Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Wanna mess with users? Take

“OK” and “Cancel”.

You know what looks visually the same but means the opposite?

“NO” and “Confirm”.

Deploy that little ui update overnight and watch the world burn.

> Customer calls
Her: I have over 5k 404 request to [insertwebsite]/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
Me: Sound like a missconfigured exchangeserver/client. Let me have a look.
> Takes a look and can confirm the IP and the owner of that IP
Me: It looks like someone/something from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is failing to resolve autodiscover.[insertdomain].com
and defaults to @ record on the zone. Do you happend to know to whom that IP belongs?
Her: No, and I dont care, just block it. I do not like the 404 that shows up on the summary.
Me: Alright
> Blocks the IP in the firewall.

>>> Fast forward to next day >>>

> Someone calls, it is the same girl
Her: I cant reach my website! Infact, I cant reach anything! WHYYYYYY!!!
> I remember, blocking that IP yesterday...
Me: Oh, can you please visist "minip.se" (whatismyip.com, swedish version) and tell me what you see?
Her: Yes, it is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Me: Do you remember that IP that you request that I block yesterday?
> I can hear the shame coming from the phone.
> Turn out that her collegues did'nt have any mail delivered to them from the time I blocked their IP
> Her boss is really mad
> Atleast she had a cute voice

Funny story about the first time two of my servers got hacked. The fun part is how I noticed it.
So I purchased two new vps's for proxy server goals and thought like 'I can setup fail2ban tomorrow, I'll be fine.'

Next day I wanted to install NginX so I ran the command and it said that port 80 was already in use!

I was sitting there like no that's not possible I didn't install any server software yet. So I thought 'this can't be possible' but I ran 'pidof apache2' just to confirm. It actually returned a PID! It was a barebones Debian install so I was sure it was not installed yet by ME. Checked the auth logs and noticed that an IP address had done a huge brute force attack and managed to gain root access. Simply reinstalled debian and I put fail2ban on it RIGHT AWAY.

Checked about two seconds later if anyone tried to login again (iptables -L and keep in mind that fail2ban's default config needs six failed attempts within I think five minutes to ban an ip) and I already saw that around 8-10 addresses were banned.

Was pretty shaken up but damn I learned my lesson!

Product sending an email: Can I confirm feature A is all set for its release on April 30th?

Me: ... what? no that feature is going out with Feature B, that was pushed back to June because of the server issue.

Product: No, the release plan document says April 30th for this.

Me: ... theres 6 copies of this doc now. Someone is after deleting my comments saying "releasing with Feature B". Oh look heres a link to another doc that says this. See Feb14th "Will go out with Feature B". This is because they are touching the same code, we can't separate them now without re-writing it.

*Me to myself*: Ha product are going to hate this, their shitty processes have finally caught up with them.

*next day*

Other manager: So heres my plan for the app release x, y, z.

*Me to myself*: ... his plan? this is my app, I mange this. What the hell is this?

*reads email thread*

*Me to myself*: ... oh so product really didn't like my reply, took me off the thread, sent a response to all the other managers asking for alternatives, CC'ing upper management. The same upper management I had a private conversation with yesterday about how shit our product team are.

*cracks knuckles*

I'm going to enjoy writing this reply.

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

What did we buy ?
Ryzen 9 and Radeon 6800 XT
What are we playing ?
Open TDD and factorio.

Yep, Can confirm, no lags.

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

I fucking hate the fact that every tech company now needs for devs to be up-to-date with geeksforgeeks or leetcode to pass their interview.

Is there no other way to confirm that a Dev is legit?

That awkward moment when you made some changes in your code and hope that it will fail so that you can confirm your theory/suspicion.

Otherwise you'll have no idea what's going on.

: /

Win 10 is the best, I love how it just restarts without asking, no more hassle of me having to confirm anything, or save data first. finally an OS that has the confidence to just do whatever the fuck it wants, so awesome!

Our team was having a problem with very slow response times from a 3rd party web service they were contacting to get some device stats. No issues on the other end, but it had already been weeks. They ask me to take a look at it.

I take a few days, do a couple of benchmarks and tests and I isolate the section of code responsible. Turns out, the method they were calling would timeout if the device was offline. We ask the vendor, and they confirm this. They tell us to call methodX to check if it was up.

After having done that, lookup now only took seconds. They were annoyed that it wasn't documented but was just glad it was fixed.

Saturday. It's already an evening. Kid is asleep. Wife is doing her thing in another room. I'm on my own, I now have time do do whatever I want! So a personal project time it is!

Open up a lappy, wake up my Mint. Switch to a workspace with IntelliJ ide. There's some message popped up on a screen. With a red cross. Read the message -- your licence has expired.

Shit.

Open up chrome, go to jetbrains website, log in, purchase an all-in licence page, filling in the form, last check before confirm... Wait, that ain't right. That's my college email I no longer have access to! Phew, it's a good thing I checked before submitting!

Go to account settings, update my email address, go back to licence purchase form, fill it all in, last check, and...

Wait..
Email hasn't changed. What if they send something valuable to my mailbox upon lic purchase? I can't risk, it's 200€ after all...

Oh come on! Open a support ticket. But it's Saturday so I don't think I'll get a response until Monday :(

and there goes ruined a perfect evening for some coding :(

shit...

So my parents got speakers integrated into their monitor. A few years ago (like 3-4) they made me turn off the sound because it annoyed them since all they did were playing some shitty flash games and some office work. Now they needed the sound back on and this is how it happened.

1. Confirm they plugged the right cable in. I know them so I knew that could be a problem

2. Made them download Teamviewer because I know they can't even doubleclick without guidance

Now the juicy part was to tell them they need to turn on sound on the monitor. As I was watching via teamviewer I saw them trying to click on the menu items from said monitor. Took me 5 minutes to explain that their mouse can't do shit on that because they need to navigate with the buttons underneath the monitor.

Turned out they couldnt get things right and I had no idea what they were seeing because they explanations went like "All I can see is Main Menu and Exit." - "Is that really all dad?" "Yes thats all. Main Menu, Brightness and Exit" turnes out the middle part is interchangable like "Brightness, Saturation, etc..."

After 2 hours I gave up and told them to pick up my speakers tomorrow

WTF freelancer, just won a design contest and it’s so fucking hard to withdraw the money to my bank account.

“There is some invalid bank details in your withdraw request, please confirm with your bank”

I never withdraw money before so i have to wait 15 days for my first withdrawal for each withdrawal methods.

The first method (express withdrawal with no fees) was failed because the bank details issue, talk with the cs and they told me to confirm to my bank, confirmed and tried again (only 1 or 2 days waiting time) but still failed, been trying this 3 times.

Trying the second method a.k.a wire transfer, i have confirmed the bank about what details are required to receive money from overseas first so i can prevent some stupid errors.

Wait another 15 days and ...

STILL FAILED WITH SAME PROBLEM

FUCK

This is the first time i regret when i won something.

ＦＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵ

For the past two years, I worked my balls off to deliver a project that eventually went live months ago.

But boss announced that no bonus is going to be paid because project got delayed.

Its not even my fault that project got delayed because customer cannot confirm requirements and keep changing.

All of my assigned tasks were also met on time, if not earlier.

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

After three hours of emailing with a customer I can confirm that programmers are the worst customers.
Customer: We've found a bug in the system... <details>
Me: Thank you for letting us know, a ticket has been created and the issue is most likely to be fixed in the next release.
Customer: Please grant me UPDATE privileges in the live(!) database so I can fix it myself
Me: I cannot allow that. You have to use the client software for maintaining your data.
Customer: No, I don't want to spend my day clicking. I want to write queries.

We didn't reply to the last one yet...
If we give him access, then I would charge them at least 3x for fixing issues caused by him.

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES: NO.

I clicked on this out of genuine curiosity to see if someone was finally trying to discourage people from annoying the shit out of website visitors. A summary of the suggestions in their article as to what to use popups for:

1. Announce new products/services, features, policy updates, new blog posts
2. Promote your sales or coupons (including countdowns)
3. Encourage people to input their e-mail address / subscribe, perhaps also offering some vague thing they will get as a reward for doing so
4. Contact forms (e.g. support etc.)
5. Prompt visitors to confirm their age before showing content
6. Login/register forms
7. Display social media "share" buttons when a visitor has scrolled a certain way through the page content.
8. Display cookie consent prompt.
9. Help guide visitors to the part of the website they want to go to.

Of these: 1, 2, 3, and 7 need to die for sure. If a website does any of these things I'm inclined to immediately leave and never return. 8 is a little annoying but seems a necessity.

Someone even replied to the Tweet saying that popups are annoying, the company responded with "let's change that!"

Blank portions of the screenshot are to avoid promoting the company unintentionally as a result of the rant ;)

recruiter calls me up about a node position. I agree to a phone interview the next day at 3pm. wait around until 3:30pm...no call. I talk to him and he apologized a bunch and forgot to tell (or confirm the time) with the hiring company. he rescheduled for 2 days later (Fri) at 4pm. I wait around until 4:30pm...no call. this time he tells me I didn't answer my phone and I'm unprofessional. 5 min later I get an email from LinkedIn. (from the ceo of the hiring company) asking if I ever got back to the recruiter because they have been anxious to speak with me after seeing my resume.

He never once actually scheduled anything with them and led us both on.

Will try to keep that one short.

So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.

Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.

I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...

Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like

30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC

And just casually missclicked...

And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.

No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work.

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

So someone posted their btc wallet details (system automated message through a custom tool) to a paste in alternative.

Was the login for an ssh. Wont confirm or deny ssh-ing into it, but another guy who saw the same thing messaged me, sent a screenshot. Account had 127k usd worth of btc in it.

Called the radio station it belonged to and gave them a heads up. Probably should reported it as well but people already seen it so it'll get taken down soon enough.

Here I am broke, busting my ass and reality throws this in my lap. But I ain't never been no god damn thief. Hope the radio station it belongs to doesnt get robbed by someone less honest though.

Honesty is probably half the reason I've spent half my life broke trying to find or make opportunities.

And frankly I've heard real horror stories of good faith reports (whitehat style pentesting, etc) and the people that report it get fucked hard by authorities. What can you do though.

Enough navel gazing though.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who build these sort of account reset tools anyway?

Not dev related.

I am fucking tired of the house buying process in the England. Honestly it is such shambles that I don't think I have ever encountered anything like this. Nothing is ever predictable, everything and everone works at random timescale and nobody gives a fuck of you as a buyer even if you are paying crazy money. Apparently we are meant to be moving next Monday but contracts haven't been exchanged, my mortgage broker gave incorrect solicitors details to the bank so they are having to redo some paperwork, the buyer of our current place has not responded for last week to confirm the date, the seller we are buying from has been jumping up and down to exchange and here I am with no certainty.

My anxiety and frustration levels are through the roof for last 10 days. I can't wait for it all to be over. I don't think I am ever buying another house unless the process changes. Just needed to vent my frustration somewhere

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

Do you want to run the script? Yes, No, Print. Wait what?
What is the intention of 'print'? Will it print the question out for me? :D

introductory rant

So I am new here, hi! :)

So the devRant android app does not seem to support this mail format:
user+devrant@domain
(the important part being the "+devrant" thing)

Now I waited 2 days for a confirmation mail that wouldn't arrive and was greeted with the "please confirm your fucking mail" popup every damn time.

"Okay, let's just change my mail to user@domain and deal with it", I thought. Guess what: You can't!

So I contacted the devrant team via e-mail.
And I waited.
2 days.
No answer.

Okay.

Delete account, recreate with other mail, be happy.

Don't worry, I'm not mad. It's just really fucking ironic.

Looking forward to a great community! :)

I'm seriously working with a system that saves the password AND the confirm password In the database... varchar field, copied info, no wonders it takes half an hour to make query.

A checkout application where, in the confirmation screen, everything (amount, references, currency, quantity of items, etc.) was sent to the client as a form, and they submitted this form to confirm.

...but there was no verification on any of the above. So any of the above could be changed and it'd collect whatever funds, and order whatever items, with whatever references you gave it.

This wasn't a major player in the space, but was big enough that most people would likely have heard of at least some companies using it. It's still being actively used today, and I can near guarantee not all the flaws have been fixed.

Usually my workplace is pretty chill, but today something rantworthy happened!

During code review, I found this guy had styled each element inside his components using nth-child selectors. For instance, in a card the heading was styled by nth-child(1), the text was styled by nth-child(2) and so on... No use of actual fucking classnames.

When I pointed this out, he told me it was actually the better way of doing things because classnames increase the size of the HTML document!

He also claimed proudly that nth-child() is more efficient in performance (idk - anybody can confirm this?)

I'm the only "css guy" there so nobody could second my views. Posting it here so that I can show this to him tomorrow by demonstrating what opinion other css devs have on this and prove my concerns / convince him to change his code.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR THIS !!!

After seeing bunch of posts about Enki, decided to give it a try,

enters my info on the sign up page
*email address is already taken* : WHAT !!

changes email address
*your username is already taken* : WHAT !!

goes back and search if there's any mails from Enki
*no results found* : Dafuq !!

Requests password reset
*Receives first mail from enki ever, with a reset link*

Did they change their name from something else to Enki or they have bunch of emails in their database to showoff user base ?

Can anyone shed some light on this, cause I'm 100% sure i didn't sign up for this before.

after resetting the password I'm able to login, but in the Notification section it says
*your email is not confirmed*

well i would confirm it, WHEN I GET IT !!

User A: We need to do some check on our data. So you need to add in a new function for this, we can't use your system otherwise.
Me: Ok then.
Spends 2 days or so to get it working
Me: So this is the function we'll add. Can you confirm that its ok?
User A: Ohh...but now I'm not too sure about this. Let me confirm with my team lead on this.
User A: I just checked. Good news,we don't really need that function now. I think we can use it with the current one anyway haha. And I just confirmed this so no worries.
So I just wasted my time then. Great.

"I need the login credentials for the CMS service"

*sends the email confirmation email*

"No, I can't confirm your email for you. In plain English: send me the email and password to login."

"Ohhhhhhhhh"

Literally what the fuck is wrong with these people.

I swear we're all fucking doomed.

# Honestly, no intention of starting a holy war;

Been a Linux guy for over 9 years spanning school, college and my previous job years;

Now I have to use Windows at my new job. I know very little abt this os and it has never been among my strong skills (only used it for gaming);

What's more intriguing is that my current company's entire infrastructure is Windows based - which I had no idea that it could be possible at such a large scale;

I don't know about what I feel about this whole thing. But what I know is that I don't wanna shy away from it. I love the job and the role (only just if it was Linux, it'd be perfect).

Just need this for a future reflection:
Can anyone confirm if it's the same with other investment banks/financial services institutions etc. infrastructure?

So today I found a file share containing some super super sensitive information accessible to what I think was our entire user base (6,500 users) if you knew the server name and had an interest in nosing around.

I reported it to our head of IT and heard nothing after, although 5 mins after reporting I could no longer access...

I suspect the infrastructure lead is going to be a dick (because his one of them awkward non team player kind of guys) and not thank me for preventing our company from being in national news papers... but try to spin it on why am I nosing around his servers in the first place..

I actually feel 50/50 about if I should of told or not.. but on flip side, I guess the access logs of me listing the files as I flick through to confirm my suspicions would of caused s bigger headache.

Fucking useless infrastructure engineers!

Modern technology is absolutely bullshit

I can't even

Now my keyboard on my phone is even too broken to complain about it

I wanted to look at someone's post history on a forum

To do so the forum wants an account. Ok. So I gave it my old junk Hotmail account during sign up for it to send me an email confirm so I can make the account so I can search. Well I'm refreshing this account for this confirm account email through the Gmail app on my phone because who even checks emails on computers anymore

Turns out, aside from this Hotmail spam email account having a lot of junk emails (it is my junk email account), there's this little pop-up that happens SOMETIMES claiming that it can't sync. I checked inbox and spam and the email isn't in there. So 1 out of 10 times I refresh there's this little "cannot sync" message that pops up and I click it. It claims my storage on my phone is too full to sync. Ok.

So I go try to find storage through the settings in my phone. It doesn't exist as a category anymore apparently. Thankfully phones have a search feature now -- because we can't have sane settings anymore so here's a search feature. First result it gives me is just device info. That's useless. It's just the hardware specs for my phone

Second it shows storage. 90% full apparently. That's odd. I have 132 gb. Thankfully it subdivided it by what's taking up space but it doesn't make much sense and a bunch of the categories don't open to anything

Apparently the fucking android operating system is 32 GB now? Well you're fucked if you wanna remove that. Apparently years of photos and videos is 20 gb, I can back those up and delete them. Similarly I have downloads in folders, and that's about 20 gb

Why are there 20 GB of apps? I literally have no apps!

Part of apps? Wtf is Gboard and why is it a gig

Why is my WEATHER APP using a gig of storage?

And none of the apps can I remove the storage they're using. The cache is like 600kb, and I can delete all data and it's using like 60 MB. So the fucking weather app executable itself is a gig of space? Wtf?

I deleted the data for Gboard and turns out that's the keyboard. So now all my keyboard settings are fucked.

Thankfully I wrote syncing scripts ages ago to sync various folders from my phone to my external HDD. I just had to connect it to the laptop and run the script on the external HDD. Problem? Well turns out no matter what I do I can't get the laptop to connect to the phone if it's USB file transfer mode. I can do photos. But this is gonna be more than photos.

So I do my sync backup script from the laptop to the external HDD. This will sync the camera, since I have sync thing sync my laptop and phone all the time, so I can just sync the laptop to the external HDD and then delete the older photos and get 20gb. Quick fix for now

Why do I need this quick fix?
Well
Get this
I've been having issues with my Gmail client for ages. It just won't display new email notifications which is really annoying because I need to know when emails get sent to me.
Now I'm thinking, maybe I can de-sync older emails and have more storage space maybe? But that's not an option anywhere. Actually, I can't even unconnect an email address from my phone. Gmail doesn't even let you do that

What the flying fuck is the state of modern technology

Now I have to go figure out what my fucking settings were for my stupid phone keyboard

The 90s were much fucking saner than this garbage. I don't need a 32 GB operating system on a phone. Is this fucking windows 8? And let me fucking tell YOU how many fucking emails you should sync to my phone. Holy shit what the fuck is all this

At least my Linux scripts fucking work like I wrote them

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

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

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

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

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

So this happened some years ago:

The phone rings and as soon as I pick it up some fast talking sales rep begins his spiel.

"Good afternoon my name is [don't remember, calling him 'jigglybum'] and we have a device that you plug into your phone line and it will allow you to make free international calls over the internet. It's real easy to set up and you can have it on us for the first three months absolutely free, if you could just confirm your address..."

"Don't want it."

"I'm sorry sir but I think you're throwing away a massive opportunity here we're offering you free international calls."

"No you're not. You're offering me a free trial of some sort of VoIP hardware."

"We yes, but it's free for the first three months and..."

"We also don't make international calls."

"That maybe true sir but with this box you could."

"I'm really not interested in your product."

"I don't think you fully understand all the benefits..."

*there's a clicking noise followed by a dial tone for a second and a new voice*

"Hi, I'm the supervisor for 'jigglybum' and I think perhaps he is having difficulty explaining what it is that we are trying to give you here..."

"Listen to me, from what I have understood you are offering to send us a VOIP hardware device that directly connects to our broadband and facilitates international calls, and presumably any calls for that matter on a three month trial which after will presumably have a subscription fee, have I had any difficulty understanding the nature of the device and terms of use?"

"Well, no sir, that's a very accurate description, so if you could just confirm your address for me..."

"NO! As you have just admitted there was no misunderstanding about what your product is or what it does. There seems to be a real misunderstanding on your part on the concept of 'no'. We don't want this product, we don't need the product and if we want to make VOIP calls, we have Skype!"

"Ok sir, goodbye."

This is, to my knowledge the only and only time that a supervisor in a call centre has wanted to talk to ME.

I forgot my password to my mindfactory account, one of Germany's biggest online vendor for computer components. So I go through the resetting process, which is:

- apply for password reset
- get a mail
- confirm the mail
(So far, so good)

- get a mail with a new CLEAR TEXT PASSWORD

Is this the stone age!?

You never send an email containing the cleartext! You never even store the password as is!
You, as the provider, should never be able to know what the actual password was.

All you are supposed to do is to generate a random salt, and hash the user's password with the salt, and then you only store the salt and the hash. And whenever a user inputs their password, all you do is to check if the you can recreate the hash with the help of the salt and your hash algorithm. (There are libraries for that!)

If a user wants to reset their password? Send them to a mail with link on where they can assign a new password.

At no point should the password ever be stored or transmitted in any other medium.

Has anyone else worked in business environments and found... em.. "wannabe-tech decisions?"

For example, naming stuff with shortened words and underscores instead of spaces.... for no real reason? Or maybe using the word "database" a little too often, just to use the word? (similar to the way you might call someone by name, only to confirm to them that you have learned their name?)

It doesn't actually bother me, rather, I think it's a bit cute that these people are interested in our culture and want to be a part of it, even if it's in sort of silly ways like this.

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

Developers insist that I give them a sketch file instead of a zeplin doc I'm like ok fine. Then I am told in like three weeks of development that they don't understand the sketch file when they insisted on it. So I'm like ok fine let me put it on zeplin. Then I'm told to compare their work with my designs. And ofcourse it doesn't match. So i sit and literally go through each margin , each padding with them. Then I'm told that they r over riding exsisting styles and say that's alot of development so I say ok I need to ask the product owner if it's gonna take more time. They get mad at me and say why I need to ask this? Like u told me it's gonna take you longer and I need to tell my boss? Then my boss says confirm all the styles with marketing ( everyone btw has seen my designs, reviewed them, and I have confirmed literally every change) and now I've been told to change a button to red ( why r your cta's and errors the same color I have no idea ??!) And then I tell the developers and they make a huge deal about changing the button from blue to red. NO ONE HERE HAS A STRUCTURE TO PRESENT HAND OFF TO THE DELVEOPERS. ITS SO ANNOYING.

Also can I just say in my presentation time and I had spent time on my designs and someone says oh let me show everyone through my screen.

I literally got a word out before all the delveopers in the room start arguing and skipping my design slides like R FO REAL? LET ME GO THROUGH THE JOURNEY ITS MY JOB.
LET ME HAVE CONTROL ON MY DESIGNS
UAIQBA.EAUKWHWUAGWNKRVIEVJWFEJCSJCSJCAHCSHXWH

sorry. I am typing this sitting on a sofa eating cake when I'm supposed to be on a diet but I'm wallowing and crying

I'm surprised they let you do this...

Me: [jira comment] We have similar text for the mobile version of the site already. [includes screenshot of what site looks like now] Are you sure about this?

[radio silence for a few hours]

Me: [slack] I want to follow up.

Web Operations: What’s the issue?

Ooh k. Slack messages can have a tone.

Me: I just want to confirm we’re not repeating copy.

Web Ops: We’re not.

I complete the ticket and submit for review. The C-suite for my department reviews.

C-suite: [to web ops in JIRA comment] This looks weird. Is this right? [sends screenshot of my work because there is repeated copy, like I said there’d be]

Web Ops: [in JIRA comment] Oh, I thought X was questioning the request. X changed the wrong text.

C-suite: The website has always looked like that. You’re looking at X’s screenshot for the current website. Look at the screenshot I sent over.

Later, I complain because web ops was completely unprofessional with the comment about “questioning the request.”

C-suite: Web Ops is working hard. It’s our busy season and it’s their first time dealing with it. You know, I’m going to teach them some css and html so they can make content changes in the CMS and they’re not sending over changes so often and bothering you.

Me: [to myself] 🤨 wtf so it’s ok for web ops to treat me like dirt. And in writing. And with service that’s version controlled—JIRA emailed web ops comment to me. And lol no 😂 on teaching them how to code. That’s such bullshit. We all know you’d never allow them to edit the CMS because they’d fuck up the site. And they wouldn’t do edits anyway because it’s beneath them. And idk how this relates to web ops gross behavior.

A few days later.

Me: I was offered a job elsewhere. Here’s my two weeks notice.

C-suite: Can you push back your last day? It’s our busy season.

Me: Nope. Bye Felicia.

Have you ever thought to send a security code to the email the user put in the sign up form just to say him later "the password must contains at least 8 characters, etc." and ask him to fill the form again from scratch?

Who is so dumb to put the input check in this order? Honeywell.

- The email is correct?
- Ok, send a code and ask to confirm it
- The password meets the requirements?
- No, ask to confirm the email again just for fun.

I'll just ignore the waste of server resources to send N * Number of users emails for no reason.

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.

The HR for my last employer sucks.

After I left, my employer changed record keepers for the 401k before I could rollover the funds to an IRA. I thought, “It will be fine. I’ll wait until they finish setting up the new record keeper. Then, I can do the rollover.”

When the blackout period was about to end, I didn’t receive any instructions about the new record keeper. The funds had been transferred already and I called the old record keeper to confirm it was done by my former employer. I think, “Maybe they forgot to contact me because I’m no longer an employee.”

I email HR and ask when I can expect instructions on how to access the new record keeper. Idiots send me instructions for the old record keeper and how to file for a distribution. HR had actually called the old record keeper for these instructions when the funds were no longer with the old record keeper. WTF 😤

It takes all of my strength to write a civil email. I remind them that funds were transferred nearly 2 weeks ago by them to a new record keeper. I repeat that I need instructions on how to access the new record keeper and I don’t need instructions on how to file for a distribution from the old record keeper.

I’m effing glad I don’t work there anymore. I can’t deal with that HR’s idiocy anymore.

Okay so I had an acute derealization episode yesterday, hence yesterday’s post. Ignore what I said.
It was caused by the lack of sleep, the first such case since 2018.
Symptoms included super wide FOV — my arms were three miles long, I saw what seemed like almost my whole surroundings all at once. I couldn’t confirm the reality of that superhuman vision with an experiment because it was hard to grasp reality during derealization. I’m almost certain that it was just my brain extending my vision from memory, but I had no idea it could even do that given how detailed it was.
Also, vertigo was crazy.
I don’t own a funded Interactive Brokers account.
I don’t do drugs, alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. I never ever did drugs or alcohol. I’m about one year nicotine free and about three months caffeine free.
I’m bipolar and autistic. My prescription medications include neuroleptics that slow me down, not speed me up — the standard medication scheme prescribed to millions of patients all over the world.

Infrastructure took away our read access in S3 to data that we own and our ability to manually delete/upload to S3 in that prefix (which we own). Without waiting for us to confirm that we have alternative means to read and change what is in there. And I had no warning about this, so here I am doing a midnight mod on an existing solution of mine in hopes that I can finish it before tomorrow morning for some legal reporting deadline.

Things would be so much easier if the infrastructure team let the emergency support role have those permissions for emergencies like this, but they didn't. I guess "least privilege" means "most time spent trying to accomplish the most trivial of things, like changing a file".

I'd like to propose that we pivot the saying "there are no bad ideas" into " it's okay to have bad ideas".

Having worked with web frontends the last couple of years I can confirm with reasonable certainty that there are indeed several bad ideas, and "no bad ideas" is not a veto that will make me implement a 3d carousel calendar.

Tried to upgrade my internet connection from 25mbps to 75mbps. My ISP sent me a success message through email and sms and can confirm that the speed is legit (upload/download). One day later, no internet connection again. Why the fuck does this shit keep on happening to me. Quarantine sucks.

9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:

I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS

What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:

password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6

Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?

$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3

$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6

$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]

$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

I was volunteering outside my country through an association that sends you to startups that are related to your studies.

It was a three month stay, and my first time out of the country, so it was exciting and scary.

On my last month, I checked LinkedIn (it's been months since I logged in) and I had a message from a week ago, by some dude with a startup of webdev and marketing located in my home country and home city.

I replied saying that I usually don't log into LI and that I was interested in the job, sent my CV. Days went by and I had no answer back and I was like "Damn, why me? I really wanted the job". Last week of my trip I got a message back from him, telling that he was interested and that it would be awesome to talk when I got back to my city.

When I arrived, a week went by before he called me and confirm the first interview. When I went to the interview, we talked about the job, what was needed and that he didn't have to test me because he was confident on what we've talked previously that I was competent enough.

Needless to say, it's been a month and two weeks since I began and I couldn't be happier, it's not the bad ass company anyone would like to work for, but they have an awesome team, they are comprehensible and it's growing fast.

Vodafone Quits Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Project

“We can confirm that Vodafone is no longer a member of the Libra Association. Although the makeup of the Association members may change over time, the design of Libra’s governance and technology ensures the Libra payment system will remain resilient,” the Libra Association said in a statement.

“The Association is continuing the work to achieve a safe, transparent, and consumer-friendly implementation of the Libra payment system.”

After moving from Windows with WinSCP to Mac with FileZilla.. I'm looking forward to the day when I don't have to remember to click a button to confirm the upload after editing a file!
The amount of times I've been changing code and it having no effect, thinking I'm loosing it.. but just forgot to switch back to FileZilla and click the button..

Why does #Devrant (idk if #'s are a thing here) not have a confirm password field?

Come on... I doubt it annoys users and it saves people a lot of hassle, especially when we are logging in on multiple devices :/ I know lots of people who type their password wrong the first time and later on they can't login and get frustrated and confused then end up resetting via email.

Also why no login with Google etc~ that's kinda annoying too...

It annoys me immensely when I struggle with myself, criticizing my own lack of knowledge in certain areas and my colleagues say: "You'll learn by doing". No, I won't, that's a foolish dogma.

I won't and I have never learned by 'doing'. The best results I've obtained have been through understanding every last bit of what's under the hood of a particular functionality. I'm not going to understand the white box by constantly probing the black box, it's just unsatisfactory and insufficient information. It's even dangerous to base yourself on the black box results because you often might get false positives.

I got through university by massive multilateral sensory focus: kinesthetic (writing things down), auditory (listening to the professor), visual (observing graphs and models of the material taught), conscious (mentalizing it all and interlinking information so that later it's accessible from long-term memory). I can confirm this is necessary for the brain because a Neurologist once told me just that.

At least for me, I had the most horrible grades (D's and F's) in freshman year with the 'learn by doing' method and the best grades (A, A+) with the multi-sensory method in later years as I matured my studying methods. In fact, with that method I've continuously outsmarted other people who had 10 years more experience than me ('experts', 'consultants',..) but they preferred to stay in the ignorant 'bro zone' rather than learning things properly. Even worse, the day they arrived on the scene, they completely broke the production environment and messed it up for the whole team. I felt like banging my head on my desk. It just makes me disappointed in the system.

If you follow popular method, you'll soon find yourself in the same problems that arise from doing what everyone else does. What happens at that point? That's right, they have to call in someone who actually bothered learning things.

So i'm currently working on my PiStation..
(look at my previous post if you're interested)
I'm imaging over RetroPie over to the SD card, screw back together the housing, and it boots up fine. As soon as i configured my XBOX-controller i got to the wifi-settings. And when i try to access my wifi, guess what, it doesn't connect to my f**kin wifi. So i double check my wifi-settings in the router i just bought to get over my roommates paranoia (that's a whole another story. Just in short, he's got no idea of IT-security and tries to be an admin, which results in a HUGE amount of bulls**t), confirm that the settings are alright, double check the PSK too, anything is fine. So i go through the whole process again, download the image (from their goddamn slow servers), open up the PiStation, image it over to the SD card, close it back up, anything boots up fine and works, except this f**king wifi. And the thing is, i COULD connect it with a patchcable, but i dont want cables going anywhere through my room. Currently imaging over recalbox OS, will keep you updated. I just want to play some old retro games ._.

A very satisfactory debugging happened to me not long ago, when I discovered that assignement in C++ and Python doesn't work exactly the same.. I never took courses in Python so I had no way of knowing. I'm a self taught programmer, so I also always feel a bit insecure about my skills.
What made it really satisfying was that when I finally googled it, it was only to confirm the "diagnosis" that I had already made. I felt like years of struggles got me somewhere, now I feel a bit less insecure about my knowledge and skills in programming. :)

One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.

Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".

Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.

Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small.

Hi @dfox I saw an android user report this bug recently as a rant, and now I'm seeing it in iOS (latest app and os version).
Scrolling to the bottom, no more rants load. The little message shows stating that more rants are loading, but when you keep trying to scroll down there are none.
When I change the sort order from Algo to Recent or Top, I can't reproduce the issue. Seems to be only Algo.
Have tried killing the app and restarting to no effect. I hadn't noticed this bug last week interestingly, but can't confirm whether that's just coz I didn't scroll enough.

User gives printee asset # to configure scan to email function... Configure SMTP server settings ensure everything is correct... Ask user to test it... No go... Try different SMTP server still no go... Tweaks Configuration settings... No go... Finally after getting annoyed at my quite possible incompetents, I ask the user to confirm the printer asset number... They gave me the wrong printer asset the first time... [face palm]

So I was wondering what was going on with Recall. Heard it would take screenshots without permission and send to MS. No idea if that is completely true. This continues to confirm that Windows 11 is a complete shit show. As I was looking I found a discussion of copilot being forced on users. Huge threads at Microsoft support saying it is a piece of shit (and that was a one of the nicer comments). So even before Recall comes out copilot is destroying the desktop experience. Is this the end? Will this force users to Linux or Mac? I am actually in shock how incompetent Microsoft is becoming.

I run games and support clients with Windows 10. I absolutely do not ever want to run Windows 11. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

Infineon infineon infineon...
Your aurix tricore is amazing for all safet systems... On paper.

Your support is abysmal. Tried forums, support line to verify a demo that only seems to work sometimes.

I just wanted to get ethernet communication using the demo. But hey one week gone and no success....

And the code seems to behave differently for each run :| the debugger works only on global variables and no printf statements. But hey just make a lot of globals right? So little footprint available so not possible :-\

Hoped that some forum could confirm the demo so I knew I was just making a fuck up, but cannot get that verified...

Embedded programming not for me... :/

Follow up sorta...

So I got pulled into a support issue on a day off. Some system was facing timeouts on our servers so had to investigate.

Over the weekend as part of the release, I released the ELK stack I built and today I used that to help.

Pretty much immediately pinpointed which machine was hanging though still had to investigate and confirm so split between KQL and checking the server logs.

One thing I've always griped about is how no one created schema docs for it mongo collections so can't easily figure out what they do or your to get the document needed.

Well guess it's my turn.... Because only I know the schema :)