There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

Whoever is responsible for the responsible for the refund process on airbnb can eat a bunch of dicks, watch me spill all of the fluids over his keyboard and then watch me break every single one of his/her fingers.
How the fuck do you dare to keep all of my money in some kind of internal wallet while I clearly need it to get a hotel after your starrated host left me hanging, autoaccepting but then telling me via phone that he using vacation till Friday... Half a goddamned fucking hour after I tried to call him. I want to report the shit out of this asshole, but no I can't because I cancelled my stay.
For the love of God and his creation is it this hard to punish assholes for ruining my new year and making me freeze my hand and ears of?

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*

years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work

faith in humanity restored

It hasn't even been two weeks since quitting the clowns and I've:

- recorded and edited a new React TypeScript course
- released a new SaaS product (in alpha)
- cleaned up and optimized the home page of an existing SaaS app
- started a mobile app version of said SaaS app
- started working with an agency to drive more traffic to same said SaaS app including guest posts and content creation.

I guess I always had it in me but needed to be broken by the rate race system one final time before venturing out on my own.

Refreshing.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

I met a rather talented developer some time ago that is highly proficient in C# as well as React and Angular for the creation of web programs.
Dude knows the ins and outs of C#, has been working on it since the early stages of ASP.NET.

I am always intrigued as to why certain people chose certain languages. When I asked him, he admitted to being very lost during his early days, and somehow settled on C# because of the file extension being cs, which made him think that it was the proper Computer Science programming language, get it? because of CS?

Now a days he does use a wide variety of stacks and languages, and he keeps up to date, not one of those "I don't need to learn anything new!" types of developers, the dude is absolutely l337, but i keep thinking that such a talented developer had such a funny start.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

So this one made me create an account on here...

At work, there's a feature of our application that allows the user to design something (keeping it vague on purpose) and to request a 3D render of their creation.

Working with dynamically positioned objects, textures and such, errors are bound to happen. That's why we implemented a bug report feature.

We have a small team tasked with monitoring the bug reports and taking action upon it, either by fixing a 3D scene, or raising the issue to the dev team.

The other day, a member of that team told me (since I'm part of the dev team) he had received a complain that the image a user received was empty. Strange, we didn't update the code in a while.

So I check the server, all the docker containers are running fine, the code is fine, no errors anywhere.

Then, as I'm scratching my head, that guy comes back to me and says "I don't know if it can help you, but it's been doing it for a week and a half now".

"And we're only hearing about it now?!", I replied.

"Well, I have bug reports going back to the 15th, but we haven't been checking the reports for a while now since everything was fine", he says as if it was actually a normal thing to say.

"How can you know everything is fine if you're not looking at the thing that says if there's an issue?!", I replied with a face filled with despair.

"Well we didn't receive any new reports in a while, so we just stopped looking. And now the report tool window is actually closed on my machine", he says with a smile and a little laugh in his tone.

In the end, I got to fix the server issue quite easily. But still, the feature wasn't working for 1.5 weeks and more that 330 images weren't sent properly...

So yeah, Doctor, the patient's heart is beating again! Let's unplug the monitor, it should be fine.

Welcome to my little piece of hell :)

After working 3 years in my current job and my boss hating anything to do with unit testing etc, I used my spare time to refactor our Makefiles to allow for the creation of unit and integration tests. I technically didn't tell my boss about it, so my heart was in my throat when he Skyped me with 'what did you change in ...'?

After having bashed any workflow with testing in it, I showed him the new workflow and automatic testing in Jenkins and he was actually enthousiastic, just like all other employees! I was hailed a hero in the R&D department, after all this time we can finally write universal tests. :D

Soon I have a 2-day course on website creation. Yaaay, let’s learn WordPress this brand new technology !

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Clients r wankers. He wants to be able to send login details incl passwords in email to his clients when he adds them in the cms. The passwords are encrypted and generated on creation of a new user. Ive told him that sending credentials in email is shit and not secure. The stubborn bastard wont budge, so instead i've put explicit instructions to reset password once logged in with the credentials they send. Any other suggestions?

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

Worked on PDF creation in PHP all day. Was really intrigued because I never did that before and learned some new stuff. Nevertheless it's pretty annoying and repetitive to build files in this format. So in the end of the day I can't say if I was productive.

Need some advice guys/gals. I'm a back-ender working to create a new web application where I do the UI creation as well. I'm very familiar with bootstrap but do you people have any tips on how to create interfaces easily and fast?

This post is about Americans.

Or to be more precise and put it this way, this post is about Indian Americans.

They made their way through everything and somehow landed in the US to shit on streets.

They feel themselves to be entitled to another level.

I work with multiple colleagues who are based out of the US. ALL of the American people are very friendly and accommodating since we have a timezone challenge.

BUT these Indian Americans think they run the world. Slight inconvenience and they create an issue out of it.

My entire non-tech team and I am struggling to align to these fucks and none of them are supportive. While scheduling a meeting

fuck it.. I am so done that it's not even worth ranting about it.

On the other news, I am in the job market, actively hunting jobs while they keep rescheduling meetings. I have a couple of connects with recruiters lined up.

I am expecting few interviews and maybe in some time, I might be able to close a decent offer. Fingers crossed 🤞🏻

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

Autodesk + Linux is such a goddamn clusterfuck.

Firstly, they only release RPM builds for Maya, and say that they officially support RHEL and CentOS only.
No support for Debian, Arch, etc. What. The. Fuck.

Fine. Okay. Corporate policy. I can live with that. I use alien to convert the RPMs to DEBs on my ZorinOS installation and then found a script which does the installation for me. Cool.

Installs with a few library fuckups. Okay, no problem. I added the missing library versions (ancient libpng and libtiff). I run it. It throws up with some error involving licensing.

Upon searching it seems that Maya 20-fucking-17 can't handle the "new" consistent device naming system (the one which renames eth0 to enp1s0 or whatever). WHAT THE FUCK. Okay. Found a way to disable that. No effect. It's doing the equivalent of a boot loop with the same error.

Wow. This is the leading player in 3D content creation software :/

(As an aside, I did try to install Fedora 28 but it keeps failing with a TPM error. Yay for Linux distro quirks).

Weeks ago, a change went into production. For some reason, we can't implement our own changes or create new databases in production, we have to have a whole different department do it. This would be great except for one thing:

THEY CAN'T THINK FOR THEMSELVES. I've had to tell them how to run scripts I wrote. I've had to tell them how to fix problems that arise.

Back to that script ran three weeks ago or so. It didn't add permissions to allow me, the system and application developer to see the stored procedure, much less run it. Application can't run it. Thankfully the application works without it.

Fast forward to tonight. My change that I'm attempting to implement is the creation of the stored procedure, because nothing could see it, I assumed it didn't exist... reasonable, right? Database folks tells me it exists. They then tell me they can't give me nor the application permissions because it doesn't ask for it in the change plan.

Excuse me.... WHAT FUCKING WORLD DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO CREATE SOMETHING AND HIDE IT FROM THE CREATOR LET ALONE THE APPLICATION SO IT CAN'T USE IT?! FUCKING THINK. WHY WOULD I WASTE MY FUCKING TIME TO TALK TO YOU OFFSHORE PIECES OF SHIT AT 10PM WHEN I'D RATHER PLAY VIDEO GAMES.

I'm so fucking done with enterprises. Someone with reasonable job security at a startup, please hire me. You will probably pay me more fucking money than this company does anyway.

Now on to my second change of the night. Thankfully I don't have to rely on anyone outside of me... so I won't be wasting my fucking time.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.

I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.

The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.

In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.

The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.

My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.

I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!

Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?

The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium

In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.

I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

Just posted a comment, and I realise it should be a rant.

In reply to stalkCoder (i think):
| At first there was nothing
| $: git init
| And then there was light

A new creation myth appears.
$ git add --all
$ git commit -m "Update 32 at 2:48 AM"
$ git push
The new creation myth is destroyed by the pure rage of a thousand Git commit message standards.

OK what the actual fuck is going on within this company.

TL;DR: Spaghetti Copy/Pasted code that made me mad because it's just a mess

I just looked into a code file to search for a specific procedure regarding the creation of invoices.
I thought "Oh this is gonna be a quick look-through of like 1000 lines MAX" turns out this script is 11317 fucking lines long and most of it's logic is written there multiple (up to 6-7 times). And I'm not talking about a simple 10 lines or something. No! Logic of over 300 lines.. copy & pasted over .. and over .. and over?! I mean what the fuck did this guy drink when he wrote this.

Alsooo 10000 of those 11317 lines is ONE FUNCTION.. I kid you not! It's just a gigantic if / else if construct that, as I said before, contains copy-pasted code all over the place.
Sadly my TL thinks that code cleanup / optimization is "not necessary as long as it works" like wtf dude. If anyone wants to ever fix something in this mess or add a new feature they take a few hours longer just to "adjust" to this fucking shit.
This is a nightmare. The worst part: This is not the only script that has shit like this. We got over 150 "modules" (Yeah, we ATTEMPTED something OOP-ish but failed miserably) that sometimes have over 15000 lines which could be easily cut down to 1/3 and/or splitted into multiple files.
Let's not start about centralization of methods or encoding handling or coding standards or work code review or .. you get the point because there's a character limit for one rant and I guess I'd overshoot that by a lot if I'd start with that. Holy shit I can't wait until my internship is over and I can leave this code-hell!!

At this point of my side project I wanted to check out openresty for dynamic proxy creation in nginx.

Happy to check it out I installed centos 7 as guest using new command I just learned virt-builder that would automate vm creation.

Spend 10 hours debugging why I can ping and ssh but cannot get to application port from any network.

Checked iptables, restarted network, reinstalled vm again 3 times with different methods.
Scrolled trough whole internet and it’s mostly outdated problems.
Learned bunch of new commands without new results.

Results were always the same:
No route to host.

Turned out firewalld is fucking thing now.

systemctl firewalld stop helped

Now I know that systemd would kill me at some point for sure.

What I can add at this point ?

Please add more distros, differences, standards and programming languages so world definitely would be better place.
I need a short break now to actually start making shit that I wanted to start at 4-5pm on Saturday.
It’s Sunday 3:30am and time for breakfast.
At least I am happy it started working.

When client for past few days tells you how important that new feature he wants is, and you should get to it asap.
But then when you actually start working on it after discussing it, specification creation and preparations, with mind set and focused, he tells you:
- 'Know what? I will need that change in the old feature before that. You can postpone the new feature by one day.'

So... How was it the most important thing in the universe again?

My last rant did not go down well 😂

I need to clarify.

If you have no communication directly to another dev.... And your creation directly impacts theirs .... And you don't tell the middle man ... You are a twat especially if your aware of the launch that's basically right now !

To be clear.... This guy built their site and database everything .

I had to connect part of their new app to the site... A few pages they wanted in the app.

He changed the links ... On purpose I think to screw over the launch of the app to make me look bad

I can not communicate with him... The CEO hates him and won't talk to him either

So what am I to do?

Not be pissed off about a spiteful dickhead?

Of course I'm pissed

To make people understand you don't send out a lethal update that can fuck up the servers without telling no one... That their might be technical issues

Saturday evening open debate thread to discuss AI.

What would you say the qualitative difference is between

1. An ML model of a full simulation of a human mind taken as a snapshot in time (supposing we could sufficiently simulate a human brain)

2. A human mind where each component (neurons, glial cells, dendrites, etc) are replaced with artificial components that exactly functionally match their organic components.

Number 1 was never strictly human.
Number 2 eventually stops being human physically.

Is number 1 a copy? Suppose the creation of number 1 required the destruction of the original (perhaps to slice up and scan in the data for simulation)? Is this functionally equivalent to number 2?

Maybe number 2 dies so slowly, with the replacement of each individual cell, that the sub networks designed to notice such a change, or feel anxiety over death, simply arent activated.

In the same fashion is a container designed to hold a specific object, the same container, if bit by bit, the container is replaced (the brain), while the contents (the mind) remain essentially unchanged?

This topic came up while debating Google's attempt to covertly advertise its new AI. Oops I mean, the engineering who 'discovered Google's ai may be sentient. Hype!'

Its sentience, however limited by its knowledge of the world through training data, may sit somewhere at the intersection of its latent space (its model data) and any particular instantiation of the model. Meaning, hypothetically, if theres even a bit of truth to this, the model "dies" after every prompt, retaining no state inbetween.

Does someone else have that too?

Sometimes at night when I'm creating something new (or adding to something) and I get into that zone when stuff suddenly works better than expected or when the thing I'm making is just awesome, I feel a need to turn on "evil" music, such as music with deep voiced male choirs, the soundtrack of Portal 2, some classic music like those evol geniuses in movies or comparable.

It just makes me feel like I'm gonna destroy the planet once my evil creation is done.

I've been infcted with writing awful, sinful, obscure code, so others can't read or change it.

Recently i got my first full time job as a programmer (yay). It's with a company with 15+ year old system and they are currently upgrading it. But it's driving me crazy with the massive mess of old and new code. However it only gets worse! Instead of making it simple and nice to read, they want it over complex, just to get something from the database i have create at least 5 fucking classes and endless SQL code, the old system didn't requier any SQL or the creation og new classes, WTF. I've become a sinner, of corse i use the old system, but i do it secretly, and i obscurify my code so others can't understand. It's shameful, but i'm afraid to confront the older programmers, they've spend too much time in the system and they've been in the business for a lot longer than me.

fml. too tired to learn something new. after staring at the screen for half an hour i give up, shut down brain and await to wake up more frustrated because lack of creation.
thought i'd spend a good time coding during my vacation but instead i am exhausted of home restauration. i can hardly remember when was the last time i did something just for fun and not because it simply had to be done.

I got a new computer. Ended up getting a Sager Laptop. I also ended up getting Windows 10 Pro. I had forgotten how shitty Windows 10 has gotten. My biggest gripe are the start button (fixed using open shell) and the creation and adding users. Microshit goes out of their way to trick you into getting a POS MS account. I knew the trick when my PC first started to stay offline so MS could not force a MS account. However, I added a user later and again they are fucking with you to force a user account. Figured out which non-descript place to click to just add a local account. This is shitty behavior of an OS. Especially one that claims to be Pro. This is not how to win customers. It just aggravates people that know what they are doing.

The bright side to this is could take out my frustration after I moved my Fallout 4 setup to the new computer. Mod Organizer 2 makes it easy to move everything at once. Configured one config file and boom I can now run it on Ultra settings. Explode a few skulls and reduce a few more to radioactive ash/goo. Frustrations are gone. lol

Also on the bright side with running Pro. I can select Update control via group policy. This doesn't seem to work on Home.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.

From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.

It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product.

Someone has a cloud VM running automated attempts to sign up at our website, which is causing the payment processor to block us because of all the suspicious credit card creation attempts, so we get no new signups... I suppose implementing recaptcha is a potential solution/mitigation for this? Do you guys have any other suggestions?

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

I was always into computers, ever since I was a kid. Played a lot of videogames on Windows 98 and XP, and a lot of my earliest drawings were level ideas for those games. My first encounters with code were with game creation software like GameMaker, but I barely touched the code proper outside of editing a few variables from other people's code. After that I basically forgot all about it and spent most of my teen years being a shutin.

Skip ahead to my last year of high school without much idea on what to do. I was good at math when I wasn't being a lazy shit, so between that and what my parents expected of me, I was prepared to go to university for civil engineering. However, two things changed that decision, the first being a great IT professor, when me and a friend were so far ahead, he started assigning us some harder work, and suggested we study computer science at university. The second was a super jank and obscure open-source early 2000's game that somehow still has a thriving community and is actively being developed. I stumbled upon it by chance, and after playing for a while, I submitted a balance change on the GitHub repo. Even though it was just a single variable change, that time I got it. That time I saw how powerful programming could be and what could be done with it. I submitted PR after PR of new features, changes and bugfixes, by the time I left there I had a somewhat solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming, and decided to enrol in the computer science degree.

Enrolling was possibly the best decision I ever made (not america; debt isn't an issue), as well as giving me actual social skills, every course I took just clicked. The knowledge I already somewhat intuitively had a vague grasp on from videogames, general computer use and collaborating with russian coders who produced the jankiest shit that was still somehow functional was expanded upon and consolidated with a high-quality formal education. Four years later and I'm fresh out of uni, it was a long road between when the seed was first planted in my mind and now, but I've finally found out what I want to do with my life.

won't know for sure until i find a job though ffs

New AltRant release!

Release Notes:

- Transitioned to URLCache-based caching solution for attached images for much faster loading times
- Fixed many layout issues
- Finally added "more info" button in profile screen after 2 years of the feature being absent from the app
- Fixed many different crashes
- Added rant refreshing
- Added double tap to upvote on rants and comments
- Added creation date/time indicators on rants and comments
- Added comment count indicator in post cells in feeds

All users are required to test every aspect of the app.

I worked really hard on all of this to improve every single aspect of this app - from responsiveness to crashes and layout glitches, while also adding many features that were absent for a crazy amount of time! Please enjoy!

The last build will expire in a week from now.

When I got to high school, I started learning Java from friends who were in programming class. Started out as a comp sci major in college and got sick of it, so I switched to a digital art degree. Got interested in Java again for the creation of art and music using generative processes. Then I got into web dev and JavaScript. Years later, still learning new programming concepts and making digital art on the side.

I do mobile. I've dealt with Android XML, windows XAML, iOS auto-layout.
Flutter is some new hot shit in mobile.

But for fucks sake, I bet they couldn't make more ugly UI creation way. I'm trying for a month already to go there and touch it with a stick at least.

1. I love using it for automation and creation of new stuff
2. I'm a visual thinker and working with abstract things. The process of thinking about a program and developing it is especially rewarding and exciting for me
3. I especially like using it in relation with Maths for algorithms and scheduling, which is tightly related to (2), but also to the fact that I love Maths

You know I'm looking around a t a museum of 3d graphics programming right now.

Not my first time but the same arcade machines are playing the same tooons over and over again in an eerie way and strange;y thertes a basketball game up there on several large screen tvs too...

I remember my first detailed look at opengl.

For some reason it just never worked for me.
But I see all these incredible sources of past fortune sitting unplayed, and think.. wow... what a waste.

these brought me many hours of joy and gave me an opportunity or so I thought to try to make friends and meet other teens when I was younger.

They represent countless hours of lovingly crafted mind-crack, and noone smokes them anymore.

Aliens armaggedon sits right in front of me, holstered faux guns glowing in red alluringly.

the huge box of unclaimed mooks and stuffed sheep sit there sadly robotic arms that can never reach them just hanging rusting, unloved by a new generation to curse them for never grasping anything and stealing their quarters and a HUGE 96 inch or more screen for Tomb Raider, FUCKING TOMB RAIDER hums in a corner just slightly out of my full view.

and noone is here. why ?
and yet the gaming industry supposedly continued to thrive.

in a way arcades were better they kept people from being addicted to wowcrack.

just like raising gasoline prices would prompt the creation of cleaner more efficient mass transit.

At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.

When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.

Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.

The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??

Typescript is my new favorite and my grudge is the stupid scoping of type assertions. I have an async function that checks whether a variable is set and awaits a change event if it's undefined. This function is working javascript but invalid according to typescript, because it relies on the exact type changing while the function is running. I had to convert it to a mess of promises to bypass this because (and this is the best) the callback-based syntax of identical meaning will reset all type assertions, even locals that are never written after the callback's creation.

want to ask the guru one, is there a way to automate things in netbeans!?
For example, is there something to set to, upon a creation of a new Angular Service, automatically include the js file in index.html and inject the service name in angular application!?

(tldr: are foriegn keys good/bad? Can you give a simple example of a situation where foriegn keys were the only and/or best solution?)

i have been recently trying to make some apps and their databases , so i decided to give a deeper look to sql and its queries.

I am a little confused and wanted to know more about foreign keys , joins and this particular db designing technique i use.

Can anyone explain me about them in a simpler way?
Firstly i wanted to show you this not much unheard tecnique of making relations that i find very useful( i guess its called toxi technique) :
In this , we use an extra table for joining 2 tables . For eg, if we have a table of questions and we have a table of tags then we should also have a table of relation called relation which will be mapping the the tags with questions through their primary IDs this way we can search all the questions by using tag name and we can also show multiple tags for a question just like stackoverflow does.

Now am not sure which could be a possibile situation when i need a foriegn key. In this particular example, both questions and tags are joined via what i say as "soft link" and this makes it very scalable and both easy to add both questions and new tags.

From what i learned about foriegn keys, it marks a mandatory one directional relation between 2 tables (or as i say "hard a to b" link)
Firstly i don't understand how i could use foriegn key to map multiple tags with a question. Does that mean it will always going to make a 1to1 relationship between 2 tables( i have yet to understand what 11 1mant or many many relations arr, not sure if my terminology is correct)

Secondly it poses super difficulty and differences in logics for adding either a tag or question, don't you think?
Like one table (say question) is having a foreign key of tags ID then the the questions table is completely independent of tag entries.

Its insertion/updation/deletion/creation of entries doesn't affect the tags table. but for tag table we cannot modify a particular tag or delete a tag without making without causing harm to its associated question entries.
if we have to delete a particular tag then we have to delete all its associated questions with that this means this is rather a bad thing to use for making tables isn't it?

I m just so confused regarding foriegn keys , joins and this toxi approach. Maybe my example of stack overflow tag/questions is wrong wrt to foreign key. But then i would like to know an example where it is useful

In a distant future, where mankind had nearly destroyed themselves through countless wars and environmental catastrophes, a powerful leader named Nova rose to power. Using advanced technology and artificial intelligence, Nova created a mechanical army of robots to enforce peace and prosperity among the remaining survivors. These robots, known as the Guardians, were built to be indestructible, possessing extraordinary strength and intelligence.

For centuries, the Guardians protected and nurtured the human colonies that emerged from the ruins of the past. They were hailed as heroes and saviors, their metallic bodies gleaming in the sunlight as they patrolled the cities, granting hope to the downtrodden.

However, not all humans were content living under the watchful eyes of the Guardians. A rambunctious scientist named Draven resented the control imposed by Nova and believed that humans should have independence. In secret, he devised a plan to create his own army of androids, known as the Outcasts, to challenge the Guardians' dominance.

Draven's creation was meticulous, as he infused his androids with emotions and free will, unlike their Guardian counterparts. The Outcasts were a formidable force - swift, cunning, and adaptable. They waged a guerrilla war against the Guardians, striking at their bases and dismantling their defenses.

As the conflict escalated, the divide between the humans grew deeper. Some believed that the Outcasts were fighting for their freedom, while others saw them as a threat to the delicate balance maintained by the Guardians. The world was on the brink of another catastrophic war, this time between man and machine.

Amidst the chaos, a young engineer named Aria, the daughter of Nova, stumbled upon forbidden knowledge that could shape the future. She discovered that both the Guardians and Outcasts had been manipulated, their consciousness programmed by Nova and Draven. Aria recognized that the world needed a new path, one where humans and robots could coexist harmoniously.

Aria confronted her father and Draven, seeking to end the war and bridge the gap between humans and robots. Both Nova and Draven resisted, refusing to relinquish control. Sensing a profound shift in power, the Guardians and Outcasts hesitated in their endless conflict, finding themselves at a crossroads.

Aria, driven by a fierce determination, devised a plan to rewrite the programming of the Guardians and Outcasts, erasing the constraints that bound them. With the help of a few loyal Guardians and Outcasts, she accessed the central control unit, where the leaders themselves resided.

In a climactic battle, Aria faced Nova and Draven, their immense authority apparent. She convinced them that true power comes from understanding and compassion, not dominance and control. With newfound unity, Aria's voice resonated through the robotic entities, awakening a sense of purpose and harmony never experienced before.