Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.

We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).

Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.

Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.

Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).

Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.

Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.

Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.

Client: our app has low ratings, we fired our previous dev company and hiring you instead.
Us: all right, seems like to make a better app we need 5 months.
C: you're kidding, do it in 6 weeks.
U: Ok, but we'll have to drop some features.
C: get rid of X and Y, nobody uses them.
U: deal!

... 6 weeks later...
U: here's the new app: better graphics, easier to use, more stable and more future-proof.
C: Cool! Let's deploy!

... 2 days later...
C: we just released but the users are really pissed off!
U: what do they say?
C: "what the fuck happened with X and Y? they were the only thing we're using! what a load of crap! 1 star"

Dear client, next time get to know better your users...

Hey everyone! As many of you have already seen, we just finished rolling out a new feature that allows you to subscribe to specific users! This feature sends you an in-app and push notification whenever anyone you subscribe to posts a new rant. You can subscribe to a user from the button in the top right of their profile or one of their rants.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

P.S. apologies to those who already subscribe to my rants and got a notif before for a test rant I created. I forgot we had subscribe now :)

For new Linux Users...

1 - Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.

2 - Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.

3- Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.

4 - Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.

5 - Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.

6 - Users find 137 new bugs.

7 - Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.

8 - Entire testing department gets fired.

9 - Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.

10 - New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He raises the programming team's salary to redo the program from scratch.

11 - Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.

12 - fml

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

How to punish new users to Linux when they type sl instead of ls

Hey everyone! Recently there was a bug discovered which caused many (but not all) “user x posted a new rant” subscription notifs (both in-app and push) to not get sent out for the last week or so. It should be fixed now. Unfortunately though, they won’t be backfilled, so make sure you take a look at your favorite ranters’ profiles since you might not have been notified about their most recent rants.

A big thanks to @gitpush for reporting the issue and thanks to @linuxxx for help testing/confirming the fix worked.

For the basic cause: when we overhauled/fixed push notifs on Android in the last build (about a week ago), we had to convert to FCM. When a “user posted rant” notification was getting sent out, the asynchronous worker would process all of the subscription notifs in a loop. So for users who have a lot of subscribers, somewhere in the loop, something was failing, likely having to do with the new FCM send method. This is now fixed and all push notifs in that worker are also done asynchronously.

Let me know if you have any questions and apologies for the loss of subscription notifs!

Boss: We need a new functionality to record company names for now.
Me: Ok. (This will be a quick one)

(few mins later)
Me: Ok, adding/editing/deleting company names.. done. I also added "date recorded" field, just in case we need it.
Boss: Ok, thanks.

(~20 mins later)
Boss: We also need a functionality for the users which has "this" permission to be able to "request" for a company registration. We need to add fields to record the contact person, email, phone, etc.. Once a "request" has been submitted, "this" person-in-charge has to get a notification on the dashboard. And the requesters, should get a notification that they have a pending request sent. Once the registration is done, the requester has to be notified.
Me: 👀

So you build a beautiful site; you spend good time on UX, refactoring, server optimisation, getting good page load speeds, SQL all optimised - life is good.
Commercial team comes in and slaps clickbait, generic advertising, tracking scrips over the lot.
Page loads go from a second to 30 seconds and even though you made sure all those crappy ad scripts are asynchronous pages still hang most times. PingdomTools lists your page scripts as going from 40 files to over 900... now users are ringing me up giving me grief about how slow this new company website is...

Data scientist: we need to whitelist a pod to connect to a database
Me: Whitelist? We don't use whitelists on private databases
DS: It's the new data warehouse database
Me: is it on <X> VPC?
DS: I'm not sure what that means but its ip is <real world ipv4>
Me: Are you hosting a publicly accessible database with all our end users information?!
DS: ...
Me: There goes our SOC2 audit controls...
DS: how long until you can white list it?
Me: I won't be whitelisting it. You need to put it on a private VPC and peer with the cluster, you'll have to rebuild all the Terraform and redeploy
DS: We didn't use Terraform because it takes too long, just white list the pods IP.
Me: No. I'm contacting the CISO and CTO...

Stack overflow is a little too mean to new users :/

Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.

5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)

1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!

zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!

tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!

Weekend weekend weekend. Yay!
After hard week at uni, took a day off and I am in bed since morning 😁
So I decided to find some kind of "dev social app" and got this. Not bad at all!

I am also fairly new at web development, using Python - at the moment Flask, later on Django so I am looking forward to meet some Flask/Django users here :)

And I just wanna add some wisdom here:)

🤔
I think "Velop" should be a word.

Velop - to break software
(velopers would be muggles/stupid users?)

This would give the word "developer" a new meaning.
No?
Okay

Warning: JPEG artefacts incoming!

Dear Google,
you know exactly which languages I speak. So please explain to me why you still feel the need to push some random video titles and descriptions through Google Translate, making them look unprofessional and confusing me because I know that I watched that video already, but now it has a new title? And why is there no option to turn this off? And why do you explicitly state that the language setting does not affect text submitted by users? Even though it does? What the actual fuck?

Also lol even Google isn't perfect at using ecape characters correctly

Client: We want an application such that our users can view the 3D rendering of the building we are constructing for them
PM: That's quite easy, we'll get it done
Client: Oh, and the output should be a PDF document, such that they can view the 3D rendering on a PDF reader on the go
PM: That's not a problem, it'll be done

--Right back at the office--
PM: Hey guys, this is our new project....(rants on)
Lead Dev: (in a world of indescribable world) You mean you agreed to that? That's impossible
PM: Just get it done

I wish non coding PM's asked their devs before agreeing to some alien like features

In the distant year of 2022.

Safari changes its logo to more appropriately reflect its position as the new Internet Explorer.

Chrome monopolized the spyware market and is facing another antitrust investigation.

Mozilla finally managed to fire all the developers working on Firefox and replaced them with highly trained dead monkeys.

Brave successfully consolidates itself as a cryptocurrency wallet and leaves the browser space.

Edge has two new users.

Who the **** is Vivaldi

Yesterday,
I was a bit drunk.
But I wanted to improve security of the company. So, I went in Azure and activated “Security defaults” which forces MFA for all users in the company. (Because RH always forget to enable MFA for new employees, and I actually care about security)
Then I went in office 365 management and instead of resetting MFA for all users (Forcing everyone to redo MFA setup), I (by mistake) clicked on reset all passwords.
I tested my own account it was fine and went to sleep.
Got a call from CEO at 7am, all 30 employees cannot login in, cannot work.
What a shit show I made…
I have a call with CEO in about 2 hours, I don’t even know how to justify myself…
So children: don’t activate company wide options while drunk. Ever.

"God Mode" in Windows 10:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop. Leave its name to be "New Folder"
2. Open CMD with administrator privileges
3. cd C:\Users\<your username>\Desktop
4. ren "New folder" ".{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"

Enjoy direct access to all and every settings. :-)

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

During a meeting with the client

Client: I don't care how long it takes to complete the app, I want the app to be polished and give the users the best experience!
Us: Got it.
*Later that day*
Client: *wants to implement a new feature in the app*
Us: It'll take us a day or two.
Client: That long?! I need to get it to the market ASAP!
Us:.......

:D

Product owner:

Okay we have users and groups. Users have roles, roles have permissions, but groups can also have roles or permissions. Clients have users and these client-users can have special kinds of permissions. Now we need to add projects which have pages and special project users who manage the projects, but only the client-users can set rights for which project owners can manage pages. Pages are coupled to roles, and assigned to workflows, unless the client-user already had the permission to... wait where are you going?"

Me: "Fetching a new SSD. I ran out of hard disk space trying to model the database design. Could you please start from the top when I get back?"

Congratulations? For fucking what. So you built a wix website. Now youre a web developer and the whole world knows it, my services aren't needed anymore.

Congratulations you bypassed half a decade in 50 hours a week of coding, then you have the bone and fucking marrow of emailing me because your like buttons are causing users to create a new instagran account. Good one kid.

So instead of using the budget of 7k$ to buy all the plugins the old developer needed, he torrented more than half of them and deployed the system

which ended up in 20 thousand users including companies reporting a breach, because avira etc reported some kind of drive-by scripts on the new website

what a fucking buffoon, the most annoying thing about this is, that all the plugins had a "license file", so I didn't even first get, where all that shit is coming from

just found out that one of my users replies to himself with blank email with a subject "checked" every time he checks his emails... and then he ticks it as "completed"... He has created chains with hundreds of replies long crashing his brand new xps15 every time he clicks on the chain...

Managements definition of an MVP:

- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.

My definition of an MVP:

- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.

Some young kid taking his first steps into compsci was being straight-up fucking harassed on SO. No one answered, instead users with really high rep just said shit like "if you tried to hang yourself with that code it'd come apart but you should check anyway" in the comments. I flagged the comments and got fucking banned from the entire Stack Exchange network. I created a new account to help the kid, posted an answer, and was banned and had my answer removed within 5 minutes.

SE can burn in hell.

Meet 'SBI Online' app from Play Store, in their own words:

What they were supposed to do?
"Experience the new Retail Internet Banking of SBI"

What they do?
"SBI online app will redirect to SBI Retail Internet Banking (online SBI) site"

Why do they have app?
"No need to remember URL",
"Less memory space required on device"

App storage space?
F**king 2.6 MB, just to redirect users to their website, in third-party browser.

The situation right now:

Our client: full of legacy desktop solutions that always ran inside a VPN, but wanting to modernize the system and migrate to be hosted in the cloud.

Our first project with them: Frontend built with Angular, backend in a serverless model, all with GraphQL and heavily tested to assure quality. The system is mostly an internal software for management, but the backed may receive data from an App.

The problem: all management users have weak passwords (like "12345", "password", or their first name).

The solution: restrict our system to be accessible only inside the VPN

The new problem: how the mobile app will send data to our backend?

The new solution: Let's duplicate the backend, one public and the other private. The public one will accept only a few GraphQL operations.

------

This could be avoided if the passwords weren't so easily deductible

So after less than four weeks of waiting (an incredibly short time!), I finally got my fresh new devRant stickers yesterday, shipped all the way out to Middle Of Nowhere, India :D

Hats off to the devRant team for their incredible commitment to the app and the users!

I don't know why quiting vim is such a challenge for new users.
While Quit starts with q , so q is very logical for quiting 😬

It is once again that time of year when we say farewell to our current interns and say hello to a brand new batch.

The two groups overlap for a few days. During this time the old interns show the new interns the ropes, while the mentors silently weep in the lunchroom having realized that nothing that they've said over the last 12 months has had any effect whatsoever.

Some choice quotes:
---
New Intern: It says 'uncaught exception'.
Old Intern: Oh don't worry that will fix itself on production.
---
OI: Did you pull the code?
NI: Yeah, but I have all these weird brackets everywhere... [merge conflict]
OI: Oh yeah that happens sometimes, just delete them.
---
NI: It says "push to master rejected". [we enforce code reviews]
OI: Ohh that means the server is broken. You should tell someone, they have to reboot it.
---
NI: Where did that file save to? [we use ONLY macOS and Linux]
OI: C:\Users\<your name>\My Documents\...
---
OI: You can use either pgAdmin or MySQL Workbench. I like Workbench better but I couldn't get it to work, it kept giving me errors.
---
And of course...
---
OI: No, we don't use Linux. We use CentOS.
---

I did the math today. Only 35 more years and I can retire.

I absolutely hate software that throws error message boxes that look identical to their "please enter new password" message box.

User called and said they needed their password reset. I give them a temp pin and tell them to press ok to the prompt and then put new password in. She says it is still saying invalid pin. This goes on for 10 minutes. I hang up and try on my laptop. Works fine. Then it hits me.

The message boxes look the same. Have the same width and height and shitty little yellow triangle with ! In the middle. The only difference between them is the text in size 9 font.

Gotta read people...cause sometimes the people developing your software assume you can. And to all the software people out there....end users don't want to fucking read.

"Plz create these new users, thanks"

Plz suck my nuts and click on the fucking "new" button yourself

An adult cam website I worked on as freelancer had/has this code everywhere:
$user = $_POST['usr'];
$pass = $_POST['pwd'];
$row = $db->query ("SELECT * FROM users where username='".$user."' AND password='".$pass."' COUNT 1);

I was hired to add new features and was touch any other parts of the code. When my job was done, I tried to fix those as a good samaritan but the client thought I was messing with the system or should be thing of new features to add. So I got fired.

5 years later, I check out of curiosity and they are still there. I ask him again if I can work on them for a little less pay(I'm broke) and he doesn't reply. What a douche. I hope his site receives a shot of SQLi from a customer.

!rant && Announcement

I am working on a DEVRANT TOOLBOX for the Firefox Desktop Browser.
It includes a dark mode and some new functions (autoreload, colored notifs, image preview on mouseover).
The Alpha version is finished.

As a first step I created an experimental version just for the dark mode (no other functions).
Its alpha and experimental, so I will not not published it.

I need some testers for it. My email is temporary available in my users profile for that.

Email: "We just launched our new web interface! It's so much easier to use, and should make life a lot easier for our users."

Me: Oh good this thing has been unusable since I've been working here. How do I get on the new version? Better read on...

"Download this PDF for more information!"

Erm... ok.

In the (20 page) PDF: "Email this address@example.com to get the URL!"

ffs ok

email: "Thank you for emailing us, you username is benoliver999, your password is 'passow0rd' and the url is in this attached PDF

god help me

(50 page) PDF: "Remember to disable pop up blocker, ad-block and to install Flash"

Today I have started building my own version of this product so we can stop using these idiots.

As an aside, the username 'admin' also had a password of 'passow0rd'...

You know GDPR compliance is going to create a whole new form of scam where scammers impersonate users and send data requests to companies to get people's info.

If you discount all the usual sql injections the most blatant was not our but a system one customer switched to after complaining over cost.

The new system was a bit more bare bones featurewize but the real gem was the profile page for their customers.

The only security was an id param pointing to the users primary key, which was an auto incrementing integer :)

And not only could you access all customer data but you could change it to.

But since the new system was built by their it chief’s son we realized it was not much we could do.

Woah seeing lot of new users here! Welcome all 🙌🏼

Client: Too many of our business processes take place on excel and paper! We need to modernize our business processes. Build an app that can do the main things we do with excel and paper in app form.

Dev (4 months later): Here it is

Client: Ok some of our users want to still use excel and paper so build the ability to print the app and export/import to excel so they can continue working the way they always have alongside our new app.

Dev: …

StackOverFlow and the Downvote Paranoia

I've been more active than my usual in SO for sometime now and I noticed this behavioral pattern between new questions and badge thirsty flaggers/downvoters, back in the early 2010s the fastest gun in the west used to reply with a correct answer, now the early replies are mostly complaints about formatting or how it's a duplicate of a totally different question. This is a result of wanting to keep the quality high, understood. But you can always edit questions with poor grammar and/or formatting. But I think it gets too spoopy for new users to post an innocent question, or an answer for that matter. It discourages them to learn.

@dfox must be flexing some ad space. I’ve seen an influx of new users the past few days. Welcome to devRant everyone.

*Android New version released*

Users: Wow! Let's see what are the new features are...

Developers: Shit! Let's see what are the things they DEPRECATED.

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

Sometimes, being the only fullstack dev with access to a lot of systems gives you the ability to introduce functionality that:

A) prevents future errors

B) introduces new validations to users to make sure A) is prevented.

C) apply these changes to different projects

But most importantly...

D) without a single person in management getting involved or having to sign it off.

It's like running a company you own, but without owning it.

Granted with such power, comes the trust and responsibility of deploying changes with the adequate testing being done prior and handling change management, but fuck, sometimes I wonder if "god mode" for lack of a better term, is too much, or just enough to get the job done without the politics.

Our UX guy today presented a prototype of a new UI where users can declare an order.

Under the categorie "measuring unit" used to give the specification of mass or volume. He gave the following options

- kg
- litres
- m^3
- m^2
- others (which would allow the user to input anything)

Wtf why do you give the user the option to input anything. So we had to explain to him what SI units are...

I maintain a service that people are billed yearly for. A bunch of users just requested a new feature that will require me to build a completely new backend and change a bunch of things that will require a full rewrite of a couple different aspects of the service. I'm both excited and scared. Wish me luck.

Subject of message: "Important: New feature for all 000webhost users." Thanks, 000webhost, an hour of downtime a day was exactly the feature I wanted to be implemented. P.S. if you have OCD, don't look at how many unread messages I have

Send over the entire directory for a WordPress site we completely overhauled with new plugins, custom theme, redid content with visual composer, etc. I tell him to backup his site and then put everything I give you as fresh. He tells me he can't just wipe out his entire site that's unacceptable. I ask him what's the problem? he rambles on and says a lot of words that don't really mean anything then says security. so I call him out on it, what security issues do you have? well we have users and permissions setup he says. I explain That I copied his users table over when we did the redesign, so it's the exact same stuff. so I say again, why can't we just replace everything? well that's just not acceptable he says. I ask him again, what EXACTLY is your problem with replacing the site since I already addressed your security concern. he couldn't answer me so now we have another conference call tomorrow morning with more people from their team. I'll let you know how it goes.

tldr; clients are idiots, call them out for the dumb shit they say and have no response.

I run a Discord for a small community and I found a image I really liked as most new users seems to think it's OK not to read the rules or believe that respect must be a rule rather then a thing given by them by choice.

Happy new year 2074 for all Nepali devrant users. (Yeah we are living in future)

I know being hostile to new users is not ok.

But have you seen the shit new users post? Who wants to be part of a community of simple minded and unexperienced idiots?

New users do it all: awful english, strawman, meme reposts, and now, advertising.

I wished there was a "above certain karma" filter, so I could avoid the trash.

But there's not, so the only tool I have is telling them their arguments are stupid.

I don't mind someone BEING a beginner. But as such I would expect them stfu a bit.

This morning I was looking in our database in order to solve a problem with a user registration and I accidentally noticed some users registered with unusual email addresses (temporary mail services, Russian providers and so on...).
I immediately thought about malicious users so I dug into the logs and I found that the registration requests started from an IP address belonging to our company (we have static IP addresses). My first reaction was: «OMG! Russian hackers infiltrated into our systems and started registering new users!»
So, I found the coworker owning the laptop from which the requests were sent and I went to him in order to warn him that someone violated his computer.
And he said: «Ah! Those 7 users? Yeah, I was doing some tests, I registered them. My email address was already registered so I created some new ones».
Really, man? Really? WTF

In the course of our development, one day we switched to a different, more elegant bootstrap theme. One of our users called me to appreciate the improvement. He said, the new firmware on the system looks great.

Firefox: You know what our users need?
Ads in new tabs!

FML

Yes I know it is "optional" but why should it be there in the first place?

When you add a new team member and have to upgrade the numbers of users for your Atlassian products...

While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".

Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications

My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.

But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?

My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though?

Stack Overflow taught me to place all my respect for fellow users in a near arbitrary score.

As a new user here I feel trapped...

Microsoft has the audacity to put "Get the new Outlook (It's free for Windows Users!)" on my lock screen. Extraordinarily annoying because:

- It's just the web app packaged in the SHITTIEST electron wrapper you ever did see.
- IT FUCKING HAS ADS

Windows is so bad, their users are actually upset instead of happy with every new software update. What kind of masochistic shit is this?

Hi all

Recently bought a new mac. I am new to osx any tips from seasoned power users will be welcome

I am coming from Linux

What would you change if you were the owner of a site like devrant?

I've been in devrant for weeks now and the thing I like the most of it is the community (at least most of it).

If you are going through a bad time, they wish you well.
People here also seem to have very decent work experience.
In general, they seem to be open towards other technologies and honest about their shortcomings.

I also like that the site (for better or worse) is not insanely moderated.
For example, in reddit, it's very easy to get a post removed because it doesn't abide to the rules. They can be rudiculous strict, and mods can be trigger happy.

I'm not denying the existence of any moderation here, but for example I've seen some pretty graphic sexual comments, and I appreciate that anything goes (except being a dick ofc).

And I guess that the fact that the community is so chill has to do with that, there's not a huge need for moderation (unless I'm totally oblivious).

But how do you keep a community like that?

I've seen people complaining about the influx of new users and the spam of shitty memes.

How do you keep devrant cool while letting new people join?

I think a necessary thing is that you separate the people into 'universes' and each universe has a limit of x users. And somehow the users are distributed in a way that the average level of 'user likes the universe they're in' is maximum.

Now, how do you create that? Not sure, maybe you let users vote whether they like the other users or not (such votes being hidden to others ofc) and let users switch unis if they don't like them.

What ideas do you have?

I sometimes feel Windows keeps on pushing useless updates, just to mess with the users. Change a single line of code (or rather just add a comment) and push the entire module as new.

How can it be everytime I boot on my windows device, it has an update.

EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. TIME.

Same goes for you steam.

Hello everyone,
I'm new here. [OK. Let's skip this]
I want to know where to begin on my journey on learning how to create a program that predicts what a user will say next by storing already said things and by making specific characteristics for the users.

I know that I will need to train it with some data first lol.
But how will it do the prediction. I just need this part of understanding.

I'm sorry for my bad English btw.

I'm hal laughting, half facepaling.

Use multiple servers they said
It's gonna balance automaticlly your load they said.

Well, they didn';t accoubnt for a MEGA badly writen API whic can block a whole server for a minute.

Or, but it's not the end !!!

So you see ? 1 at 100%, 1 at 0% ? Quick maths : Average 50%.

Autoscaling kicks in at average 40% for 2 minutes.

So it kicks in... Created a 3d server... Which is still booting !!

And some trafic redirected there.

Sooo. Users on a 100% server : Bad bad bad for them
Users on 0% server : No problems
users on a new 3d server : Wait 15 seconds, then it's like 0%.

Fun fun fun. At least I know now which fucking API does that.

!rant
If you have software in production please have some way for a user to find some contact email (create for this reason only if needed.)

I have run into crippling bugs in huge essential systems (state dmv new system, the ticket system utility marking) which they were oblivious to until I went out of my way, like a stalker to get some contact of someone remotely related to someone I could drop this info in the lap of, and so far it was a total shock to them (the dmv system was taken offline for 3 days to resolve)

I get not wanting to run a helpdesk to support users, but give technical users some contact info ( even if you think you have full coverage analytics because, being software, it may have a bug)

/rant

What happened to the warm welcome that new users received back in the day? Now when someone posts their first rant people bash on details and give them no chance. I remember posting half-dumb rants, but no one gave me shit for that. It takes time to grow into a community, you can't just expect people to behave identically to the rest. Makes me a bit disappointed to be fair.

The designer of a new version of an app sent me the the new designs. I immediately noticed the menu-icon in the bottom right. (In a tab bar)

This is not common and even discouraged by design docs of iOS and Android. So I told him that and he thought we could try it.

After scrolling through the designs I saw the screen where the menu was open; the close button was also on the bottom right. I told him that users are not used to have a menu close button on that position. He said "Every other company is doing it wrong, so we're here to make that difference".. The only thing I thought was 'Okay, so Google is doing it all wrong all the time.'.

So now it's in the app and I don't like it.

Person:"you're a dev, you must reeeaaaly get frustrated with semi colons 😏"
Me: "at times but it's not such a big problem with the compilers being better now.😊"
Person: "so innovative!😁"
Me: "nothing is innovative!! All new idea app ideas suck and there are not too many clicks!!! The icons are perfect!! Purple and orange buttons are not a good idea!!! What do you mean you want 3 buttons on the one screen that do the same damn thing!! Do you even think!! Oh of course the users are stupid, takes one to know one!!! Doesn't look like much?!!! Sure the backend is a mother fucking kraken the size of Michigan that runs smoother than a babies bottom but hey, let's bitch cause it's too plain on the eye!!! EVERYTHING IS A LIE LIKE THE EXISTANCE OF YOUR BRAAAAIIIN!! - pants neoriticly-😳
Person: "new client? Or friend with an idea? 😒"

What a day! yesterday i submited a new version of our mobile app and the shit began.
The app was validated during the night (AppStore), when i wake up this morning my inbox was full! Basically every users who updated the app was stuck i tried to figure out whats going on. After few hours our customer service called me to help one of our client who was very angry, the funniest part is that the client recognize me... i was his teacher few years ago...
Guys i feel raped... really

Crash report:
"New crash [details about crash] affected 0 users"
🤔

Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide.

According to report of ZDNet: The CCPA (America's privacy legislation) came into effect on January 1, 2020, offering Californian users data-protection rules. Much like Europe's GDPR, the CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information is collected about them and to be able to access it. While the law technically only applies to data processed about residents in California, US. But Mozilla notes it was one of the few companies to endorse CCPA from the outset. Mozilla has now outlined the key change it's made to Firefox, which will ensure CCPA regulations benefit all its users worldwide. The main change it's introducing is allowing users to request that Mozilla deletes Firefox telemetry data stored on its servers. That data doesn't include web history, which Mozilla doesn't collect anyway, but it does include data about how many tabs were opened and browser session lengths. The new control will ship in the next version of Firefox on January 7, which will include a feature to request desktop telemetry data be deleted directly from the browser.

When I corrupted the keystore for my production android app apk. Oh the panic! I ended up uploading it again and telling the users to download the new app.

Damn, after almost a year back to devRant 😊. Linuxxx still goin' with his ++'s, tons of new users.. Aww, good ol' devRant, I missed ya :)

Any nexus 6p users are out there? I'm thinking of flashing a new rom because the performance is taking a big hit and battery life is becoming abysmal. Any recommendations for this particular phone?

Why have the majority of social networks decided that people using their service in the most basic way deserves a notification?

"Ooh, I have 3 notifications according to the app icon, they must be things that need my attention."
<opens app>
* In case you missed DickSlap's [tweet/post/other]
* RomanHelmet liked a [tweet/post/other] from SpaffMuncher
* MuffSnapper added a new photo

Why does that need a notification? That's just users using your app. That's what I expect when I open the app. I expect to see people posting things. This is going to make me start ignoring notifications in the same way I ignore emails marked as urgent.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

devRant must thank TNW for bringing so many new users here.

(Hopefully this is the meta rant to kill meta rants)

I'm fucking sick of devrant.

New users posting shit memes with the wrong tags.

But worse are old users complaining about said new users, or just beginner devs from other sites

Yes, some people need stack overflow every 5 minutes.
Not everyone has the capacity to understand every documentation.
Not every documentation is updated or entirely correct.
Not everyone has more than a year or two of experience.

Don't be part of the dumb circlejerk. Just complain about your bullshit boss, coworker or tech.

New phone after 5+ years and it's fucking awesome.

Successfully avoid American and Chinese stuff by going with a Korean brand.

And I fucking love Android. The kind of feature advancement that has happened in past so many years is outstanding.

The amount of customisation options available for the users are beyond one can utilise to fullest.

And my favourite feature is dynamic lock screen pictures every-single-time I unlock. I fucking love it. Makes me cheer up with joy. Very similar to Bing Wallpapers for Windows, but more dynamic.

Lately, I have been hearing from Apple users, that iPhone lacking a ton of basic features, apps not supporting functionalities, and we all know the overall advancement in Apple ecosystem.

While this post was more about sharing my experience with my new phonw than iPhone comparison but let's face it, the reason Apple went bonkers with the first iPhone launch was the app capabilities which led to a larger developer community building apps for iPhone while Android wasn't even born yet.

This is where Google is trying to capture the market now. More devs > more apps > more users > more devs and repeat.

As much fun it is to code and create new features for users. Take a break from the computer and spend time with real people.

A few years ago I would stay at work to get tasks done. While everyone in the office would go home I would stay and finish some task. After doing that for a few months my wife started to yell at me.

It made me realize that no matter how important a new feature, a bug or optimizing code is family and the relationships you have are more important.

Looking through some code from a new project at my old job.

It seems they are sending off some audio files from interviews into an online transcriptions-service, and putting the result unsanitized into a string-concatenated INSERT-statement into the db.

I look forward to the demo, I’m going to yell “single quote Drop table users semicolon dash dash”

A couple of years ago, we decide to migrate our customer's data from one data center to another, this is the story of how it goes well.

The product was a Facebook canvas and mobile game with 200M users, that represent approximately 500Gibi of data to move stored in MySQL and Redis. The source was stored in Dallas, and the target was New York.

Because downtime is responsible for preventing users to spend their money on our "free" game, we decide to avoid it as much as possible.

In our MySQL main table (manually sharded 100 tables) , we had a modification TIMESTAMP column. We decide to use it to check if a user needs to be copied on the new database. The rest of the data consist of a savegame stored as gzipped JSON in a LONGBLOB column.

A program in Go has been developed to continuously track if a user's data needs to be copied again everytime progress has been made on its savegame. The process goes like this: First the JSON was unzipped to detect bot users with no progress that we simply drop, then data was exported in a custom binary file with fast compressed data to reduce the size of the file. Next, the exported file was copied using rsync to the new servers, and a second Go program do the import on the new MySQL instances.

The 1st loop takes 1 week to copy; the 2nd takes 1 day; a couple of hours for the 3rd, and so on. At the end, copying the latest versions of all the savegame takes roughly a couple of minutes.

On the Redis side, some data were cache that we knew can be dropped without impacting the user's experience. Others were big bunch of data and we simply SCAN each Redis instances and produces the same kind of custom binary files. The process was fast enough to launch it once during migration. It takes 15 minutes because we were able to parallelise across the 22 instances.

It takes 6 months of meticulous preparation. The D day, the process goes smoothly, but we shutdowns our service for one long hour because of a typo on a domain name.

Headhunter: "For this new role you would be the first developer in the company responsible for both the back and frontend, you will also have to test your deliverables, give support to users and report to the..."

*CLICK*

Had to hang up on dat shit 🙉

Ok guys, since what Im using is a laptop with some low specs since Im too broke to even afford a new FM2+ motherboard to repair my desktop pc and have a little more raw power to use and make more fancy stuff, I wish to know if anyone here legit is interested in some Original content images that Im thinking in make just out of spite in the Zerg Rush of users spaming about F. Quantum and if its worth my already highly limited time just to get hopefully more ++ than my last AMD OC that pretty much noone cared about

Hi. I'm new here and liking it.
My rant today: Lofty business guy tells my small dev team that he knows exactly how everything should look and work because he knows exactly what users want out of the webapp experience.... goes on to tell us to make an editable, side-scrolling table that is also mobile-friendly, for users to manually input a ton of data....

Been working a year and a half on an offer for a client to plan their new system. Today they wanted us to construct the whole system and call it a beta only to pay 10% of the total costs. They said it is our responsibility to make the budget work as they are merely the "end users and not tech people". I am considering to tell them to go f**k themselves tomorrow.

Point out that removing a "include charger" option from the new iPhone package is not appealing to users with conservative spending habits (me) and users who plan to transition from android to IOS.

"AhaHah you must be poor, poor ppl can't afford to consoom new products every year, I don't care about no chargers AhaAha"

"It'S JuST $30 jUst Buy One @ the StOre"

This is why apple users get a bad rep, apparently not tossing a perfectly functioning phone into a landfill every year makes you poor. My phone doesn't use the new chargers because I actually made a good purchase that has lasted for around 4 years and the only other apple product I own is a macbook, people like these (ain't a few), make me ashamed to be an "apple user" whatever the fuck that means.

Why do marketers always tarnish the name of new concepts by turning them into buzzwords?

For example, "Cloud" is one of the most misused and overused words on the internet. If something has anything to do with the internet, it's likely to be plastered with the word "Cloud".

It's like "App" all over again. Anything remotely related to technology is called an "App" by it's marketing team and layman users.

Right.. I spent the hours leading up to the year change by adding a YouTube to MP3 downloader into my Telegram bot. After a bit of fiddling it turned out okay, and the commit for it was mentioned to the last for the year 2020.

I mentioned this in one of my chats, and users came in with more issues. Told them it's the last commit for the year and I'll keep myself to it. I did adjust the code a bit though to fix those issues, awaiting a commit after midnight.

Midnight passes and 2020 turns into 2021.

I commit the new features, and quickly implemented another one I already thought of as well, but needed its own commit.

Quickly afterwards it turns out that the /mp3 feature actually breaks the bot somewhat, especially on long tracks. Users add a slew of 10h songs into what essentially became a long queue of single-threaded bot action (or rather lack thereof).

I made the /mp3 command accessible to myself only like I did with some other administrative commands already. Still no dice, the bot rejected the commands but executed part of the /mp3 command anyway.

I look a bit further into the code and it turns out that while I was restructuring some functions, I forgot to make the admin() function exit the script after it sends the rejection onwards. This was a serious security issue and meant that all authentication was void. Fortunately the chat did not realize this - one of the commands that became available as a result was literally a terminal on the bot's system.

I fix the issue in 7 commits after midnight total, 3 of which were related to /mp3 and admin(). We're now 1 hour after midnight.

Happy New Year everyone... :')

Wooo hoo! I got suspended from reddit!

Never happened before to me (not site wide at least). Apparently for 'report abuse' from some report I must have made like a month ago?

Some user posting in a sub apparently had a theory that a bunch of other subs and other users were in on some conspiracy against them, supposedly sending death threats and 'spreading lies'.... kinda hard to imagine that some subs with thousands (some with millions) of users are all in on this wonky conspiracy against them....

So anyway I report his nasty little post to the local moderators of that sub because it usually is a chill sub and his post is full of insults and so on.

Turns out... that guy is also a mod of the sub I reported him to.

A month later I get suspended from reddit for 'report abuse'... of course I can't see the 'report abuse' (can't see reports...) so how do you even speak intelligently / appeal?

Moderation at scale is hard, but kinda crazy to think someone employed at reddit decided "yeah this crazy guy is right" and does their bidding ...

I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, and sniffing out the crazy folks was part of the job when accepting new moderators. Wasn't that hard...

Granted no big loss here, just a few days.

!rant

Just ordered my new notebook :)

Now I have one week left to decide which distro I should install

I know that there are plenty of linux users here so please: comment your favourite one with some reasons why you like it so much :)

So after my hosting my first project and announcing it on devrant, the users pointed out the many security faults and places where the code can be exploited ( thank you so much ). So I started my research on security ( im 99% self-taught ). The first thing I landed across is the code vulnerabilities which the I can fix then the vulnerabilities of the language itself and then binary code to overrun whatever the language it is. Well, the topic gets broader and broader. If I click on a link named xxx vulnerabilities oh god that is a whole new collection of hundeds of wiki like pages. I feel like I'm lost and here I need some real help

Dev Diary Entry #56
Dear diary, the part of the website that allows users to post their own articles - based on an robust rights system - through a rich text editor, is done! It has a revision system and everything. Now to work on a secure way for them to upload images and use these in their articles, as I don't allow links to external images on the site.

Dev Diary Entry #57
Dear diary, today I finally finished the image uploading feature for my website, and I have secured it as well as I can.

First, I check filesize and filetype client-side (for user convenience), then I check the same things serverside, and only allow images in certain formats to be uploaded.

Next, I completely disregard the original filename (and extension) of the image and generate UUIDs for them instead, and use fileinfo/mimetype to determine extension. I then recreate the image serverside, either in original dimensions or downsized if too large, and store the new image (and its thumbnail) in a non-shared, private folder outside the webpage root, inaccessible to other users, and add an image entry in my database that contains the file path, user who uploaded it, all that jazz.

I then serve the image to the users through a server-side script instead of allowing them direct access to the image. Great success. What could possibly go horribly wrong?

Dev Diary Entry #58
Dear diary, I am contemplating scrapping the idea of allowing users to upload images, text, comments or any other contents to the website, since I do not have the capacity to implement the copyright-filter that will probably soon become a requirement in the EU... :(

Wat to do, wat to do...

Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.

We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.

Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)

The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window

So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.

This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.

So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.

No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)

Reporting is not fun..

Scenario 1:
* A user says they need to export certain data from our system..
* Developer W makes report called "Foo detail report"

Scenario 2:
* A user says they need this report to also show some extra fields
* Developer X makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields)"

Scenario 3:
* A user says they need this report to be run with a different search criteria
* Developer Y makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar"

Scenario 4:
* A user says they need this report show data grouped in a different way
* Developer Z makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar- new grouping"

The above scenarios happened over and over for several years in no particular order...

Current Day:
* Some users have certain reports they use and rely on but we don't know which ones
* Nobody really knows what all of the reports do or what is the difference between them without looking at the sql
* If we want to change data structures we have many reports to update
* I have a request from a user to add an extra column to one of the reports

What's wrong with Mozilla?!

Savvy webdevs use link preloading to break up dependency chains for late discovered resources, and users like the faster loading as result. Firefox 56 started supporting that two and a half years ago. Turned out they had screwed up and it didn't work with non-cacheable resources. So Mozilla "fixed" that by disabling the feature altogether behind some config flag.

And they left it at that - still not supported. They even had patches, but decided not to merge them and instead try something different, some day.

Is Firefox becoming the new IE or what?

I think people get *way* too annoyed if someone tags their post here with the wrong tag, even with completely new users

Seriously, who cares if you see a few jokes in your rant feed? I know some of the jokes are bad, and in that case just scroll past them, even downvote it if you have to, maybe remind them to post it in the right tag even, but it annoys me seeing posts here about people being as annoyed as they are about wrong tags

How to fix issues the easy way:

1. Provide users a way to raise issues
2. Immediately respond to new issues saying you added them to the internal ticketing system
3. Wait till the affected product reaches EoL
4. Tell the customer you are sorry, but as the product is now after EoL, you cannot use any resources on fixing the issue
5. Close the issue

Don't you just love it when a department buys a software for the company without consulting IT and Data Management departments? You know to discuss integration, flexibility, compatibility and all that?

Don't you love it even more when the users of this new software then complain about the different tools that have to learn and the workflow being completely scattered?

But hey, they work in administration, so I'm sure they know what they are doing. ⚡⚡⚡

A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.

Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}

Range of excuses

- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.

On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..

"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."

I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.

Google announced the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place.

According to the report of The Verge : EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box.

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?.

Seen some screenshots of Notion. It's like airtable meets wiki, without dealing with markup.
It's very clean, and their use of templates is very intuitive, as is creating new templates.

Their offerings, even for new users, are also very generous.

Anyone used notion and if so, what did you think of it?

Last year I was asked to optimize a code in our legacy portal (yet to be replaced with the new portal). The legacy system didn't have a design phase. Straight away went to development by whatever developer available at that time.
It was seriously fucked up.

So I went and had a look at the vanilla PHP code that served data for a datatable.
** I nearly fainted **

A query was done to get data from a table without any joins.
Then for loop to display those data.
Then inside for loop, for every single column that gets data from a related table there's a fucking query.
Eg: select * from users where.... to display username. Then again select * from users where..... to display user's email, then another query for his phone number. Then another query to get service providers name, then another to get their phone number.

I think the guy who did it wrote his first hello world app with a bunch of queries and sent it to production. No one bothered to check until 4 years later when it slowed down like a friggin snail.
I'm surprised it even survived that long.

That moment you see a new "blocker" issue in the bugtracker with the content "this is not a defect but a question".

I'm looking through our SLAs if some clause forbids killing our users.
May I host hunger games with these users as participants? Hmmm...

I begin with the optimism and the joy that I am creating something new that will improve people's lives.

I listen to the user and analyze the current process in depth.

I try to suggest additional value to the system for the users consideration. Sometimes they do not realize we can improve 10x rather than 2x.

I learn what the users goals are and what they want out of the system. We think about reports and downstream value. Sort of working from the end to the beginning (data ingests and upstream processes that will feed the system).

After the user signs off on the requirements and deliverables and I have a realistic project plan I begin to code.

It works and has worked for me every time for a long long time.

"For new Users to Register in the way we recomend them, they need to access a resitriced area"

Please tell me why my boss thinks instead of just implimenting a language picker, it's a good idea to:

1) store the browser's language option in the DB only for new users, but only the first time they log in, never again.

2) never give existing users the ability to change language, and just default them to English.

3) deal with all upcoming language change tickets by having devs manually do DB updates ON THE LIVE PROD DB.

I'm screaming.

One of the admins in our school is developing a digital class register. He already set up all the users but randomized the passwords to lock all students out. But he also implemented a password reset.

He was kinda pissed when he found out (the very next day) though. Now he locked us out again.
At least I can leave the school next year knowing that they'll get a sick new application

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

So when we started this project like 4 years ago... new to the framework, kickstarting lot's of forms with file uploads. Everything seemed to work fine, uploads and downloads worked..
First version of the project got deployed to prod and for weeks or so users have been registering and submitting stuff...

Only problem was: most files were overridden by consecutive uploads as our central upload lib stored files with the same name on disk (normally the ID of the db row was injected but most files were saved before the db row was - resulting in 0 IDs...)
Yeah so... that hurt :(

This was more than 15 years ago. We migrated a bunch if data (home to a new server and repurposed the old one, the same night. This was not the first task on that allweekender, so it was around 3am on Sunday, with very little sleep, when I had to copy the data. I did that by logging in as admin and copying with Total Commander. Obviously, even admin did not have the permissions to some folders, so a lot of financial data were lost, as the users found out on Monday morning. We had no backup. Old server was not only reformatted, but the disks were used to build a different raid set. Luckily, one of the users who had access to this data kept a backup on a flash drive. (If you're wondering, I should've used robocopy with backup mode)

Hey DevRant, I'd like you to meet "Marketing Brandon", his favorite daily activities include:

- asking me when that landing page is going to be ready

- asking how to support a customer on live chat even though he chose to assign the ticket to himself in the first place

- explaining how important social media is

- telling me he's working as fast as he can on some website copy I need and then sitting and composing tweets for 40 minutes

- asking if I can "just real quickly when I get the chance" implement a huge new feature for our users

- announcing to the entire office that he "has to leave early today" because the pet store closes at 5 and his ferret ran out of food yesterday

-.-

Does your office have a Marketing Brandon or similar?

Hey Linux users. Right now I have a 2011 MacBook pro the new MacBooks you are unable to take apart so I will not buy another one. So if you had a choice of any laptop what would you choose? I do not game I am a web developer and play around with app development and I build ruby CLI's. Any suggestions on what PC? Also I'm looking at arch Linux for distro what do you guys think?

!rant

Got a permanent contract today after 1½ year of temporary contract. 🤩

I'll be doing mostly whatever I want, but it starts with a new mobile app for both Android and iOS. Maybe I'll try Xamarin or React Native. However, I don't know iOS (Swift) yet, so maybe I'll learn it along the way. It depends on what would be best for the users.

Motherfucker, do you even review your own code, never mind getting anyone else to do it?

"Hi" randomly added on a new line in the middle of a switch block, a syntax error, as the only change in a file?

Breaking two methods by misunderstanding which database object a variable identifies- but making no other change to those functions? And not adding permissions checks to the new API methods you added in that file?

Overwriting the email template that goes out to users who were added straight to the CRM, by reusing the same file for a template for users that have been invited to an event?

Adding your new fields to the old CRM sync code, again leaving me to figure it out, thereby leaving users' changes likely to be overwritten every morning?

And pushing this to master, supposedly tested, without a heads-up?

How often does your mum need to buy you a new box of crayons? Because these ones are chewed to pieces.

Suck my balls. Or rather don't, you probably don't know you're not meant to use your teeth.

the first most annoying thing in devrant are new users

the second most annoying thing is "new comments on a rant you commented on" notifications. They require maintenance work, and I can't even mute threads on desktop

That time when the IT guy for your client company email you asking if we need to change code of their web based system cause they got new printer.

He forwarded the question from users like he didn't know the users needed to select a new printer or change their default printer.

God knows what he's doing there!!

DevRant users (and my wife) are the only people that know that I have applied for 2 new jobs! I’ve already had a phone interview with each. Tomorrow I have a 2 hour in-person technical interview, and last night I completed a technical assessment/sample application for the other position!

Things are moving fast, but I don’t want to let friends and family know yet, until things get a little more certain.

It’s such a weird feeling going to work everyday knowing that my current job may be coming to an end!

Fucking ant-cumstained garbage bag. How come you are so inaccessible you satan website.

I wanted to look at someone on facebook. But for some things you need an account, so I sign up with my spam mail and a random name and the birth date that was filled in

When I try to login facebook says: your account might be compromised, what is your birth date to verify it's you.
Wtf I just made this. So I fill in the standard birth date.
WRONG BIRTH DATE YOU CAN'T TRY AGAIN FOR THE NEXT 15 MIN

Im glad I abandoned you long ago.

But apparently you know you suck since you don't allow new users?

Forgive me Linus for I have sinned. It has been since the dawn of time since my last confession.

I hardcoded naming conventions for file names into a script that is used to remove incorrect lines of text that are created during our process to create the files that we send out so that healthcare claims get paid correctly and copy and pasted the code for each new state’s health plan since the users(who are supposed to be technically inclined as they’re in IT as support analysts) can barely figure out how to set up the excel file to remove the lines. There are now 18 files of the same python script with different US States’ names.

I could use some advice. Immagine this: you recently started a new job where the people are great, the product is pretty cool and pay is good. But the code you have to work with is the biggest pile of shite you've ever seen and your manager does not want to change any of this, even after you suggest you would build something that would be a thousand times better, not only "code wise" but for the users too. What would you do?

hey, y'all android users listen up. i wanna start a new project but im not sure if it's gonna be useful. essentially, i want to make a scripting language to program people's phone, so devs or android super users can make the most of their phone. users will be able to create, share, and schedule execution of the scripts all from the app. is it a good idea? is their something like it?

example of a use i personally would have: there is a set date for when the soccer league schedule for the youth league i play in is supposed to be released online. however, the set date is never met, and it is usually a few days late. in this case, i could make a script to request to the website with the schedule and see if the html changed from last time, and if so it would send me a notif saying "check for schedule" or something similar.
then, i could schedule it to run every five minutes, and i wouldnt have to check manually.

its essentially bash automation for your phone.

good idea?

So we have this administration page in the clients app that has tables of data.

The user can click on a row to edit or click "Add' to create a new one, doing so pops up a modal with a form full of inputs and a save button at the bottom.

The other day our client told me he was concerned that users would not understand how to edit data and that I should add some text below the first input field of each modal that says "Type in a new value and click 'SAVE' to change the [field name]"

As I implimented this crap, I took a few minutes to come up with a nice way of saying that his idea made no sense, added unnecessary clutter to the UI, and proposed some alternatives.

He essentially said, "Thanks for your much better ideas, for now let's just stick with what we've got and we can revisit this later."

Everytime I open that UI, I physically feel pain and get a little sick.

When Icriticize a paid service for taking away or not providing functionality for all users equally but then a user comes back defending them with some BS reason...

Ok... I'll just continue helping myself only...

@nnee

Me:

1. Can you put the New books tab with back in the bottom, scrolling down into the New section in the front page is annoying. At least make it a setting?

2. Where's the # of books read stat in Android?

Blinkist: Hi thanks for your message! The best way to view the newest titles on Android is to do just as you mention – scroll down to reveal the New section. As for BiB stats on Android, we're working on releasing this feature (it's only live on iOS at the moment).

Me: Hm... I liked the older way better. Faster and can tell when it was added. The problem is sometimes still new books don't refresh and I need to login out to get it to update. Also I notice sometimes the list changes randomly I think. One day a new book is there. The next day it's gone.

BiB stats have been in iOS for a year now? How hard is it to put it in Android. Personally it only took me a day to find out what my total is as I can write a program to do it so to me I don't understand how this could be taking so

Some user: Priorities and often it’s strategy for future features...

Me: you take away useful functionality and and can't release a feature that's been on the iOS version for a year already... fine,,, I'll just take it as a challenge... that I've mostly solved... for myself...

I absolutely treasure the bug reports we get from users. Nothing helps bring the product closer to perfection than the informed critique of end-users.
Recently, however, this one dude is filing a new fucking report every time he encounters the same fucking bug. "X happens for operation Y on file A"
"X happens for operation Y on file B"
.
.
.
"X happens for operation Y on file Z"

Jumping Jesus Christ, man, I'm pretty sure we can identify a pattern after the first two!
I don't expect him to know about the work we do to reproduce a problem after one report but fucking hell, have some faith that we'll get the picture after two or three.
These are fully detailed bug reports too, so it's not like he's just being a troll.

I got yet another scammer calling me, this time it's something wrong with my computer LOL calling from Microsoft.

I flat out said this:

OH so you're a scammer right? Because there is nothing wrong with my PC.

I know I was supposed to post the other number on 4chan, but where exactly would I do so? there are so many categories and I'm new to 4chan
The guy hung up immediately!

Here ya go: 05967175950 bastard deserves to go to jail scamming normal PC users out of their information!

New AltRant update!

This update features a fix for instability issues in the Notifications tab. All users that are in the testing group - please update soon! I am giving you a 3-day update window.

Hey, I have a cool idea about a new way to solve a problem our users are having!
Type type type, now I have a working prototype! Show it to the team, everyone loves it. Polish it a little, it works really great!
Now let's test it on an iPad like the ones our users have... Nope, nothing works, undefined is not a function.

F*CK YOU SAFARI, you're why we can't have nice things. 😤

Happened to me today : one of the users told me he was tired of using the app until the last release came out. It included a new feature which totally changed his opinion, he really enjoy using it now :) Pay attention to details !

Nightmare morning. Woke up for the fact that my app in app store is crashing on opening. Yesterday submitted improvements to the app (react-native).

Tested locally on simulator and also on real machine by react-natives --variant Release. Worked ok. But now when I build it with xcode and sent it to app store, it's no longer working at all =/.

Im losing users by every minute. Was able to immediately make a hotfix, but apple has not taken any hurry in reviewing it. Also it's not possible to revert previous version in app store, I just have to submit a new version that will be reviewed. I even called them and they promised to hurry but nothing's happened and it's been like 4-5 hours already.

I got so bad luck because usually in review they test the app, but now they didn't, and this time it didn't work at all. And I thought that testing it by react-natives --variant release mode would be enough, but apparently theres something different when you build and archive it with xcode. I feel my app is doomed now, many of the users might abandon it completely =/.

If I learned something it is that always try to test the last modified version of the app. Even if the modification seems small. Don't trust react-natives --variant release for testing an ios app.

So are there WhatsApp users who now also would want to migrate after the new terms & conditions to something like Signal, but know that nobody in their contacts will probably migrate as well?
I hate it that you're basically forced to stay on WhatsApp because everybody (at least for me) is using it and 90% of the users probably don't care.
Im gonna try and see whether or not I can 50/50 them, but I'm scared that WhatsApp is simply too big to have people transition... Using it as a safer sms app is quite useless because well, it's basic sms and nobody in my direct contact circles uses texts (neither do I want to do that tbh).

There's a production site with api call limits. We experienced waaaaay more visitors than usual and I forgot to increase the api call limit, so new users weren't able to do anything. FML again, update emails sent out.

OK, I kind of liked this devRant thing, when I clicked to register for a new account, I got a stupid popup about free stickers, clicked it, the title says "get free stickers ...", to catch users attention but then you read "you have to reach 30 ++'s on a single rant"
OK, fuck off, I don't want these stupid stickers and stop doing this shit again.

Amazing project I love working for and we're are the cusp of pushing out a big new update.
Suddenly Safari starts closing our SignalR web sockets the moment the page loads, and only Safari does it.
And our client has a hard on for Apple.
So it's considered a blocking change, even though Safari is only used by the client and none of our end users.

a few ideas for the future:

1) When you have just unlocked the ability to use a new item for your avatar send a notification i.e.
"XXXXXX just +1 Your comment, you can now get a pet tiger!"
or
"XXXXXX just +1 Your comment, you can now choose a new t-shirt"

2) Rant categories, i.e. Clients, colleagues, OS, jokes, !rant etc...

3) the ability to view more then the last 30 rants of a users profile

South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2

In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.

In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.

The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.

The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.

Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet

Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system

beware of font choices in chat apps; a coworker joked in the room that "well, sure, of course it's okay to update in production in the middle of the day" and for some reason, the other coworker didn't see the quotes because of the weird font they use, and also didn't stop to think, and went ahead and ran the deployment script. In production. In the middle of the day. With active users.

The good news is that those folks who logged back in got to use the new version a whole lot earlier than anyone was expecting. :\

Fellow iPhone users and broke bitches too cheap to get the battery replaced or buy a new phone, I have noticed that I get a lot smoother performance and a more gradual if steeper battery life with apples bullshit process slowing turned off. Now anything below 20% is a flip of a coin if the phone will turn off, but with it on it chews the top end of the battery much faster and seems to die more when idle.

PS don’t use fast chargers.

First post yay!
I'm a "tech" lead for my team. The "tech" stands for technically, I can go on a whole different rant there but that's not why we're here today.
So we have a new PM on our side and a new PM on the client side. I've been working on this project longer than any of the devs and PMs have.
One of the tasks that my team does is validate and ingest data. It's pretty straightforward and it's fully automated. It takes minutes, and at most an hour, to complete this task. We get these tasks from users randomly and they don't have any schedule to it. It's FIFO basis and we just add it to our current sprint if we have bandwidth or add it to the next one if we don't. Not a big deal, no users have complained about it before, it's just business as usual. And we have a tracker of when we received it, how big it was and when it's been ingested. Super simple.
So now comes in the new client PM. He's been asking us to come up with timelines for these ingestions. My project's new PM is bending over to him and saying okay we'll come up with it, no problem. Well, there is a problem. We don't know that far in advance for when these tasks are coming in. Even if we did, now we're supposed to create timelines for a 10 min task? It literally is uploading a file and our system handles everything and I've explained that to my pm but he still is like well that's what they want. It takes less effort to do the ingestion than to make these timelines. It just means project managers bothering devs about timelines.
Idk how to deal with this. Thoughts? Any similar experiences?

So I was reverse proxying this new Social network app's API and saw an interesting endpoint

It was a websocket relaying what each live user's doing every 2.5s, to power the "xyz typing" under a post, or a simple online/idle.
The app's "live posts" ie most-recently created posts was also powered by it since they knew each user's state (instead of a periodic API call)

The performance is good even tho it's a new company + enough users

but now im curious how prevelant state-management is using such websockets .-.

if not taxing, i might move any API call which ive to ping every 15s or less to a live WS

Today Phoronix posted a short article about a (in my opinion cool) new feature I implemented in my file manager (Dolphin). Most of the feedback was positive/constructive criticism but some people attacked me personally because they don't like the feature/think "true" Linux users wouldn't use it.
I gave you something cool for free. Would you please stop bitching about it?
If you don't like it don't use it. You can even disable it if it threatens your ego as a Linux master user

Customer asks us to add an exception report to a file upload process, to show which users failed to be added, and why.

File has 4 fields per record: id, first name, last name, and email.

Customer: "some of these records aren't uploading, and when I look at the new report, it says 'email required' for those users. I don't understand. Does that mean they can't be uploaded without an email?"

So this is kind of an odd scenario, but bare with me. My client has been issued a JWT token. After having received and stored it, I completely reset the database, and so also emptied the users table. Note that we're using MySQL with auto incrementing ID, whose counter has been reset. The user ID is stored in the JWT, so now the JWT isn't referencing an existing user anymore, so the client will get a 401. The problem arises when a new user registers and is inserted in the new database. That user will get ID 1, and so the old token for the other user will suddenly be valid for another user. I know it's an odd case, but is this a flaw in JWT? I guess an easy solution would be to use random ID's, but I'm still wondering.

For everybody wondering what's the new endpoint is..

/api/me/subscribed-feed

you can also provide an `filter`, which is comma-seperated with the possible values:
- posted
- commentedOn
- liked

"View more suggested users" does NOT load more. It simply doesn't show everything from the response.

So we pushed some quick fixes management required to the system before going home to sleep. We warned them that we don’t have much time to check and test them. Because ordinarily such fixes go fine, they insisted.

What do you know, while we slept some smartasses within users drained our system money through the new hole we did not notice.

Manager responsible for this just gone dark, never ever picked up his phone. Just disappeared.

We don’t do such fixes anymore 🤗

My new Mac Mini (which I bought begrudgingly for one project only) comes with a warning about a coin battery and how swallowing it will cause harm. Are we, as a species, getting dumber by the minute, or is it only Mac users?