weeks will have to be done in 2 with new additions to the features.

You know the drill, here's your potato :/

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)

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Proud of my dad today.

He used to be the type of person who installs any application/software without reading what's being displayed on the screen. And my browsers used to be filled with all those toolbars and random search engines.

But yesterday when he was installing an app on his phone, he came to me asking "why does this app need access to contacts. It shouldn't require them in the first place".

I've succeeded in my mission.

Dad: 1
Shady Dev: 0

My employer gives me a mission to complete in our project using plain js.
*Uses 30 hours of working time completing the mission using custom js elements*
*Presents the results proudly to the employer*
*Realizes Microsoft edge doesn't support custom elements*

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

Pro tip: As great as your product is, it's 1000x harder to pitch to my boss when it has a goofy-ass name.

Me: Hey boss, I came across some new software that'll help manage our mission critical database system.
Boss: Oh yeah, what's it called?
Me: WoolySocksDB Enterprise Edition
Boss: 😐... No.

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):

1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.

2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.

3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.

-----

When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.

It is both! @__@

Mission successful!

Yesterday I successfully replaced the charging port and headphone jack of my Oneplus 5

FeelsGoodMan

Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"

We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^

Last Friday i convinced my boss it was mission critical to have an IntelliJ Idea subscription for my workstation...

I mostly push yaml files to git... 😁 and i regret nothing...

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

Somewhat unpopular opinion time. I don’t 100% hate Facebook.

I do not support their data collection, but my biggest problem with FB is the users. My connections are inherently idiots because I’m in high school with people who are way too narcissistic and full of drama. I left FB because of the toxicity, and the data protection as a result was a bonus.

I support the original mission of Facebook, to connect people. I just wish it was still about that.

Some companies are structured and work as cults.

Went to company party several days ago and felt as if I was 🧠 🧼. The way they talk about the company, people, “mission”, social structure of employees etc. I literally felt as the only one who’s seeing through it.

Note to self: If I were to start my own company, I have to read a bunch of books about cults.

Anyone else worked at cult-like startups?

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

I really don't understand how some it recruiters ever got their job... Brainless fucking scaredycat fuckwats!!!

Just finished a mission and i put myself back on the market, been flooded by calls and emails since monday, so far so good.

But all of them wanting you to 'come over the office for a chat', fuck no. 'I will come once a real opportunity gets presented, i propose to do video conference call as to not waste time and transportation'. But noooo... It's like they never heard of that thing being possible before. I propose them to use meet.jit.si (really cool and free to use videoconference software, no software needs to be installed)... 'Yeah sorry but your link doesnt work', 'how come? You just need to go to the url and grant cam and mic permissions for the session'... 'No it asks me to install software (not true) and i simply cant now ... Can you tell me who you are and what you do and what your field of expertise is?'

For fucks sake you got my cv right in front of you you fucking blind maggotpuss! Learn to fucking read!

Tomorrow is another, hopefully better day...

Glad to take that of the chest.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

I accidentally deleted the Facebook chat history I had with someone. Wanting it back, I quickly whipped up a program for my Teensy to download and executes a Java app I wrote. The Java app gets the Facebook cookies, decrypts and uses them to read the chat history which will then be sent to me. Now all I have to do is insert my Teensy via USB and I'll have my chat back! *mission impossible music playing*

Waking up from a dream with a girl in it.
TL;DR: We fell in love and I can finally somehow remember her. Not completely though...

(To the perverts: We did not have sex nor did we kiss.)
The worlds I am becoming a part of are very complex. I won't get into the details of how they look like. I will tell as far as I can remember.

<vaguely remember the beginning>
My sister, my mom and I went into a house which turned out to have weird things inside.
Suddenly I became something like an agent and I had a special mission. I went to the basement of this building. Saw a few guys chilling there. Grabed a walkie talkie which was taped on the right wall. I have listened to it while moving back to the entrance, when I have arrived there, it began to do disortion type of sounds.

<I have been to a lot of different places here. Telling each of them would make me to not come to an end lol>

Then I have decided to go outside. The outside-of-the-house world changed. I was at floor 8 or something like that. It was very high when I looked down. All of the sudden I got into a waterfall type of thing which was about to suck me in to a circle. The waterfall was limited to the area of where this house was. It was basically hovering above the streets, but never reaching the streets.

I somehow met the lovely girl in a cube type of thing that helped us not to fall down through the spiral. We enjoyed the action the waterfall created. It made us move in a circle and we had to hold ourselves at the wall of the cube which luckily had knobs to hold on.

After that whole action I have been in my bed and sleeping. She somehow found me on a social media platform and contacted me with "Meet me on <some strange date>".

<some unlogical world shit happens here. I will just skip them until the date>

The day to meet her comes. She is up on a hill with a "purple?<idk it was purple-ish>" sky.

<can not remember the dialogue>

We had a great time and I felt that she had feelings for me.
She then went away. What about me? And me, too. ;)

The next day I went to see her again. She was gone. I found out that she has a brother. I talked to him about where she might be. Turns out her brother was a demon or satan <idk they all became agressive and god-like powerful lol>.
He told me that she must be there where <random name of enemy> is to fight the enemy to rescue her mom.

Her brother went to help her. I followed him since I did not know where the enemy was. Let alone where I was. The world has changed for the 99999th fucking time lol.

I followed him up another hill with trees and a lot of people. It was autumn.

Then we found her sitting on a hill looking down to the sea beneath us with cherry blossom trees around her.

The dream was about to end. I felt it. So I have asked her a few questions after the happy greeting, but I can not remember them and her answer anymore. But I do remember that she did not say anything after one question. She just stared at me looking through my eyes which immediately did end the dream.
I was able to get into the dream shortly after it a few times, but I was not able to interact with them.

Besides of that: I have had "Battle Symphony-Linkin Park" playing as a background music for the whole dream a long.

The good thing is that I somehow would be able to recreate her. I know how she looks like to about 60%.

I do not even know why the fuck I am telling y'all this.

In just one week I have to make two presentations for my class, first one talk about open source and why everyone should use it and in the second one I have to explain how Git works and why it is so helpful for common projects.

It feels like God gave me an essential mission for life

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Fellow Devrantians,
I have a ridiculous story and a mission if you choose to participate.

So we had a dev that worked here for 2 years. He eventually left. It was a mutual decision as they didn't want to perform some of the work the boss assigned. Okay, I guess that is a thing. Not working on stuff for 2 years is kind weird but okay.

It has been almost a year since he left. A cop shows up today. Apparently they were investigating a crime perpetuated by 2 people at my work. During the last year it is alleged that 2 people that are very high in the company have placed mice in this former employee's vehicle. Yes, the very serious crime of Vehicular Rodent Redistribution has occurred at my work place. There were 2 people involved (there may be more). So technically that raises it to a Conspiracy to Commit Vehicular Rodent Redistribution. This may mean the feds will have to get involved.

This is a dark day for our company. I am not sure how to deal with this information. I cannot look at these people the same way anymore. I didn't realize we had Mouseketeers in my work place.

The mission: Please help me come up with additional crime titles and perpetrator titles for this heinous crime. I intend to share my thoughts at next weeks meeting.

I wanted to play games today. simple mission. i was playing for two hours and somehow i ended up writing a webapp to help me with my taxes based on data from my firefly-iii server 🤔

why can't i sit down and just do nothing for a day 😅

My goal was to hack the game to increment a random byte of memory every frame if SELECT was pressed. Mission accomplished!
(Done with ASM hacks, not recompiling from the pokeblue disasm)

To all the Java Teams that died during the fucking Mobile Civil War, We salute you!

1. Millionaire 2011
2. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
3. Dragon Ball Z Saiyan Fighters
4. Moto Girls
5. 24 Special Ops
6. Thor: The Dark World
7. Kung Fu Panda
8. Worms 2011: Armageddon
9. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
10. Resident Evil - The Missions
11. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
12. Spider-Man 3
13. Need for Speed - Undercover 3D
14. Contra 4
15. Rambo on Fire
16. Fast and Furious 6 
17. Counter Strike 3D
18. Men in Black 3
19. X–Men Origins: Wolverine
20. WWE Legends of Wrestlemania 3D
21. 3D Fight Night: Round 4
22. 3D Ultimate Rally Championships
23. Assassin's Creed
24. Zuma
24. Die Hard 4
25. 3D WWE Smackdown Vs RAW 2009
26. Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones
27. 3D Fight Night: Round 3
28. Super Mario Bros
29. Bruce Lee - Iron Fist 3D
30. Naruto Adventure: A New Apprentice
31. FIFA 2011
32. James Cameron's Avatar
33. Racing 2: The Real Car Experience
34. King Kong
35. Gangstar City
36. Iron Man 3
37. XIII 2: Covert Identity
38. 4x4 Extreme Rally 3D
39. Real Football Manager 2013
40. Splinter Cell: Conviction
41. 2008 Real Football 3D
42. Assassin's Creed 2
43. Hummer 3D
44. American Gangster
45. Real Football 2009
46. 3D Football: Real Madrid 2010
47. Xtreme Dirt Bike
48. Tekken Mobile
49. A Good Day to Die Hard
50. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
51. Asphalt 3: Street Rules 3D
52. GTA IV Mobile
53. 3D Contr Terrorism
54. Real Football 2015
55. The Amazing Spider-Man
56. Contra 4 (2009)
57. Mortal Kombat 3D
58. Bad Girls
59. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
60. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 3D
61. God of War
62. PES 2009 (Pro Evolution Soccer)
63. Ultimate Street Football
64. Assassin's Creed: Revelations
65. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
66. 3D Super taxi driver
67. Gangstar 2: Kings of LA
68. Asphalt 6: Adrenaline
69. Assassin's Creed III
70. Danger Dash
71. Real Football 2014
72. Gangstar - Crime City
73. Gangstar 3: Miami Vindication
74. Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
75. Zuma's Revenge!

We know you guys did your best but the world is a fucking shit hole. We still remember your hard work!

76. Mission Impossible 3
77. Gangstar Rio: City of Saints (I guess these were your last days at work. Well-done guys!)
78. Real Football 2010
79. Real Football 2011 (Real Soccer)
80. Real Football 2012
81. PES 2011 (Pro Evolution Soccer) 
82. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (My Favorite)
83. And those missing the list.

WE SALUTE YOU ALL!!! ∠(^ー^)

newlifenewhope Update No.1 / Day 2

It's so hard to formulate company's Vision and Mission, even rubber ducks is not helpful. I need my vision to be unambiguous. this will take a while to finalize

My Server arrived and not opened yet
The Dozen of rubber ducks is delayed for another 3 days.

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

Fun stuff from the few most recent pages in Dwarf Fortress bug tracker:

Human civilization's soldier is an Alligator Recruit.

Dead suspects confess to crimes

Crash due to zero-size weasel

Pets and other animals from retired fortresses appear as selectable 'workers' in request screen, die of old age on arrival

Some animal people have extra fingers

People dying twice?
Most confusingly, one necromancer shows as having died from old age twice, despite this not being possible.

My Nature Hating Adventurer Who Lacks Altruism And Is Very Cruel Isn't Happy After Butchering Animals

bat man males don't have geldables

Reanimated severed werebeast necromancer hand has a full body

Dwarf likes "cacao wood wood"

Dwarves turn hostile againt the player and defend their prison from raid sent to free them

Visitors giving birth during visit leave their baby behind

a water buffalo got stuck inside a rough tetrahedrite wall

Animals which retract into body parts forget to come out

Herbalist stuck on stepladder, starving to death.

Artifact has an image of nothing

Cave Dragons are sometimes intelligent, and sometimes join human civilizations

A goblin knocked over a workshop and now my dwarves are killing each other

Ambusher elves are being spotted, but the giant monsters they're riding on aren't.

runs with food from table to table. Can't eat

Intelligent Undead Sent on Mission Return as Ghosts

Horrified merchants immediately destroy their wagons, pack their goods and leave the depot

Dwarf king abdictates to become commoner necromancer apprentice

Internal body parts with certain tags can still wear clothing & armor, without being otherwise accessible

Necromancer marries zombie

Single dad dwarf with buggy dead wife leaves kid behind when he takes over holding

Large quantities of adamantine coins causes trade depot to burst into flame

!dev && random == true

Venus (top), Jupiter (bottom). There's a star (Antares) there to make it triangle but the star is dim to get caught by my crappy phone camera.

I've always fascinated by the night sky. Nevermind the mission to travel to Mars, the only matters now is how beautiful the night sky is but a lot of us don't get access to it because of light pollution. It's kinda sad that I need to go outside of the cities to see more of what the sky has to offer. I really wish everyone can see and appreciate it once in a while.

Few months ago I was working on something rhat wasn't mission critical for the current sprint. Near the end of the month I was asked to help the BD team (which usually do the testing) with testing the webapp as well as the mobile versions. First day of me testing ever, found more bugs by myself than the 5 BD people did in the entire week. Really felt like a boss. Next month they asked me to help again. And again. And again.
This is how my desk looks nowdays (the 3 phones are behind the laptop charging)

!dev (maybe slightly)

I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):

Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.

So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...

Boss : "Hey everyone is so busy/too good to work on that project but it's really complicated af and you'll be alone. Good luck ! Oh and we are ok to hire you next year after your apprenticeship, work well and without pressure !"

Me : O_o "Ok I'll do my best, shoudn't be that complicated"

Me (1 month after) : demotivated, sick of that mission, tired, algorithm not working, I wanna die I'm a parasite for that company. Thanks giving me that work to do.

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

PM: Page load times are up. It might be your API blocking requests.

Me: Possible, though most of my load testing was performed against a random sample of requests at nearly 5 times the expected average per minute rate. I can add some logs but I think this is a red herring theory.

PM: Yes add logs, and New Relic and get it released ASAP.

Me: To confirm, you want me to make a bunch of diagnostic changes to a mission-critical API the day before Holiday break...

I felt like that guy from the Apollo 13 team warning Gene Kranz that the LEM was not built for this and I can make no guarantees... Released an hour before we went home for the weekend.

I'm playing a PC game, Yakuza 0, for passing some free time. It's an action game so I get to fight and stuff.

In the latest mission, I'm supposed to run to the supermarkets (different ones too) and get 5 items for 5 NPCs to unlock the story progression.

I'm basically running errands for 5 NPCs.

What the fuck am I doing with my life

Aaaah FUUUUUUCK!!!!!

As if I had nothing better to not nor deadlines I went on a mission to tweek my i3-wm installation with resulted in lightdm not starting... FML

I have severe OCD. What I do and what I make should be perfect. When I went to being a teacher as a side hustle, two days a week, three hours a day, nothing serious, my brain was like "teaching is a noble mission, Janusz Korczak was a teacher, and he dropped that Teacher Banner when he stepped into a nazi gas chamber to not let his students die alone, and now you are the one who caught that banner, and now you are carrying it, and you must not bring the shame to it", then I wasn't sleeping because for every class I SHOULD be READY, everything should be checked and prepared, there should be not a single case of me not knowing the answer for anything students ask, let alone being late

!rant

Okay, I try not to swear even when I am frustrated and I’ve had it up to my neck with a certain issue; it’s my personal ideal, and I have my reasons - I also have my ways of venting anger.

I searched for bootstrap on Google just once. Since then, I’ve just been using the actual website to get where I need to. Now, at the beginning of every YouTube video I watch, I get a Udemy ad asking me to enroll into the Bootstrap class. I use Adblock (I know it doesn’t protect me from all their ad scripts) but seriously, can they please tone down on the aggressive ads.

It’s so infuriating. If I have clicked the ad link to be redirected to Udemy, perhaps your AdSense should understand that I don’t want to learn Bootstrap from Udemy. If I see one more f$&@?!#g Udemy web development ad... I might just make it my mission to become a l337 h4x0r and wreck Google. Hehe

Now that that’s out, thanks for reading.

I'm still on my answer one question a day mission.
With this time, to fight back with "this doesn't work", I almost create codesandbox for every answer. (Assume there's enough info)
But, my gut tells me I probably gonna loss reputation again.

My monday started with boss calling me at 0730 asking if I could do a support-mission at the offices of the local landfill - this because 2 of the support people had called in sick and we where short on manpower. RIGHT! I said, with a sense of dread and disbelief. ended up spending much of the day there. fixing everything from default reader of pdf to calibration of mouse sensitivity.

It's not like I need to code or anything, since I am working on two different projects and in competition of a third. Finally came back to the office after been at the landfill until lunch and got another support mission; this time internal mission. namely write out from our companys database and import the data to an absolute atrocity called PowerBI so our accountant get the numbers......... FINE!!! I'll do that too, but dont come to me and cry when the project delivery date gets postponed into eternity!!!

Not the best workspace picture in the world but it's my first working space that I rent with some collegemates inside a shopping center with 10 floors in Iran. The only thing that annoys me is the fact that I have to get premission for almost anything from security...

Today the mission is to clean more and make the setups!

Why do some people feel the need to prove their stupidity and utter lack of skill in the face of the world?!?!
Yesterday I learned that a sister company is hiring an intern civil engineer to code some application plugins connected to our IS ?!?!? How the fuck do you think he can only understand what the fuck we do?

To put it in context, I'm kind of the CDO of a French medium group (a little cluster of companies), as the group is in the construction industry I'm the CTO for all Computer things. Inside the group, I'm the CTO of the digital factory. So the group IS is a microservice decentralized API REST-based architecture.

Next Monday we'll have a meeting, so I can explain to them why it's a FUCKING STUPID IDEA!!!! The only good thing is that any application programming done outside of the Digital Factory will be handled as an External Company Application, so it's not my problem to secure it, debug it, or simply make it work. And they already know that I'll enforce this ruling!!!

But WHY the fuck do they still think any mother fucker can professionally program!!!!!! Every time I have to deal with them It's horrendous!!!! I had to prove them why using a not encrypted external drive for a high security mission It's stupid!!!, and why having the same password for every account is FUCKING STUPID!!!

The most ridiculous part is they have a guy who really believe he has some IT skills!! Saying things like "SVN" it's a today tool (WTF), firewall are useless, etc....

WHY!!!! WHY!!!!

It's 1:15 AM and I just got gome from work after 16 hours working on some really difficult mission critical things and deploying.
I think it's 16 hrs, my mind doesn't really work anymore. Good thing I drove home safe...

So I bought 2 dvd packed with old rpg games.

I didn’t know my first quest will be to get those games working.

To make my life more miserable I decided to convert those dvd to iso.

First I needed to find computer with dvd because those I use apparently don’t have dvd anymore.

Found one with windows 7 inside.
Yeah first mission complete.

Now just find dvd to iso software and burn those bastards.

I need to update date / time to be able to use internet over https.
Checked.

Started looking for the dvd to iso software. Microsoft answers giving links to bloatware with detailed instructions how to install desired things without crap. The link to download doesn’t work but at least I have the name ImgBurn.
They have website so I click on first mirror and run setup.
First fail they’re linking to bloatware that downloads another bloatware that installs some search plugin for firefox.
Uninstalling search plugin.
1 hour passed by.
Clicking last link. Success.
Now time to click it smart to omit any unwanted software and get only what I want. Reading trough install instructions and checking out not wanted checkboxes is like great quest.
Finally I have what I want and I can backup my dvd.
What a great evening.

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.

For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.

Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.

Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".

Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.

That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.

And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.

The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.

Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.

The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.

Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used.

hdparm -y /dev/sdb # to the rescue for the silence

turns out I could simply reorganize my mounts and spin down my hdd. Now at last can I enjoy the silence...

If I try to listen carefully I can only hear street noises from across the river and a few 9-stores buildings [something ~600 meters] through a closed plastic window and absolutely nothing from my PC.

Now.. Next mission: how to silence those street noises...

Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.

tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.

For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.

After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.

Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.

At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.

I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.

So I'm at this clinic deploying this top notch clinical cutting edge health care system we worked on for 3 months with mission impossible team...
A nurse came to me:
"You must be the IT guy, can you fix my printer ?"
What would you say guys in this scenario ?

Just wanted to share with you that I just finished my first ever mission as a freelance !

After a lot of information gathering and administrative cumbersome tasks to become a freelancer and a student at the same time, I have finally managed to acquire my first client and complete my first mission !

Excited to see what’s will come next !

So I decided to have some funzies over the weekend. Started XCOM 2. Built a team for a mission, spent an hour customising. Then I spent 3 hours going through and not failing miserably even once. The last fucking part of the mission, my favourite sniper dies after getting hammered in the face with a fucking laser beam. Then I lose control of the battlefield and everyone dies. Start again because I'm NOT gonna lose my awesome sniper!

This game is like designing software, planning deployment strategies, and disaster recovery at the same time. Recommended for all devs!

Fuck you Android ! Why the fuck does making my fucking status bar transparent has to be more difficult than launching a mars mission with a team of chimpanzees. I have been trying everything from xml styles to fucking java code but the status bar won't take the tint. Been at this fucking shit for 2 days

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

Apparently by being assigned to mission impossibles and making it through.

It's not always fun, but it sure as hell improves my skills.

So just a normal rant here. .. it was one of those moments you find in yourself in sometimes. You get so caught up in thinking you know everything that you can't implement occams razor into your everyday work routine anymore. You've worked with so many complex workarounds that when you are faced with a simple problem with a simple answer you can't see the blinking neon light shouting at you anymore , and you can't here the bells sound anymore. ..
My rant is about Me vs the infamous mikrotik router. Something I had to set up. Something I had to login to setup. Something I've done so many times before but this time , my inflated ego and overbearing sense of grandeur just could not figure out.
Class how do we login into a router? Well find your gateway and type that sucker into a browser and you will be on your way ... well that's the answer right there. But since I thought that my router was connected to three dummy switches that it would affect anything or the paranoia I had that my isp somehow disabled any connections to the router at all or that I and to open a new port to connect to it or use winbox to connect to it using only the mac address or ssh into it ..would work ...I didn't try using the tried and tested way of doing it.
I wanted it to be an adventure. I wanted it to be a problem to solve so I shoved the ordinary answer out of the way and used other methods to try and connect to it...
All I had to do was used Nmap to scan the gateway for open ports and realise to view it in the Browser on port 8080 instead and finish my journey ...
I was looking for a dragon to slay , a maze to conquer, glory at the end of my mission ... when all I felt was a sheer sense of idiocy.
--Rant Completed--

Level 1 support moron dishing out bad instructions from his flowchart.

Wanted me to edit config files for a production setup, which would've killed shipping for all stations, in the middle of our shipping rush.

Fixed the problem while in the escalation queue for level 2. L2 confirms the fix, and bemoans the shit documentation L1 provided.

If its a business class (mission critical) system, hire decent support staff! You might try testing people for reading/listening comprehension, and then paying them a decent wage! This isn't good for my blood pressure...

My first exposure to computers was my mom’s Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I used to love playing “Impossible Mission” and “Way Out” on there. Eventually I started programming in Basic on it.

Whenever I reach the point where static analysis can't help me any further I always feel a sort of thrill mixed with terror. This is the real deal. Until now the problems were easy to find, the questions had well defined answers to choose from, the rules were universal. In the part of the logic that cannot be checked, the invariants upheld manually, where the best the type system can enforce is for the programmer to clearly state what they're doing, lies the real beast. In proofs commented on functions or invariants as logical expressions over plain English variables written in the doc comments of a struct.

In the blurry and pompous future I imagine for software development, that's where the programmer's time will be spent. Once we all agree on what a string is, what it means to depend on someone else's code, and what parts a UI should be made of, all a developer should have to do is make decisions and derive proofs an automated deduction engine can't do on its own.

!dev

so I got asked how much I wanted as my monthly salary for my first dev job and I said 300 USD, did I overshoot ? I haven't gotten a reply yet and I am worried I messed up

backstory, I had this online video interview but during that period i was working for my dad in a remote village, the background was terrible, I had to tilt my camera to an odd angle to make it less terrible, after all the usual talks on "our company company's vision and mission........ we are trying to create....... blag blah blah.......". he commented on my area and I said I was working odd jobs to keep up,

him: how much will be enough for you monthly ?

me: I just need enough to pay for internet and maybe a little left for other stuff (I was this desperate)

him; no we need you to face this job squarely without distractions, how much will be enough ? send your reply as message, yes, they reached out to me through email and whatsapp

me; 300 USD

I'm fucking worried I was over the bar.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

I‘ve now my first smart home device. It is only a power outlet, but the story behind it is a bit special.
Because Apple trapped me in there ecosystem I wanted to have a HomeKit compatible outlet. The problem with that: Either to expensive or to big. So my ne mission: Connect a non HomeKit device to HomeKit, but without a too expensive proprietary gateway/bridge.
After a bit of googling I found a software called "Homebridge", build to run on a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately I had one old RasbPi 1 B. So I installed a new Raspbian and installed Homebridge. I forgot how slow it was.
Then I bought a cheap (but good) ZigBee outlet and a ZigBee USB Dongle. With a plugin for Homebridge it was very easy to connect the ZigBee Dongle.
Then I tried to connect the outlet, but the log said "Unrecognized device". After a bit of research I found out that the outlet is not supported by the homebridge-zigbee plugin. As a software engineer I tried to find a solution for it, so I reverse engineered the device recognition (very easy because Homebridge is a node application). After a while I managed to add the configuration for the outlet to the plugin.
And see, it became light.

Expected to know everything about C# when all you've done is used Visual Studio to build an installer that bundles up someone else's C# app.

I'm a Web Dev not a magician (although at times I feel like it 😊).

Yes I've got a bit of the knowledge that's managed to get into my brain via osmosis but not mission critical level stuff.

Hotel Vim

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...

Welcome to the Hotel Vim
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel Vim
Any time of year (Any time of year)
You can find it here

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

So I called up the Captain,
"Please bring me my wine"
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine"
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...

Welcome to the Hotel Vim
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin' it up at the Hotel Vim
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "

I’m done with people who claim they don’t have time to do something.
Constantly hearing people complain they don’t have time to do things, oh fuck off you cunt. You work a nine to five, you get home at half five and you sit at home doing fuck all while you complain that things aren’t going your way.
Doesn’t even have to be about developing, lost count with the amount of people who claim they don’t have time to go the gym. Dickhead, you have a 24 hour gym three minutes away from your house. You could go after work, instead you’ll sit on your ass, eat a load shit and then complain you’ve put on weight.

If you’re doing fuck all to make things happen then you lose the right to complain about your circumstances. Stop blaming other people for your fuck ups because you ‘don’t have time’ to get shit done you absolutely holocaust of a human being.
While I’m at, fuck people who think it’s my soul mission in life to fix their shit, believe it or not I don’t give two flying fucks about your circumstances if you’re doing fuck all to help yourself.
Do me a favour and kindly drink some bleach.

Desperately need advice from devs in India...
asking this here since really stressed about this and don't know who to ask to...
I am an engineering student from Bangalore, India from a basically no name college...
I have been coding for 2 years now, web stuff, primarily rails and js...
i have worked with handful of startups, done internships, and am working on my own projects which i will launch soon...
Lately my college has made it a mission to make my life hell even though i always perform well academically...it has gotten to a point where I am not able to work or learn anymore...
I wanted to ask what consequence my career will face if I drop out ?
I believe lack of a graduation degree will make me not eligible for many jobs...please suggest what I should do...

WHYY , are you fucking fucking complaining, mother fuckdr yyuo fucking won

You completed our mission objective successfully

You fucking did it mother fhcker and what ur asking from me after all of thus shit weve been through for the past 7 months is beyond our primary mission objective ,fucker

Obviously as you can fuckin see from the 7 months of suffering we can not repeat the same objective twice, just like u cant be born or die twice, fucker

Shit happens once and thats goddamn fuckin it motherfucker move on to tje ffckin next mission objective that i command u to go towards

NO FAILED MISSIONS. I ONLY BROADCAST SUCCESS. BUT SHIT HAPPENS RARE.

So forget about her u motherfucker, you told me what you wanted to achieve, i planned out the whole scenario, i organized the mission objective for you and you have took the fuckin risk and and action and guess what u fuckin succeeded. My mission objective has never failed you. What you are trying for these fuckin past 7 months is not my mission objective and it is out of scope, unplanned fuckin shit and that is why u fell back into fuckin depression i told u to fuckin stay away but u aint to me listen fucker

Stop.

Breathe.

Worry no more about the shit that is irrelevant and out of your fuckin control.

U got friends at college. Hang out with them ull feel better. Whwnever u think of that fuckin whore goo mothrrfuckr and meet ur goddamn fckin irl friends. Text them. Shit man.....

Good luck

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!

I have been using the same silver spoon for 6 years. It sits in my drawer used and waiting for it's next mission. Have often thought of washing it in the lounge, but then I'd bump into people who excitedly introduce themselves and ask if I'm a new employee...I've been here 9 years.

Have never washed it, perhaps I'll get a big spoon to accompany my dirty spoon...

Um working on the solution to eradicating escalating diseases application and web based application..... Have three sections: 1. Emergency
2. HIV/tb monitoring/ report
3. Public info.

Iam gud at writing and codes but not good at expressing myself.
.any innovative fellow dev that can add me another section that I need to consider....my projects mission is to fight against disease world wide....any contribution or new ideas ?

I finally got around to setting up my own cloud with nextcloud on my own dedicated server.

Just setting up Nextcloud alone was not really the challenge ( I've set up at least 2 Nextcloud instances in the past ).
The actual challenge was to install /e/ OS on my mobile phone and get it to work with my Nextcloud instance.

It's not all performant, buttery-smooth or super-fast yet, but for a one-person / user-cloud, I think it should be just fine.

There's still room for improvement in terms of server-side performance, but it's working fine with the basics at least.
I need to figure / iron out some issues like social federation via ActivityPub not working, Nextcloud SMS not syncing up my SMS, Mail app crashing because I used a self-hosted Nextcloud instance, etc; but those are things I could work on slowly, in the course of time.

No, the server is not physically controlled by me, yet ( it's a dedicated box server though. Still, hosted and physically controlled by a provider ).

I intend on setting up another 'replica' on a RaspberryPi which I will then make primary, connecting to the internet via DynamicDNS.
I'll probably keep the server as a fallback / backup server just in case my home server loses connectivity.

Taking back control from Big Tech is something I intend on pursuing actively this year. I've had the idea in my head for too long that it has started to fester.

This is only a first step, of many, that needs to follow, in order for me to take control back from Big Tech.

Yes, there still is some room for improvement, but I think for now ‒
Mission Accomplished!🤘