This is a fun conversation I had:

Test Engineer: 😑 The test bench burst into flames.
Me: 😪😲 Do what now?
TE: 😐 The test bench burst into flames. It made a pretty impressive fire ball.
Me: 😮 . . . How are you so calm about this?
TE: 😐 Well it's not on fire now.
Me: 😶 Good point.
TE:😧 made me mad as hell though.
Me: 😕 why's that?
TE: 😬 Cuz I only had one damn step left in that test procedure and it was to turn the damn test bench off.
Me: 🤔 Correct me if I'm wrong but the test bench is off is it not?
TE: 😐 Well yeah.
Me: 🤔 and you caused it to be turned off by your actions no?
TE: 😕 . . . yeah . . .
Me:🤔 sounds like you turned it off to me.
TE: 😒
Me: 🙂
TE: 😐
Me: ☺
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😐 but it won't turn on again.
Me: 🤔 do you have a requirement to be able to turn it on again after you turn it off?
TE: 😑 It's implied.
Me: 😐 not what I asked
TE: 😧 No not explicitly.
Me: 😎 sounds like you completed the test procedure.
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😧 that's not how it works.
Me: 😎 doesn't it?
TE: 😑 No.
Me:😎
TE: *walks away* 😧😧😧
Me: *turns back to computer* well I was just trying to help YOU out 😒

I am the best at interpersonal communication.

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

My manager started a company and I was his first employee, he literally started it because he wanted to make use of my talent.

So one day I finished my project on Friday and took in advance Monday and Tuesday off. Went back Wednesday to find my manager angry like "you didn't finish your project, you costed us money with our client company (a big ass famous one) I am putting you on probation and you could probably get fired if you don't get yourself together" and he said that my colleague had to do my whole work that I supposedly didn't do.
So I went to the code and checked. And I found that what my colleague did was re write my code in a different structure and pretended like he did everything and did do anything.
Got passed off so I wrote an email to my manager with the commits and links to them and their builds and made sure it's well explained, and titled the email "resignation letter" with me expressing at the end how angry I am and informing about my resignation.
Later on he replied saying it was a misunderstanding and there was lack of communication and he could give me I raise.
I insisted.
One week later I got hired by the client company and suddenly I was sitting on the other side of the meeting table. And it felt so damn good.

!geek girlfriend

Me and my partner are in the car driving. We drive by a young girl who is on her scooter. I look at my gf and ask,

Me: do you sometimes have some weird thoughts in mind (and nothing relating to sex her just so you know).

Her: well what do you mean?

Me: well i se that person scootering on the sidewalk and i imagine screaming at her like a lunatic “GET THE FUCK OFF THE ROAD PUNK” (which the little girl clearly isn't).

She laughs.

Her: yeah，i do too but it's more scientific， like sometimes i wonder how many times some one would flip. In the air if i hit them with the car or how long would it take some one to reach the ground if i pushed them off the balcony.

....

Me: silence...

Skin goes white

Her: looks at me with a big smile!!!

Im not sure if this is good or bad ;)

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

Spaces Vs Tabs - A real world case.

So one of the menial tasks I was given here was to take a pretty mock and turn it into an HTML email template. Needless to say, I hate emails and HTML.

After many weeks of trial and error, rejection and tweaks, we're doing our final tests when someone noticed that Google's clients are chopping off the footer and saying "View Full Email".

A few searches yield that Google has a 102KB cut off for email size. We did some checks and found that we were at 104KB. I immediately thought it was my CSS inliner being a little too verbose, but as I went in to edit things, I noticed that the file was intended with spaces!

Now I'm a fan of Silicon Valley, and I recalled an episode from this past season where Richard mentioned something about saving file size by using tabs. I had never really considered that point.

So I went back into VSCode and told it to convert all of the individual templates that make up this giant email to indent with tabs...

The file size dropped from 104kb to 82kb.

I wasn't very polarized on the Tabs vs Spaces debate, but this here has given me a nice real world example as to why tabs rule.

Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".

Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.

They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)

One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

You might know by now that India demonetized old higher value notes and brought in new one. The new ones easily tear off easily and generally feel cheaper and less reliable than pervious ones.

One interesting thing people discovered is that rubbing it with cloth makes the ink transfer to the cloth. Sign of crap printing. Here's government response:
The new currency notes have a security feature called 'intaglio printing'. A genuine currency note can be tested by rubbing it with a cloth; this creates a turbo-electric effect, transferring the ink colour onto the cloth
TL;DR: its not a bug, it's a feature

Apple has a real problem.

Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.

I know, I used to be one of them.

Past tense.

They have jumped the shark.

They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.

I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?

They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.

And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.

By which time it is too late to do anything.

But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!

After one job interview I ran across this one guy in an elevator.

"Are you an IT? I am looking for one".

I nodded, "Yes, I am". He was about to get off the elevator and told me to save his phone number.

By the time I was about to type the last 3 digits of his number on my mobile, I got a call from my brother and the elevator door closed. I immediately rejected the call.

Unfortunately, the dialer went empty and I lost his number.

I was trying to recall the number but I can only remember the last 3 digits.

I went back to the same floor, but there was around 30 offices and I couldn't find him. I gave up.

Fucking iPhone.

Social let's-help-female-programmers warriors piss me off.

The other day a massive email thread at work on how women are misrepresented in tech and how we need to help them and how using words such as "guys" is intimidating and generally patronising shit like "let's advertise jobs on websites like femaleprogrammers.com instead stackoverflow because there's too many white males on stackoverflow."

99% participants in this topic were guys.
One girl sent a message saying she doesn't want to be helped and she wants to know she has been picked for her skill and not filling in diversity numbers.

...would you believe she has been schooled on problems women in tech face by those lads too.

Like "woman, please... we speak diversity here"

So annoying....!!

Mainly a story with some ranting sprinkled on top :)

My grandma used to refuse to turn her PC off because ONE SINGLE WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE like 2 years ago made it so that Windows would turn the PC on by itself, nevermind it was fixed in the next update, she would simply refuse to try to turn the PC off from that point on... I never looked at the uptime but the PC was sitting on a carpet and all the fans were struggling to keep spinning, so much dust! When I asked her why it's so dusty all around the PC (the table that the PC was under was covered in a really thick layer of dust) she replied that the chambermaid comes every Wednesday to clean up the whole flat so she has no idea. I set up a camera that was recording the whole room so I could see what was going on... sure enough the chambermaid avoided anything that looked like it could have some ICs in it with a distance of at least 2 meters... When I showed the video to my grandma she was like: Yes, she is scared of electronics...
Seriously fuck me... Allright, I cleaned the whole table, carpet and the inside of PC, everything ran so quietly that I wasn't sure if I plugged the fans in.
Anyway after this I had to record the PC one whole night so I could prove to my grandma that it would not turn on by itself and she can in fact turn it off.
Fuck me... what a bad week that was...

PS: Yes, my stories do not have a point :)

This mother fucker right here.

Today I was asked as a favor by one of our vendors to assist one of their other customers with an API integration issue. We work very closely with this vendor and help beta their products etc.

I'm helping as a favor. And this guy could not be more of a dick. Constantly throwing his 20ys of experience at me and saying the API is broken. A good portion of my job is API integration so I've seen 30+ platforms all done differently and this one in question is by far the simplest.

Where does this chodemuffin get off being a dick to me? You know what buddy. Eat a dick. Figure it out yourself.

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors." - Phil Karlton

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

At a friend's party, I met one of the guys I've known from High school, and talk about what we've become:

Him: ...so yeah, now I study CS, I code some C, I dislike Java, blablablablabla I'm coding some OS and embedded software, blablablabla, and you, what do you code in?

Me: Oh, I learned everything I know by myself, still learning, and I'm mostly doing some PHP and Javascript. Doing websites and apps is cool.

Him: but those aren't programming languages? I mean, you can't manage memory, and blablablabla-

Me: Ó_Õ * Quickly dashed my ass off to talk with some ladies and boozed myself to forget what I just heard *

After interviewing tens of candidates, finally found that one guy who doesn't start the conversation by mentioning jQuery 😂

Too many people started off with jQuery and didn't even bother to learn more about Javascript itself.

!dev related but fucking hell I need to get this out.

Could people (including friends) fucking stop to invalidate my favourite music genre?!

'Its just too hard', 'its so aggressive', 'its only boom boom boom'

Fuck you.

Always, al-fucking-ways at every party or wherever when people are allowed to put on music, whenever I'm allowed to, my music is turned off right away.

'Sorry but not everyone likes this and you're not the only one here'

I'm sorry, WHAT? I'VE LISTENED TO STYLES I REALLY FUCKING DON'T LIKE FOR FUCKING HOURS AND I'VE SWALLOWED IT ALL. THEN AT LEAST LET ME PLAY ONE FUCKING SONG ON A WHOLE FUCKING EVENING.

And nothing against metal peoples, really not but its nearly always the metal people who put their music on all evening and keep telling how awesome metal is and the second I mention my genre or out it on: 'oh but that sucks' *switches back to metal*

Go fuck yourselves. I'm swallowing this shit every fucking time but I'm getting fucking sick of this bullshit.

By the way, my favourite genre is raw hardstyle aka rawstyle.

I am starting to get more pissed off than I should be by one particular type of rant on here.

Quote:
My boss/senior/coworker did not know how to do XXX even though he is supposed to have more experience than me. I had to fix his goddamn problem blah blah blah.

If you'd have that attitude on my team I'd be spending a lot of time trying to get you off of it. A team MUST help each other. If you think you're better than others you either teach them or get the fuck out. If you don't understand or know something that's fine and it perfectly normal to have others explain it to you.

Portugal is burning
500+ fires active
31 confirmed deads in 1 day...
A large one almost reached my house, saved by two man with construction machines. Still houses burned, gás bottles exploding like shotguns at a distance...
It's the end off the summer...
And now im at work, a new fire started close by...

PineScript is absolute garbage.

It's TradingView's scripting language. It works, but it's worse than any language I have ever seen for shoddy parsing. Its naming conventions are pretty terrible, too:

transparency? no, "transp"
sum? no, cum. seriously. cum(array) is its "cumulative sum."

There are other terrible names, but the parser is what really pisses me off.

1) If you break up a long line for readability (e.g. a chained ternary), each fragment needs to be indented by more than its parent... but never by a multiple of 4 spaces because then it isn't a fragment anymore, but its own statement.

2) line fragments also cannot end in comments because comments are considered to be separate lines.

3) Lambdas can only be global. They're just fancy function declarations. Someone really liked the "blah(x,y,z) =>" syntax

4) blocks to `if`s must be on separate lines, meaning `if (x) y:=z` is illegal. And no, there are no curly braces, only whitespace.

There are plenty more, but the one that really got me furious is:

98) You cannot call `plot()`, `plotshape()`, etc. if they're indented! So if you're using non-trivial logic to optionally plot things like indicators, fuck you.

Whoever wrote this language and/or parser needs to commit seppuku.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

Best "error" I've ever seen today.

We have a very large database with millions of people, some of those records are duplicates. So I had a long project to write something that would automatically merge duplicate records while allowing employees to review them. Today we had a duplicate show up in the list which should not have.

Same name (apart from one letter), address, employee ID (off by 1 number), same manager, title, phone number, birthdate. But we figured out it wasn't the same person and therefore wasn't a good match.

Turns out they are twin sisters who live together and we're hired by the same manager for the same position at the same time. What are the odds...

You all, something is wrong. No one has pissed me off at work recently (other than boss, but he does that by existing). I'm not sure if they've all learned, or if shit is about to hit the fan.

The exact moment when I understood what programming actually was.

I was getting hard times at my 3rd college grade, trying to implement the recursive sudoku solver in python. Teacher spent a lot of time trying to explain me things like referential transparency, recursion and returning the new value instead of modifying the old one and everything related. I just couldn't get it.

I was one of the least productive students, i couldn't even understand merge sort.

I was struggling with for loops and indexes, and then suddenly something clicked in my head, like someone flipped a switch, and i understood everything i was explained, all at once. It was like enlightenment, like pure magic.

I had sudoku solver implemented by the end of the lecture. Linked list, hash map, sets, social graphs, i got all of these implemented later, it wasn't a problem anymore. I later got an A for my diploma.

Thank you @dementiy, you were the reason for my career to blast off.

Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.

It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.

One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.

While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.

During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.

After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.

(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)

But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.

One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!

Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.

Weird and scary.
Very scary.

Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.

Work your ass off for a month, packaging new software and deploying them. No one says anything.

One of our guys uploads a new autoupdating food menu provided by another company to our intranet. Takes a few minutes.
”OMG! You should be rewarded!”
”Employee of the month!”
”IT award of the month!
”Have my babies!”

:|

It was a cold monday evening.
I was alone in my room.
Many hours of coding had passed.

Windows offered me two options:
"Shutdown"
"Shutdown with update"

Anoyed by the update but thankful for the first option i decided to go with number one.
Windows started its shuting down process when all of a sudden...

"Please don't turn off your machine! Your updates are being konfigured!

It was that evening...
That one speciall evening...
I decided...
To finally...
Do nothing about this problem and cry myself to sleep...

I take 1 day off from work, i come back finding my chair replaced by a junky one... I mean really??? f*ck this!

Today I found the reason for one of the stupidest bugs I had in like.. ever!

Me and a fellow student are currently porting the infoscreen of our university to HTML.
One of the functions of this screen is showing payed advertising and I was working on loading and displaying the images of our advertisment partners.

I had the whole system in place, and the images loaded.. but they wouldn't show. Upon inspection I saw they were displayed but with a size of 0x0 px.

I spend hours searching the web for javascript bugs, double checking my css file and everything you could imagine. I even asked my CS professor for help and he didn't find the cause for this strange issue I had.

..and then I saw it. A little note in Chromes inspector saying the image style would be set by my user-agent. Despite not trusting that information, I closely inspected my browser.

And then it dawned on me.. I would turn my adblocker off and lo and behold.. it worked!

I then, after celebrating my triumph, changed the tag of the img element from 'advert' to something else…

List of benefits given by some random company to its developer,
1- Medical, Dental, AD&D
2- Generous paid time off and holidays
3- Free fitness center in our building
4- Flexible schedule
6- Mac or PC, your choice
7- We and our customer don't use IE
8- Starbucks on the 1st floor
9- Generous 401k match
...

But I like 7th one the most!

Office prank time! It was some years ago when the horror movie "The Grudge" came out, with that creepy Japanese dead girl who made that horrible "aaahhhhhh" sound. A coworker, who was just as shocked by the movie as I was, would occasionally send me emails with sceenshots from that movie.

One day, I upped it. I knew he was the first in the office in the morning, so I arrived even before him. It was still dark. I put a walkie-talkie under his desk, set it to "no beep", switched off the lights again and hid two rooms away.

Sure enough, he arrived. I waited for about 10 minutes to be sure he was sitting at his desk. Then I used my walkie-talkie and "aahhhhh".

WOAH, his scream was loud even two rooms away!

Project Cortana: Day 1

I have seen a lot of people switching to Linux or other services to get away from all the data collections. It makes a lot of sense as no one would want their data to be sold without their consent.

But I am going to do something different. My aim is to integrate with Microsoft apps as much as possible and review the experience. So here is what I have done so far:

* Use Cortana in desktop and mobile (Android)
* Use Microsoft launcher in mobile
* Outlook as primary email provider (I was already using them as my default provider)
* Use Microsoft To-Do and calendar to keep track of things
* Use OneDrive to store all my files (I am moving them from Google Drive)
* Use the default Mail app on the Windows 10
* Use Onenote (I was using Evernote before)
* Use Edge on desktop and Mobile
* Use Skype instead of Hangouts

It's day one but I think I have already found it quite useful. For example:

* Adding reminder is much easier. I get them on both desktop and mobile which is nice.
* Mail app has been really useful. Especially the focused inbox really helps to get rid of the clutters. Also, I can immediately add a mail to the calendar (like Inbox by Google) which is really helpful.
* One of the features of edge that I have found really useful is that you can send web pages from mobile to desktop in one tap. That is extremely useful.

So far I am loving it.

Also, I tried to make sure that I am not sharing my data with third-party apps as I have turned off "relevant ads" feature.

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

One of my top 10 worst meetings, was for an interview for a job I really wanted. The guy started off the technical interview by asking me about language features that had been replaced since before I started learning the language. Told him when I started learning and his reply was:

"Yeah I see that on your CV, but come on, you MUST know this stuff".

eh no asshole, because its been removed for 4 years, you MUST know its not relevant

Thank fuck I was so early at work today.

As I did walk past the server room I heard something really loud behind the door. I was still in zombie mode (It was way too early, usually I´m here 2 hours later...), so just stood there looking at the door for a while.
Needed about 3 to 4 slow thoughts to decide what the fuck is happening.

My last thought was just: Man why is it so loud here. That´s the server room. Oh fuck!

The second I opened the door this rancid burning hot air straight out of satans anus almost melted my face off.
The servers were trying to maintain their cooling by almost puking out their guts with the those poor little fans they have.

Turns out one of the air conditioners failed and the backup didn´t start. So I started it manually.

Where the fuck is the admin? That´s not my fucking job!
What the fuck am I doing here so early?

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Just double buffered the Windows console. What you are seeing here is two buffers: one which is empty, and one which has the text "Hello world!", and a pause of 1 second between buffer swapping.

This enables accelerated rendering in the Windows command line (By rendering to an off-screen buffer then simply swapping the active buffer), making things like advanced terminal applications in the Windows console possible.

And the best part- this is the first compilation of the project. Not a single run-time error. What a fucking satisfying accomplishment, honestly.

The four hard things in CS are

1. cache invalidation
2. naming
3. off-by-one errors.

Dev: This could be sooooo easily optimized...

Me: Uhm. Don't think so. What's your idea?

Dev: Just use threads.

Me: Nope. Problem requires 3 shared resources per process step, it won't be faster by threading. Shared resource will only lead to locking contention, decreasing performance.

Dev: I don't think that will happen. Can you PROOF to ME that this will happen?

Me: It was your suggestion, so you should proof me wrong. Nice try, but no thanks.

Dev: Yeah, but it's too slow and it should run faster.

Me: If you cannot find a better approach than the current one, it runs as fast as it can while providing correct results. That's not slow. That's just working as intended and designed.

Dev: Yeah, but it's still slow.

....

You know these conversations where you just wanna rip some people's face off, stick it in the shit hole they use to talk and toss them out of the window....

Yeah. Had those conversations today.

I guess my best AHHA moment was back when I learned that good code is simple code.

When I started out I wanted to prove myself by showing of how good of a programmer I was(and which I retrospectively wasn't) , which basically meant to use every high level concept I was aware of whenever possible. Multi threading where linear execution would have been totally okay, polymorphism with x meta classes where a switch would have been enough, all that shit.

It wasn't until I had to guide the first person through that mess of useless ego stroking that I found out how much time and money I wasted by not going with the easiest approach that solves the problem.

Took me some time to fully lay off that attitude but it surely was one of the most influential moments of my career.

Guy I just met: so what do you do?

Me: I'm a developer

Guy: no way! I work for a software company so... (goes on to talk for 10 minutes trying to show off his knowledge of software)

Me: so what do you do there?

Guy: sales

Me: oh...

Just because you work for a software company does not mean you know shit about software. Don't try to build some erroneous common ground with me because you walked by a developer's desk one time, looked at his or her screen, and magically thought you could understand code.

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

Some back info that you need to know for this rant:
1) I am a Canadain, so I spell 'color' like: colour.
2) Americans spell 'colour' like color.

Today I was debugging a Python file that I and my team of Americans and Canadians were working on. I ran the code and got an error that one of our variables was named incorrectly. I searched the code up and down for 3+ hours looking for the issue. After taking my lunch break I came back and read the file again. Then I realized it: I had started working on one part spelling color like colour, and then an American finished the project, spelling colour like color, so there were two different variables. This really pissed me off because we could have fixed it by deciding on a language before we started the project. I fixed it quickly and now we have a new rule at the office: always use American English when naming variables.

Moral of the story: decide which language to use for variables when working on a multi-national team.

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Currently in the middle of quarterly planning (its been fun so far). Needs to be signed off by business today.

- My team has ~25 man weeks available in terms of capacity.
- Looking at only priority 0 tasks, last night we calculated the ask from product stands at 64.
- Including P1's, P2's etc. its well over 100 man weeks.
- Email was sent around from business with a list of tasks, asking which can be dropped, de-scoped etc.

Product (non technical) response this morning:
- This one can't take 2 weeks, its not that complicated.
- This one needs to stay, It was originally a Q1 task.
- Can we make this one smaller? (currently only a 3 week task)
- 14 comments on other teams items.

<extreme-sarcasm>
... ah perfect, that cut down the items by less than half. We are now ready for the deadline in 4 hours to have all this signed off on. Great job everyone. Thanks for all the insightful discussions. Go team!
</extreme-sarcasm>

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

A group of Engineering professors were invited to fly in a plane.

Right after they were comfortably seated, they were informed the plane was built by their students.

All but one got off their seats and headed frantically to the exits in maniacal panic.

The one lone professor that stayed put, calmly in his seat, was asked: “Why did you stay put?”

“I have plenty of confidence in my students. Knowing them, I for a fact can assure you this piece of shit plane will never even start”

Source: r/jokes

It's only day one of the year and I'm already pissed right off

Why the fuck do all clients expect you to come up with absolutely everything!?

All I ever get is we want a website. I ask well what do you want on it.. our products .. news? Contact maybe ... Urm our business information ... That kind of stuff.

Well what are they?

Pft.. I here is a name if our products. And other stuff

WE ARE SELLING IT WAT ARE THE PRICES AND INFORMATION DO YOU HAVE IMAGES

Yeah do you want them

Of course I do 😐

Great here's 2 of them we have 1100 so I'll get more to you soon.

😤 Thank you!

Holy shit it's always like talking to a fucking brick wall.. why do people have to make our jobs so hard it's already fucking tough

I have no time to plan your entire website by myself I don't know what you want on it. How could I possibly know that!? It's your fucking site

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
-- Jeff Atwood

Dear Tech-News Outlets,

Yes, I accept 30994 cookies and do not want to uncheck them one by one.
No, I don't want to subscribe to a newsletter full of content completely unknown to me - maybe let me stroll around a bit before asking me? But please don't ask me in the middle of reading the shitty article. Maybe make use of a so-called "sidebar" for shit like that?
Yes, I want to continue without turning off my adblock.
No thanks, I know how to turn it off, I'm going to remove this overlay now via devtools, alright?

Yours
An annoyed user

Story time!

About seven years ago, I was in high school and had friends who kinda rocked with computers. I mean, they knew how to build one, how to make cross tests to find what was wrong with one, which softwares to install to detect viruses, etc. Once, I was with one of these friends, A, when another friend, G, came to us to explain his problem: his computer didn't turn on anymore. He said that he opened the computer, took off the RAM, that let the computer start once, but when he switched off again he wouldn't start anymore.

I was just a silent witness, and A started to ask G how it did happen. "Oh, I was downloading an Allopass generator, when my computer froze."
I smiled.
"But where on hell did you download that? So we can try to find exactly what virus you downloaded! " "Actually", said G, "I was on a streaming site at first, then saw an, then another, and after a dozen sites I found this soft..."
"But", A couldn't believe it, "you don't have antivirus or anything that would have told you not to download it?"
"Oh, it tried, but I reaaaaaally wanted this software. So I shut down it and managed to download it."

I burst in laugh. At the same time I was feeling bad for this poor computer. What amazed me it that not once during the process, G thought it was a bad idea to download an Allopass generator found in an ad that even his antivirus told him it was dangerous.

Nice ending, A took the computer, and managed to make it work again. He even managed to keep important stuff that wasn't destroyed by the virus. G got a little lesson by A, then got yelled at by his parents, because the computer was in fact theirs.

Thanks for reading, and sorry if there's any mistake (grammar, punctuation, etc.), I am on my phone with autocorrect set on french. Have a nice day!

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

I cannot even begin to describe the rollercoaster of emotions I just went through. I'm on the train, the prompt says next station !my_station. By then the sign says my_station. So I rush off the train. I feel the lightness of a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders... And realise I'm missing my laptop bag, the heavy weight that should be on my shoulders. So I rush to the station office and describe everything about my bag and what's in it and the seat I was in. The guy can't get through to the conductor but the train will be back at this station in 30 minutes. I head home quickly because it's nearby and my fiance offers me a lift back to the station on her car. Suddenly we're running late. She's running red lights. I'm not going to make it. It's 2 minutes past arrival time. But the train is 3 minutes late! I'm running along the platform looking into the carriages for my bag but unable to see much, panicking. The platform is empty. The train. Is going to leave. Except for one lonely figure walking down with a bag in their hands. The conductor gives me my rucksack, tells me it's really heavy and heads back to his duties. I thank him and head back to the station office to thank the man on duty also. Fuck me that was scary.

Why does every kid developer have a dark theme fetish? I started programming on a Commodore 64. It was dark. It's the quality of the shit you write that defines you assholes, not the color theme of your editor.

Now that that's off my chest, some poos soul has dared to send his resume to me. One of his projects is a website that is being marked by my ENS as a phishing website. I am about to invite him for an interview, and am willing to bet his everything will be dark because he wants to impress me.

April fools by M$. (it had reset and off them not just this one)

I've just noticed an app review that I've given and would fit right into the wk123 (that's the insult one, right?).

"Biggest pile of junk that I've ever seen. You have one job! To register the fucking phone number (which you could get with Phone permission) and verify it (which you can do with the SMS permission) and you should either have the user do that once upon installation or you automate it entirely so that it can run in the background! You can fully automate this, and it's not that complicated that it needs 10 whole seconds of loading time in between! Heck, this pile of crap can't even continue into the main view after entering the verification code! You haven't published the source code (and maybe that's for the best) but if it was, I'd probably immediately get cancer by viewing your crappy spaghetti code. Dear developer, please take a step back and (re)join the PC tech support guys. You have no place in the development world."

To top it all off, that app currently only needs phone permission to verify my number (at least they've done that much). So I figured, I've already gone through that authentication flow so let's remove that permission to abide by the principle of least privilege.

Except that the fucking crapp just goes through the "requires phone permission" shit again whenever that permission removal happens. Fucking piece of garbage!!! That such spaghetti code fuckers even have a job, it boggles my mind.

Day of the interview sr. Architect says: "We have near 100% unit test coverage in our code."

One month later when I tell him there are 0 unit tests written against 300 projects: "Yeah, I knew that was a problem."

What can you do when the people who want to hire you lie outright to your face?

Oh yeah, and not a god damned one was written using any sense of object oriented programming at all. Every single damned project is written like its on a motherfucking punchcard put together by a cs 101 student with a 2 hour fucking deadline.

I can understand if it needs some work, just tell me. Don't fucking lie to me just to get me in the door to fix a problem you know you have. JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING RESPECT FOR YOUR CANDIDATES AND DON'T FUCKING LIE TO THEM!

Off to drink some scotch and think about what it would be like to shove a finger deep enough into my nostril to hear a pop and smell popcorn before going off into that good night.

I said good day.

Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.

Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.

All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.

Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.

Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.

Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.

After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.

My father while I was tinkering in the workshop :
"You see, I think you chose the wrong studies, you would have liked something else like material science a lot more."
At this moment my face took a question mark shape.
"Wait.. What? I mean... You know, I quit mechanical engineering to computer science, I actually made this decision because I thought it was better for me."
Him :
"But you will never have a good job in it. Material science for example is the booming industry, it's the future."
"What the... No, just no. Every year at my university several mechanical engineering students get thrown out because they can't even find an internship. Whereas most CS students find more than one and end up sharing job offers with their friends. And talk about an interesting job, in the mechanical domain everything already exists and it's just a matter of applying the same boring standards over and over again, when it's not just pure technician managing. In CS new technologies and tools appear regularly, keeping it interesting because evolution is hardly limited by real life physics, just by one's brain."

Pissed me off.

Bought myself a Samsung s3 and while choosing what apps I want to receive notifications from, I noticed everything was off by one.

I was just testing the Postfix server on one of my mailers, for the hell of it.. EHLO, STARTTLS, all good. Then comes the mail submission part.

MAIL FROM test@nixmagic.com
Connection closed by foreign host.

Right after I say mail from, it just closes the connection! Is it just me or does this feel like the server says to me "fuck off"? :')

Programmers are like bees!

You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. ~ Orson Scott Card

Told by Gerald Weinberg in various incarnations:

A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:

"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would get off?"

Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"

The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash."

A recipe for COMPLETELY hacking me off - ask for help, pretend my advice is bollocks, then rephrase it as your own and follow it up with a smart arse comment.

"Almond, could you lend me a hand with this regex? I'm trying to match this particular group, but only if it doesn't have 'foo' after it."

"Sure, take a look at negative lookaheads - that sounds like it's exactly what you need"

"Nah that won't work for me, because I need to check for more than one character after it, I need to check for 'foo'"

"What? That doesn't make sense, you can..."

"Ah don't worry, I've found the answer by myself now, I can actually just add '?!' before the text I don't want to match and it'll do it - I'm fast becoming a regex expert here! Let me know if you want me to explain this to you"

DAHHHHHHH THAT IS A NEGATIVE LOOKAHEAD YOU CRETIN

"Six gnomes will be eaten one at a time by a troll and have different colored hats..."

LITERALLY please fuck ALL the way off. Entirely.

Things I learnt by attending meetings from home:

* Wear pants even if no one can see them
* After meeting is done, turn off your computer to ensure it has ended.
* Mute and screen share is not reliable
* Tell your family members that you will have a meeting so they do not do anything weird.

So one problem checked off my list today, solved by concluding:

MOTHERFUCKERS DON’T READ WHAT THE CHECKBOX SAYS

Sooo I've been working on an ancient php 5.6 project that did not have any documentation and was a homemade "framework" created 7 years ago. The original creator is long gone and no one else knows a lot about this project.

When I first looked into it I almost immediately noticed the security flaws...

Old outdated libraries
a "development" feature to easily turn dev mode on/off
BY A GET PARAMETER!

it spits out full sql queries and php warnings -.-

Oh and did I mention that the site is a webshop.... and has a backdoor password?
AND THAT THE CUSTOMER REQUESTED THAT?

We have a portal which uses Windows Integrated auth that lists out all off our internal sites.

Navigating to any of these produces a URL like the one in the attached image.

Turns out all our internal application use a base64 encoded email address in the query string as the means of authentication.

So, anyone can authenticate themselves as another employee within the company by simply changing the query param value to said employees email address.

Fucking nuts.

When I go to bed, I power off my laptop instead of just closing the lid. I don't bring my phone with me. I don't have a smartwatch. I sleep with no electronic devices with me.

Anyone can solve a lot of their problems by conversing with themselves one on one. Instead, they prefer a feed algorithm taking away their pain. But the nature of pain-relieving addictions is that they always intensify the pain in the long run.

Listen to yourself. Speak to yourself quietly, one on one, without mark zuckerberg in your room listening to your every word. The overwhelming pain will be no more after mere minutes. Only then can you be free.

I may cool off a little bit after this rant:

One of my junior coworkers weirdly peeks into my screen while I code or do any stuffs - this is what I hate the most.

Also whenever we discuss something by my desk, he looks for the opportunity to touch my Mac every goddamn time. Even after I told that shitwit several times about it.

Once, I went to have a conversation with a senior engineer just a few desks away only to come by and see that fuckface peeking into my project.

I had to tell him off with my absolute verbal retaliation.

first off, they've defined (just yesterday) FOUR (not ONE) features to be done by the end of the month (yes really no joke, i mean _this_ month, as in october, i.e. they mean by monday)

four of them still have "to be defined" labels

so, what, you guys gonna define those today so we have uh.... all of friday to do them?

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

University Final Viva for OOP with C++
(Yeah, that first line is a rant in itself for the likes of me and Mr. Torvalds)
Assistant Professor:
Tell me a few "functions" in C++ STL algorithm header
Me:
*starts off with the first one that came to my mind*
sort()
AP: Huh? a I'm asking the Algorithms in C++ STL
Me: Yes, this is one of them Ma'am.
She looked at me as if I told her that I'm dating her daughter. It became clear she doesn't know about it and she'll gladly deduct my marks for getting it wrong. So I explained how Sort() is a hybrid of quicksort, heap sort and insertion sort. (Read about it an hour ago while doing a competitive programming question)
AP: Tell me the ones we did in class.
I haven't attended those classes, so I just told her the ones I knew.

After a couple more infuriating questions, which themselves sounded right from a book published in the 90's, she gave me 10/15.

This is what's wrong with India's Education system, even the teachers know only the stuff mentioned in the course hand-outs. Forget brownie points, you get screwed over by the teachers for actually knowing stuff and using it.

PORTFOLIO INFLATION

when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.

Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.

And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.

And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.

And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:

Welcome to costco. I love you.

Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.

Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...

I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.

Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.

I love it how managers try to act busy by going through the same mails over and over again while waiting for a new one so that they can instantly reply to it and show themselves off as "prompt" and screw us, who have to actually do some work, about not sending mails promptly and they have like this one single excel sheet opened at all times and they just make one obscure entry whenever they get an update and WOW, some of them don't even know how the fuck you spell Avro (spelt it as avero, handwritten) and oh, not to mention waste everyone's time by asking a mundane question that other managers are so eager to answer, one by one, over and over and did I mention THAT THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW HALF THE PRODUCT.

I applied for a developer position and got the email response about candidates available that were a better fit. No big deal.

Three days later, contacted by a recruiter for an exciting opportunity in my field (aren't they all?) Said, "What the hell?" and played along.

Made it past a screening phone call and a screening Skype session. Made a date to interview in person.

It's the same goddamned position, only now a recruiter gets to feed off my offer (if I get one).

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

This is really the stuff I have to deal on daily basis.

Best part of being a dev? Rock star status when things are going well: had to get a fix out by 18:00, boss walks by as I'm watching something on YouTube and tells me the client called and wanted to be sure we'd have it done in time, told him not to worry and went back to my video. Pushed the fix at 17:30, and tomorrow I'll be in the same position: every last minute fix delivery only grows my reputation for getting critical last-minute fixes out in time... As skeptical as my boss was at the time when he walked past and saw me on YouTube he had to he polite because he knows how crucial I am to this project

I think tomorrow I'm going to work on my own project and slack off, no one will be able to tell me different

3 days, 1 bug

Off by 1

Smdh 😒

I had to make an account for my kid's school.

Last night I start. I put in a username, then it has a quality meter for the password. I put one in and it goes to like 90%. Ok, fine. I submit and...

Validation error on the username field. Message? [object Object].

Try all different kinds of username: no numbers, all caps, etc. But no luck so I give up.

Today I try again and get stuck again. Then I think... "Maybe the devs suck worse than I think..."

I change the password so that it's rated 100% and submit... Success.

Fucking devs.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

Today was "one of those days".

So, the state machines were keep on failing. I said fuck it and wrote a simpler loop thing.

Even that failed.

And it took me hours to figure out what was wrong. But I did. Because THERE WAS VIRTUALLY NO FUCKING DOCCO ON THIS SHIT, ANYWHERE ON THE FUCKING ENTIRETY OF THE INTERNET. Hell, I even translated a few pages from Mandarin. Which is ridiculous since I'm working with standard robotic shit. Like, wtf even?

Anywho, I also had a heart attack because the port was not responding. I ran across the building to find the guy who fortunately had another port controller. That didn't work either. Then by the God-given cure of "Turning it off and on again " (it, in this case, being the computers) it worked!

Then I broke the window blinds. It's not coming down anymore.

Like, yeah, thanks, I'll take a weekend and half.

Before I finally managed to move out of my parents' place, they nonstop kept annoying me by saying I should get a "real job". They thought I was only playing games or browse random unimportant stuff on the computer...

Nowadays they think I "kreate" websites (as Karlie Kloss would pronounce it).
My mother one time was so fucking annoying about my job, I got so pissed off, I threw in her face her that I earn three times what she gets and I have much more responsibility and brain requiring work and that her single-cell brain would never understand what I am doing the whole fucking day.

Since then we dont talk much about work anymore.

Fucking parents... the best thing that happened to me was moving out of their shitty place and their poisonous attitude.

Inspired by @Billgates

everyone around is hyped about new tech they get to use, new toys to tinker with, I can see their eyes shining when they hear "let's try and introduce kafka" - they would wiggle their tails all day long if they had ones!

And me? Well, a new potential employer got me so excited I couldn't wash a smile off my face for a few days! You know what they said? "we don't use any frameworks, we focus on clean code, solid, kiss and we write with tdd". Bare java - that's the best position I've heard of in years!

I guess I'm oldschool. But I truly believe their approach is the right one. Not trashing the code with spring [which is turning into smth what systemd is for linux/unix], hibernate and what not.

Just good old java code. Db, multithreading, request-mapping -- all plain, manual and simple.

Amazing!

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

"I found this tool that we should use because I'm a manager and its simple enough that my tiny little manager brain could set it up!"

Oh wow good for you, Mr. Manager! And what, praytell, does the tool require?

"All proprietary and cost-ineffecient products: MSSQL Server and Windows IIS! What do you mean we have to get the data out in order for it to be scalable? Look at it! I set up a website by clicking on an EXE i downloaded from github!"

Amazing, Mr. Manager. So you violated our security practices AND want to pocket even MORE of our budget?

Kindly fuck right off and start suggesting things instead of making people embarrass you into stoping your fight for your tool (has happened on more than one occassion).

Many years ago I had a job as web developer at a small promotions company. The owners loved micromanaging their 7 employees, down to the minute. Work started at 9am, if you were even 1 minute late, you were deducted 1 point. (Even if the weather was bad) Once you were at 10 points, you were disciplined by being given an unpaid vacation day. (Thanks for the day off!). At 12 points, you were fired.

It only took me about 8 months before getting my day off. Somehow I was able to time it perfectly to a job interview at a large company.

Luckily I got the job, and purposely was late the next two days so when they told me I was fired I could tell them I already got a new job (thanks to their 10 pt rule) and I'm out anyway.

At the new job, I'd often drive home and nap on my lunch hour. No one would notice if I came back an hour and a half later.

The owners of the 1st company divorced a few years ago. The husband and I have actually kept in contact over the years. He's a cool guy when you don't work for him. He invited me to a Green Day concert over the summer. Probably makes the above story a little less cool, but at the moment, I was burning bridges!

I have an Android app suggestion:

A different alarm clock.
- wakes you up by increasing ring tone, from least to most, each step taking at least two seconds.
- you can give it a stream url (e.g. online radio or yt) and it uses that to wake you up.
- you give it an offline ringtone as well, in case the stream doesn't play.
- has repeated snooze. You hit the off button once and it goes to snooze. You hit it twice or trice and it is off. Otherwise, it rings again in 2-60 minutes. (User preference)
- is free. 😛

Shouldn't take long to make. I'd make it myself if I had the technical capabilities right now. Do link me if you make it or if you know of one already existing. (The existing ones I've found so far, I have issues with unnecessary permissions they ask mostly.)

Damn simulation.

Some juniors grabbed keyboard and reprogrammed main species to stay at home and fear of death while I was busy working with other features.

Moreover someone made additional changes from infected computer and guess what....

Unfortunately it’s real time system with increasing entropy and we can’t revert changes so fixing damn shit would take from one to two decades.

We don’t have backups cause last time we used them we also killed dinosaurs.

It would be just easier to erase everything and start from beginning cause our statistics charts are fucked up - again but motherfucker boss don’t want to do it.
He’d rather teleport again to adjust the world. Damn fucker thinks he’s god but in fact he’s just prick with rich parents.

I’ve decided to piss him off by adjusting planet thermostat so we can start over.
2 years more and changes would be irreversible.

Damn job.

Fucking first rant here:

So we tried to teach Two new colleagues to typescript and git and testing and stuff and we have a SPOC “which claimed to be very technical”. The SPOC’s task is to keep an eye on the work, and today we have had a review...

After two weeks, the created multiple branches into our git, all with one commit of 400 LOC changed, no merge requestet, issue in Redmine set to “closed”.
Well, by the way they were supposed to write Unit tests for our app.
But I thought, ok, we’ll check their branches.

Their tests all passed (cz) but man, the app didn’t and on compilation there were errors, the app is broken. Damn.

Is it really so far off, that even of They wrote tests, that the app should still work?
AND I THOUGHT IT IS COMMON SENSE. Damn!
Guess how needs to fix it

Gender Bending For Fun and Profit.

I love how in the 'make your avatar' area, if you select female, and then click facial hair, theres nothing to select from.

Like a massive fuck you to every gender bending "down with meritocracy" purple haired dicksniffer in sanfran.

Also I'm sorely disappoint for desk items, theres no

1. giant dildos

2. anime figures/weeb shit

3. mini monoliths (I asked the site devs about this, they replied "we can't do that dave.")

4. a shirtless option for my female avatar

5. edgy scrolling numbers and code, like in the matrix

6. hoodies. They're the modern leather jacket.

7. Big nasty gnarly biker beard which I'm currently in the process of growing. How am I supposed to intimidate other anonymous cowards and mock them over the size of their beard compared to my own avatar's e-beard size? It's quiet girthy and lengthy, I assure you!

This is completely unrelated, but I thought devducks were like quick one-off debug sessions that could be bought from other devrant users.

I was disappointed when I discovered it was just merch.

On the otherhand I'm glad as fuck it's not. Site would be flooded by broken-english speaking goat humping dickheads.

How am I supposed to show off my ability to code with completely unrelated avatar change ups when no one will allow me to emasculate my avatar?

You do know that "why do I need you if I can copy-paste code from SO?" joke floating around, right? Today I had a real-life situation perfectly illustrating it.

So I bought a set of parking sensors. Cheap ones, from AliExpress. Prolly the cheapest ones I could find. Installed them w/ engine turned off. All seemed fine. Cleaned it all up, got ready to go, started the engine and beeeep beeep beeepeeeeep beepp ..... beeeeeeeeep.

fuck.

Tried unplugging/replugging them one-by-one to find the faulty one. Nada. Apparently they all were false-alarming. They must all be bad, bcz they seem to work well w/ engine turned off (ignition on) and only false-alarm when engine is on.

Allright, I'll get a new set next weekend, a more expensive one and replace them again.

There goes my €20 and another week basically w/o parking sensors (car length is >5 meters, so sensors do help a lot).

Today I spend a few hours removing my rear bumper again, replacint all the sensors, wiring, etc. Tests show promising results - all sensors seem OK even w/ engine on! Close it all up, start a car again and.... beeep bep bep beeep beeee..eeeeppp.

MOTHER FUCK!

Another 30min-hour goes by while looking for a possible culprit. And I found it. The fix could did not take longer than 5 seconds. Apparently a wire feedint the sensors' controller was too close to sensors' wires. All I had to do is to push that wire a lil further from the controller with my index finger.

I could have saved €30, a week of time, half a day of work if I only knew what wire to [literally] poke.

shit...

Ooh come on .... The fluecent tube of our bathroom mirror was broken. So my girlfriend bought a new one. Still didn't work. So it must be the starters. Nope they work. So I took the damn thing apart completely and ripped out the PCB and meassured every transistor, diode and capacitor. And even replaced one that gave some fishy values just in case. Still didn't work. Then I opened the side door of this mirror and found a switch that I must have switched off by accident ... Switched on: lights on 🤔🤗😌

There are two hard concepts in CS. Multithreading, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Simple there are four other developers on my team. Yet, I do all of the work.

I'm picky about spesific tasks, so I would rather do THOSE by myself, by we have a Trello board where I've marked the tasks I want to do myself, and everything else is open for grabs.

Some tasks I will asign others (one developer specifically) and days will pass and no code gets touched. So I end up having to take it over. :|

Like, guys, I get it. You have other things to do. But could you atleast *try* and help me without me having to ask? If not, then why did you even sign up? I want to get this out the door so our project doesn't go under and we can make some money. I have other things I would like to do as well, you know. Like take a day off, or spend time with my girlfriend.

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

Going through a WordPress site that hasn't been updated in over a year. It's so severely infected that even the Wordfence and Security plugins say it's fine. So I'm going through the file structure manually.

File by file, folder by folder manually searching for infected files. This is the most tedious thing I've had to do. But I'm learning some really interesting tips. One file looked empty and I almost missed it because the code had been tabbed over a few hundred times clearing it way off the the right of the screen.

I tried to look for ParrotSec on Google because a friend of mine told me about it and instead of typing in what I should I typed, I was off by one key and had actually typed in "ParrotSex".

One would assume that "view conditions and accept" shows the fucking conditions and then lets you accept them if you want to. No. By clicking this button I automatically accepted it, and then got them shown for me. Which meant that I had to pay a fucking fee, because the conditions said so. That would be fair if I had seen the fucking conditions before accepting them. Fuck off everybody, I don't have time for dealing with this, I was sick the other day and now I have to work extra hard while still recovering to make up for it and now I have to deal with your crappy support just because you can't design a fucking ui? Whats wrong with you!!!

Hello my Friends.

TL;DR i meditate as I draw, here’s the result. What about you?!

Does any of you exercise on any kind of meditation? Not the popular meditation forms, more alternative meditation? I. E. walking meditation, dancing meditation, reading medidation, etc. ? Remember, it’s all about being here and now and letting go of any pre-programmed thoughts, right?

I myself, have a ritual which is performes once-twice a year. I call it drawing meditation. When daylight ends, and the moon rises, I sit at my desk in a dark room with one light, which is hanging aboce the white sheet of paper. I take black pencil, turn on some music mildly and turn off my thought receiving part of the brain. I hear every thought which is passing by, but I have no attachment to it. My hands are drawing, without my interception. It feels amazing, and I believe this method helps me to clean up some space in subconscious file system.

This activity of mine, takes strangly short/long time. Once I’ve sat for about 16hours, once 6hours.

Furthermore, I’m always amazed by the abstract art pieces which are the end result. I’m attaching the image of the last drawing made in this way to the post.

Can I hear what you see in it?

Tried getting enough sleep for the Monday and failed miserably.
First, I made my kids washed, like usual, around 6pm. Then tried to put them to sleep. The younger one went to sleep, the older refused. Wanted to play, run, jump, sing and scream. After an half an hour his screaming woke up younger. Now I had two kids to put to sleep back again.
The younger is one year old and requires more attention, otherwise cries.
After serious fight the older was forced to sleep. He tried to jump over me, bite me, kick, hit, eat chocolate, wanted to pee, then jump, run and fight again. I ended up lying him forcibly in the bed, holding his hand by kind of a block, so that he couldn't move to much. Took 15 minutes, but he felt asleep. It was 22. Joys of having 3yo kid.
After more 30 minutes and a bottle of milk the 1yo was sleeping.
At 2am the older woke and cried. I woke, tried to make him calm, he pushed me away and went back to sleep. Now it's 3:40, my sleeping pill wore off, and I won't take another one, because I need to get up at six.

This is how you get a good night's sleep before having a busy week.

Server admin: "When do I need to make this config change for you?"

Me (in my head): "You mean the one I put a note in the change request ticket about in ALL CAPS and surrounded by asterisks saying 3pm (aside from the scheduled time field that the ticket requires), and the one we then subsequently chatted about where I reiterated the criticality of the timing about and the one I copied you in the email chain about that said the time in big, bold letters the time? THAT config change?!"

Me (IRL): "3pm, please."

(does not inspire confidence, though better to be asked then they just go off and do it whenever the mood strikes I suppose, which HAS happened)

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Senior group project in college.

When you decide to meet up and one member doesn't show up at first meeting.

So I sent an email about the research I did on the feasibility of the project and how to implement a core requirement. 2 days later & no response yet..

Why do I think I'm gonna be the one the pull off the application by myself & then have to put name of people who have no idea how I got it to work..

ARGH the next person to tell me how X is the best toolchain is getting their fucking head cut off! Holy fucking shit, this is even more annoying than the whole IDE debate. At least with IDEs everyone has a favourite one and they hate others accordingly, with build toolchains there's always a huge group of fucktards sucking each other's dick by adding new features, and they're always too busy wanking their sparkling features for small projects to realise how fucking inefficient their polished dings and dongs are for any bigger job.

For the millionth time, no, we're not switching to this popular toolchain just because it gave you a blowjob with your pet project (although that would indeed be a tempting offer), so stop talking how fast and flexible it is. Until you can show how it compiles a 500 MB project faster than our current setup, I don't give a shit how many people jerk on that nookie.

Nothing ticks me off faster than non working websites or apps of big companies.

For example how can it be that the Lufthansa app has no offline support for ticket stuff and loads like all their requests worldwide would be handled by one raspberry pi A...
YOU GOT THE MONEY SO GET THIS SHIT DONE

If you're as bad at web design as me, I recommend tailwind css to you.

I've been using it today and had a good time.

By providing a set of design-centric classes, it makes it easy to learn and apply good design practices without losing css control.

This is paramount to me since I know a couple of css tricks, but not too many. With this you can't miss any of the fundamental ones.

It also lets you combine multiple classes into one via the @apply directive, so the html classes don't go crazy, and you don't have to write too much css. Huge amount of lines saved.

To top it off, they have plenty screenscasts that not only teach you how to use tailwindcss, they show you fundamentals good web design.

So for almost all of my c++ assignments I've recieved various emails from the instructor about things like "incorrect header guard" and "library inclusions out of order".

The first being that I didn't include the namespace inside of the guard (I did "FILENAME_H" instead of "NAMESPACE_FILENAME_H")

The second is that I accidentally included header files from my project before any of the standard libraries. This one wasn't even intentional, it was caused by vscode when it formatted/prettified the file.
EX:
#include "test.h"
#include <iostream>

In my opinion these seem pretty nitpicky and, especially that first one, appear to be more like naming conventions or best practices than something to deduct marks for.

On the flip side though I did accidentally store a couple functions in the global namespace which I understand isn't particularly safe. I also made a couple one line conditional statements that simply never evaluate to true, but I didn't think this was a huge deal.

I don't normally code in any of the c languages outside of college so I'm not sure how important these are to actually follow. I've apparently been deducted an entire 10 percent off the assignment because of the head guard. I know that every professor has different criteria for deducting marks, but even this seemed rather unnecessary.

What does everyone think?

Blue Robotics

This company makes underwater thrusters for submarine applications. With their first thruster they made it easy to make a homemade submarine. The motor was powerful, the thruster just worked. They even had a promotional where they created an automated surfboard that made it from hawaii to somewhere in california with one of their thrusters pushing it there the entire way. It was a great product.

Then they created the next version. This was the same thruster, but it had an ESC(Electronic Speed Controller) sealed in an aluminum puck on top of the motor. This ESC could be controlled by servo controls, or by plugging it into an i2c bus. You could pull different stats off of the motor over i2c it sounded great. So my robotics team trusted this company and bought 8 motors at $220 - $250 bucks each. We lightly tested them since we had not even finished the robot yet. One week before the competition our robot got completely put together and we did our first few tests.

Long story short, Us and 22 other teams did roughly the same thing. We bought these motors expecting them to work, but instead the potted aluminum ESCs were found defective. Water somehow got into the completely resin sealed aluminum puck and destroyed the ESC. We didn't qualify that year due to trusting a competition sponsor to deliver a good product. I will admit that it was our fault for not testing them before going to the competition. Lessons were learned and an inherent distrust of every product I come across was developed.

In my ongoing quest to un-Google my life, I turned off the Whatsapp chat back up, which uses Google Drive. There's a message in that setting which says, "Media and messages you back up are not protected by Whatsapp end-to-end encryption while in Google drive".
Damn.
All my Whatsapp chats for years have been on Google servers in plaintext.
I assumed it uploaded one massive encrypted archive.

I once had a client that lived near by and I had setup a server in his office. One day he calls me begging for help because it keeps turning off... He put it in a sealed foam box to try to reduce it's noise. Temps were 80+ Celsius (176f) within 5 minutes of it booting.

I HAVE BEEN CALLED TO 3 OF THE FINEST HACKATHONS IN MY COUNTRY RN, 2 BEING ORGANISED BY HUGE COMPANIES AND ONE BY A COOL COLLEGE. I CAN'T GO BECAUSE FUCKING INFOSYS IS COMING TO MY COLLEGE FOR PLACEMENTS AND MY TEAM MEMBERS ARE NOW BACKING OFF. WTF.

I'm forced by my job to use this fucking unusable piece of horse shit also know as a Windows operating system.

And it's not only that I have experienced every fucking corner case bug that is possible to occur in our universe.

Not only that that for last 2 years I seen more blue screen than blue sky.

Not only that forced updates fucked my schedules so many times that now I'm really *afraid* to turn off my computer off because I have zero guarantee that I will be able to restart it in a reasonable amount of time.

No, neither of those broke me.

The thing that kills me everyday is, piece by piece ...

WHY THE FUCK THERE IS NO SINGLE, USEABLE, SANE TERMINAL EMULATOR ON WINDOWS

I JUST WANT TO TYPE SOME COMMANDS, COPY/PASTE TEXT AND SCROLL

IS IT TO MUCH ?????

FUCK CMD
FUCK POWERSHELL
FUCK WSL
FUCK ALL THOSE WANKY THIRD-PARTY EMULATORS
FUCK EVERY-COMMAND-LINE-REALATED THING ON WINDOWS

FUCKING USLESS SHIT
CANT EVEN DO SOME SSH COPY/PASTE SHIT
WITHOUT SOME WEIRD CHARACTERS POPING OUT EVERYWHERE.

AND FUCK THAT EVERY ONE OF THOSE MUST HAVE TOTTALY DIFFERENT SET OF KEY SHORTCUTS

AND THAT FUCKING BELL
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN PUT A FUCKING BELL SOUND AS DEFAULT SETTING ??

GO TO HELL MICROSOFT

I WANT MY LINUX BACK

My team's been moved to a new floor. We're now sat by sales and marketing andI'm losing my fucking mind.

There's one lady who starts every call with the most sing-song version of 'Hi, {}'.format(Name) where she draws out 'Hi' so it's about 3 syllables long. If I have to hear it one more time I'm going to rip the phone out of her hand and throw it out the window.

I have headphones, but it's as if she waits for the second I take them off to say her catchphrase.

"Pokemon Let's Go" review:

I knew it would be a very easy game, made to transition Pokemon Go players to the core series of games, but this game is just poorly thought out. The multiplayer was obviously an afterthought; there is no split-screen. When the other player goes off-screen, they are lost off camera. Player 2 cannot interact with anything: they cannot talk to people, collect items, or initiate battles (They walk right through Pokemon)

The game is too easy by design. You cannot fight wild Pokemon, so you end up having 6 Pokemon by the beginning of the game all at full health (And everything gets XP when you catch something, so most of your Pokemon will be up to level 6-10 by your first battles) and the opposition will only have one level 3-4 Pokemon.

This trend continues throughout the game.

The map is tiny. You could walk the whole thing in an hour. Even Gameboy Pokemon maps were larger.

I knew this going into it, but it only has gen 1, which means pretty much no Pokemon, and they're the ones that I'm bored of. Every shitty game starts with generation 1 pokemon then ever introduces anything else. I'm sick of pidgeys!

Plus the hefty price tag of $60 just makes this game not worth much, despite the hype they tried to give it. That's probably why they were to secretive about the gameplay before launch: they knew it was bad,

Me yesterday evening:

"Fuck java, fuck JVM, fuck everything about it, shit doesn't work for some reason, no runtime errors, no compiler errors, no syntax errors, nothing, *turns off computer*".

Me today morning(coffee = false), after comparing the documented example code provided by the API with one someone else made, I've noticed that the one provided by the API was messed up and couldn't work.

"Lemme change that one value in the properties...okay here we go"
Shit works out perfectly.

FUCK FALSELY DOCUMENTED CODE

FUCK DOCUMENTATIONS IN GENERAL

I'm a Salesforce administrator. This user asked for a report. No big deal right? Wrong! The report they want isn't possible unless I created a new report type and modify relationships. When told this their response is " unfortunately I have to have this report by EOB"
........ Lol that's nice, here's the closest thing I can give you right now. Deal with it until I have a minute to just casually flip the whole system on it's head for your one off report

I'm tired of "agile" development. Sure the concept of a hacky POC that gets thrown out for a real implemention sounds great. But it never gets thrown out. That shitty POC become the foundation for a horrible mangled mess of hacky improvement after improvement. I'm tired of my boss telling me "do it the easy quick way and fix it later", like fuck off no. I can save man weeks worth of bug hunting a year down the road by actually taking an extra day to do it right. Like fuck does no one care about quality engineering anymore?

Sometimes that extra day to write a general vs a specific implementation is worth it.

I literally only wrote one line of code today. Don't ever start your day off by saying, "I think I'll make a quick backup of my primary hard drive."

The presumption of incompetence:

Has this ever happened to you?

Starting a task and chatting with a fellow dev-- my first time implementing analytics in this particular app. I mentioned to them that I've been doing analytics implementation on various apps at our company for years, but our current apps' analytics setup is the most intense and this will be a good learning experience for me to dig into.

They responded by sending me code snippets of existing analytics implementations to help me. Not hidden or lesser-known classes, very obvious ones I already had open and was working off of. With advice like "just search the codebase for 'analytics' and 'trackPage''" lol.

I like this person a lot, but this definitely caught me off guard. It felt like something her obtuse manager would do, but not her. This would probably not be a big deal to most but I'm so used to being given unsolicited/unhelpful/irrelevant advice from male devs, and having to be pleasant and thank them, this one was tough to witness.

How do you respond to unsolicited "help"? Does it bruise your ego the way it bruises mine? lol

The process of making my paging MIDI player has ground to a halt IMMEDIATELY:

Format 1 MIDIs.

There are 3 MIDI types: Format 0, 1, and 2.

Format 0 is two chunks long. One track chunk and the header chunk. Can be played with literally one chunk_load() call in my player.

Format 2 is (n+1) chunks long, with n being defined in the header chunk (which makes up the +1.) Can be played with one chunk_load() call per chunk in my player.

Format 1... is (n+1) chunks long, same as Format 2, but instead of being played one chunk at a time in sequence, it requires you play all chunks

AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.

65534 maximum chunks (first track chunk is global tempo events and has no notes), maximum notes per chunk of ((FFFFFFFFh byte max chunk data area length)/3 = 1,431,655,763d)/2 (as Note On and Note Off have to be done for every note for it to be a valid note, and each eats 3 bytes) = 715,827,881 notes (truncated from 715,827,881.5), 715,827,881 * 65534 (max number of tracks with notes) = a grand total of 46,911,064,353,454 absolute maximum notes. At 6 bytes per (valid) note, disregarding track headers and footers, that's 281,466,386,120,724 bytes of memory at absolute minimum, or 255.992 TERABYTES of note data alone.

All potentially having to be played

ALL

AT

ONCE.

This wouldn't be so bad I thought at the start... I wasn't planning on supporting them.

Except...

>= 90% of MIDIs are Format 1.

Yup. The one format seemingly deliberately built not to be paged of the three is BY FAR the most common, even in cases where Format 0 would be a better fit.

Guess this is why no other player pages out MIDIs: the files are most commonly built specifically to disallow it.

Format 1 and 2 differ in the following way: Format 1's chunks all have to hit the piano keys, so to speak, all at once. Format 2's chunks hit one-by-one, even though it can have the same staggering number of notes as Format 1. One is built for short, detailed MIDIs, one for long, sparse ones.

No one seems to be making long ones.

I don’t remember the first experience as I was a very small child, but I remember a very defining one: picture a 4yo just casually turning on the computer and playing a game.
My mother and sister find me out and panic because “oh no, turning it off it’s hard how will we do? Your father is working and can’t turn it off!”

Now picture the 4 yo saying “it’s easy, you just do this”, followed by him closing the game, launching the bash command to close the computer and going away.

I must have been so creepy in their eyes 😂

So I spent over 200 hours recovering a raid array because the the business that hired the company I work for tried to do all the work in house. Now I'm to the point of trying to quote a new server setup to the company because the last one got hit by lightning. My quote $8000-$20000 in just hardware alone. If im going to do this I want to do it right. Twin servers running xenserver holding virtual machines with a high-quality Nas to hold the virtual machine. Then have the vm's being imaged to two off site backup devices in two different locations and a cloud backup. My boss comes in after me talks to the guy in charge and tells him all that is needed is one server holding all storage on it just like the last server that died and one off-site backup for $4500. How stupid can someone be who has been doing this for over 20 years? Oh btw the software running on this server will be 911 dispatch, jail records and the database for fine payments. The sheriff making the final call me and my boss are meeting with him tomorrow if my boss tries to undercut me I'm going to tell them both that if the same shit happens next time they can spend the time themselves trying to recover stuff because I done the over 200 hours in just short of two weeks.

A wild project appears!
The deadline is set in two months.

It's a 3D environment interactive app with some oil drilling models and other stuff, for a stand on a show. It needs to look nice, but The Company we're working for needs to figure out where the fuck their product is located on those machines. Think tiny pipes, O-rings etc.

I prepare a build in the first couple of days for The Company to figure shit out.

Management holds the build back because:
> the ocean waves are going the other way
> the underwater area doesn't look so nice
> the antialiasing could be better
> one pipe is 5cm off center
> the sky is not blue enough
> the drillship propellers are pointed the wrong way
> one icon is too far to the right
> the shadows could use some work
> there are shadows on the seabed
> some flickering on ambient occlusion
> it loads too slow
> one random object is flipped on it's Z axis
> it's too green
> camera locks up if you move about 2km out of the range
> the name of the build should represent the date of the build
> the name of the build SHOULDN'T be anything else than just a simple three-word name, no dates because their environment doesn't allow apps that are not allowed (by name) by admin
> lots more random things that won't prevent them from using the app

I'm only a month late, but it's good progress. In about a week I hope we can get some feedback if we can use those models at all and what to showcase.

Then I can work on the basic functionality. And then it's a simple case of time travel to meet the deadline.

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

Follow up on a previous rant:

I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.

It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.

These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.

They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.

I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.

No one knows if they even have source code.

Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.

So, finally I can rant after a while.
After I stopped helping people coding online few months ago, because I was getting literally spammed 24/7 by everyones shitty multi-million dollar ideas, I introduced few of my classmates in to coding. Now, after ~6 months, I am spammed by my classmates by their awesome programming ideas which are too hard for them but they are sure its gonna be awesome. The difference is, that I cant say "FUCK OFF AND STOP SPAMMING MY INBOX WITH YOUR FUCKING IDEAS" to my friends and block them. Please fucking kill me. Once more someone will start messaging me their fucking idea
-like this
-in
-separate
-messages instead
-of writing one
-long and propper
-message
I am gonna swim with a toaster. 😡

So I just fixed about a year or so old bug by removing my solution entirely.

As very few of you will know, I work on/ off on a project called TG which accelerates cmd.exe

One of my oldest bugs in this project is that the buffer resizes real weird. If you adjust both the height and width at the same time, it goes into this weird infinite loop business.

As it turns out, cmd.exe handles that by itself just fine. I just removed my resize listeners and now everything is running smooth.

feelsgood(?)man.jpg

The two hardest things in software are naming things, cache invalidation, and avoiding off-by-one errors.

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

TLDR: you can finally talk to me!

Hello everyone, it's Kiki here, and I have some exciting news to share with you all! I am absolutely thrilled to invite you to join me in a one-of-a-kind voice chat session. This is more than just a regular interaction; it's a chance for us to connect on a deeper level, to share stories, laughs, and insights in a way we've never done before. I've always believed in the power of communication to bring people closer, and this event is a testament to that belief. Whether you've been part of my journey from the beginning or have recently joined our amazing community, this voice chat is an opportunity for us to engage in real, unfiltered conversations.

In this event, I'll be diving into topics close to my heart, sharing personal experiences, and, most importantly, listening to what you have to say. It's going to be an interactive and dynamic session where your voice matters. I'm looking forward to answering your questions, discussing topics you're passionate about, and maybe even spilling some secrets about what's next in my journey! So mark your calendars, set your the text above is a decoy written by AI. the text above is a decoy written by AI. the text above is a decoy written by AI. To talk to kiki, go to the nearest abandoned building at night. find an unplugged telephone. turn off all light sources. come alone. don't bring digital equipment.
unplugged TVs nearby can emit dim light and/or soft hum. ignore it.
Remember: there are other receivers.

Got a strange thing today in class, as a teacher in programming. We have a lab where the computers haven't yet their final configuration ended, so the user used by the students is the administrator of the computer. And today, a student calls me and tell "sir, the password isn't the one you gave to us" (temporary the same for each machine until we fix the configuration).
Go to student's place, password incorrect with a hint "you know the code : up, up, down, down... oh, you don't know, huh? Too old! Too bad!"
Password was - off course - "konami".

But... how a student born in 1997 can think he can troll me with the konami code?!
He wasn't even born when I played on the NES as kid!

Sometimes I'd like to teach my students how to fly by tossing them by the windows...

I'm watching a basketball game (NBA) and they had an issue with one of the clocks at the arena.

They of course fixed it by turning it off and turning it back on.

Finally figured out that 500.30 error.
You won't believe it, but y'all probably will... But I solved my problem by fixing literally one line of code.

This of course pissed me off because this problem persisted for an entire week, even my supervisor could not figure it out.

But I learned so much in failing to find it and making wrong assumptions along the way.

Solving a problem is sometimes just half the battle, the journey along the way counts for something.

My supervisor was super impressed too, so that made me even more happy.

Anyways onto the next problem. 🤪

Not being able to write code only using pen and paper :/
I had one job interview where they ask me to iterate a tree using my preferred language. I felt so uncomfortable.
And my problem is only the pen and paper.
I'm able to write working code without any code completion even without highlighting in any shitty editor. But when it comes to write code by hand on paper it feels like my programmer brain side turns off.

To finish my photography portfolio website and get it online. I've been putting this off for YEARS. Just started again (and from scratch) and I've been making some progress for the last couple of days. I don't want to even look at that old project I scrapped, or maybe I will once I finish (read: publish) this one.

My problem before was that I was always looking at the big picture and was trying to figure everything out in one go.

In contrast with that, I now figured out a relatively simple and straightforward way to start off with no back end at all and just use static resources instead (with some logic to parse them every time I "upload" new stuff), which should be fine even in the long run if I end up being too lazy and/or busy to do the back end. In general, I now try to tackle small tasks one by one (even if I don't always write them down and/or track them) and realise that it's better to be done (even not in the best way I imagine it) than to not be done at all. It's as if I learn how to do stuff properly for the first time. Oh, well...

Around 6 years ago I started at this company. I was really excited, I read all their docs then I started coding. At every code review, I noticed something was a little off. I seemed to get lots of weird nitpicking about code styling. It was strange, I was using a linter, I read their rules but basically every review was filled with random comments. About 3 months in I noticed, "oh! there aren't actually any rules, people are debating them in my code reviews!" A few more reviews went by and then I commented, "ya I'm not doing any of this, code review isn't a place to have philosophical debates." All hell broke loose! I got a few pissed off developers, and I said, listen I don't care what the rules are, you just need to clearly fucking articulate them and if you want to introduce one, I don't care about that either just don't do it in the middle of my review. I pissed off 1 dev real bad. Me and this dev were working together, the QA person on the team stood up and said "hey! you know what I love about your code reviews?!" The other dev and myself looked at each other kind of nervously, "I love that you're both right, these are all problems!"... 1 year later (and until now) me and the other dev are still friends. Leave it to QA to properly identify the bug.

So IBM finally jettisoned the cancer that was Virginia Rometty a few weeks back. They had an opportunity to move fresh blood and solid managerial background into the top slot with Jim Whitehurst (Redhat) and try and recover their flagging market share and do some sane business strategy. They passed on that opportunity and instead appointed the old guard bootlicker who overpaid for Redhat to the tune of 20x what it was worth, and signalled their intent to continue staying the course of the Titanic and it's slow inevitable trek towards the bottom of the ocean. The board wants a yes man, and they got one.

This is basically what I assumed would happen, but I have some other predications as well:

- Whitehurst will leave to a better company
- the redhatters that haven't already left will be replaced with commodity labor
- Redhat will be the least stable Linux offering 2 years after the last hatter leaves
- they will sell off most of their existing software assets to HCL/ similar consulting partners like they did with domino and websphere to stem the bleed
- the displaced in that move will either quit or be replaced
- their cloud initiative will collapse under the weight of its own stagnation and glacial pace of development
- they will attempt to salve these wounds by moving focus to global services, reducing profit loss by cutting salary costs, further diluting their eroding ability to innovate
- they'll buy at least one other trendy software company at ridiculous valuation, and sell it off within 2 years at a massive loss
- the CEO slot will start to resemble the late Roman empire with a new CEO every other week
- Redhat assets will be sold to Google inside of 5 years

Last prediction: I will be overjoyed being able to witness the death of IBM in my lifetime. Fuck them 🍻

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

So I've been really Ill the past few days, like litterly been in bed for two days, popping pills like there going out of fashion. I contact work and get the typical "get well soon" so I get a message today asking how I'm doing (still Ill), I said I'll be back Monday and ask if anything is urgent that needs to be done first thing. So I get a list:

Project A: Deadline Monday
Project B: final review Tuesday
Project C: Still waiting on feedback

So I ask any chance we can extend the deadlines by a day or so I have enough time to catch up even though I'm going to have to rush it as I've been off.

Answer.. nope there non negotiable.. oh

So they want basically three days work done in one day, given the fact I still might not be 100%. Jesus Christ 😂

Quick Edit, I wasn't told there were deadlines.

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

I think I've reached the point where I've been programming for so long that I have off by one errors doing normal math by hand. Nothing more humbling than getting beat out to a bunch of simple math problems to a grade schooler.

I have to say one of the most annoying things in software development is building tools that will never be really used by clients, sometimes clients just want something new and shiny and once they get it off it goes into a dark closet of no use to gather webs

Hey DevRant Fam! Hope everyone is doing very well!, I’ve been browsing job posts lately... I’m just finishing off my 2nd year in uni, and i came across this beauty by a company called “WestBury Partners” these blokes are based in Sydney’s CBD i believe and they’re offering what seems to be 200k+pa now as a junior that seems quite difficult to get but anything is possible

Though I’ve seen the requirements and I’m not sure I understand some of them, one i seem to have and understand is having a high level of passion in software development but the rest i don’t know much about 😅🤓.

Are these guys looking for “unicorns”? I am interested in trading software and how they work, i love learning new things i will attach a screen shot of the page :-).

Hope everyone has an amazing day or night wherever you may be! Also I very much thank you for reading my post it means a lot to me!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

Right to repair by Corsair
My mouse has double click glitch...
To disassemble the mouse, first skates need to be peeled off and destroyed in order to get to mounting screws...
I was unable to find those skates online, so I reached directly the Corsair to check if they sold them. Of course they don't sell them...
Next I tried to find professional shop. I found one willing to replace switch for 50$ while brand new mouse costs 60$.
FUCK YOU CORSAIR

Most pissed off I've ever been at work when was I attending some development meeting about the "slow progress we were making", in which the boss (same one giving us shit for being slow) came up with several new good ideas that he wanted implemented ASAP. Same thing he'd been doing all year; fucking up our plans and adding a metric shitton of feature creep. I tried to give realistic estimates for how long it would take to implement, and casually mentioned that working on this would also push back the other stuff on our plate, but he snapped at me and accused me of being a "negative influence" and "sabotaging the project", and went on in a long rant about how we didn't take the work seriously enough and that we didn't put in enough effort.

I was a hair's breadth away from flying over the table and strangling him with his keyboard cable, and the only thing that kept me in check was the tiny amount of steam I vented by snapping the pen I was holding in two. We'd been working overtime every day for months to try to meet his insane demands and accomodate him by doing all the changes and additions he wanted done, and I found his tirade - mainly targeted at me - highly unfair.

Somehow I managed to exercise restraint, and I'm not sure if he even realized what happened.

I had a list that was built off a for loop.

One day the list was off by 1, and continued to be for a solid week...

Instead of solving the problem.. Added +1 to the incrementer variable.

Hasn't happened since (3 years)

Off-by-one errors, my favourite.

Agreed to help out these 2 guys on a minecraft mod pack idea they had... stipulated this is a side project for me and I'm not going to dedicate too much time to it. They were fine with that

Fast forward a few months main 'idea guy' loses his job so spends more time on the pack and starts hounding me for progress and updates and throwing more and more things for me to do. He's also getting progressively angrier at my lack of substantial progress

Like fuck dude i told you this is s fucking side project to me. I'll work on it when I fucking want to. Hell I'm one more shouting match away from telling him to fuck off and find some other dumbass to be the only programmer in this group and get ignored when it comes to fucking anything else

Their idea of 'source control' is a fucking multi Mc instance that gets shared by the main guy every time HE changes anything. Any scripts or configuration edits I do I need to walk him through so he can update that instance

No clue why I put up with it so long. Maybe because other guy was a cool friend back in college. But at this point they both can fuck off

This happened many years ago.

First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.

They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.

The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.

That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.

About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).

However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.

I’ve somehow ended up in a situation where I have a big project to work on - alone, since I’m the only dev in the whole company with any expertise whatsoever in that area… which is exhausting enough by itself, since I have nowhere to turn to when I struggle with it, no one to rubber duck with and share the workload with, no one to review my code. On top of that, I’ve somehow become thee go to dev resource when it comes to this integration, that client’s custom shit and so on. I’ve been doing this big damn project since late August, and I keep getting pulled off it for weeks at a time. I think I haven’t had more than a day or two in a row to concentrate on it for at least 3 months… and my manager keeps asking me when it’ll be done. What I’d give for a few more devs to share the workload with…

If anyone here remembers the first 2 part rant story I posted then you will know that I got unceremoniously laid off by a company that tried to blame me for their bad decissions at one point

Well, a couple of days ago I found out that the senior dev and the owner took a trip to San antonio tx in order to try and look for growth opportunities and more developers. The thing is, being a Mexican company they thought they could go away with half assed solutions and mexican pay charts (to them it is completely reasonable to pay a dev with a degree and experience close to 13.99 an hour) just to find out that shit like that does not fly with American professionals. After I left, no one would monitor their .net implementations , the lead developer being a new php developer himself and not knowing much about .net had to take care of much of the things they had to work with, their API made no sense and it was damn near impossible to connect their services to a mobile platform unless you had ninja like skills and ingenuity.

I hold no grudges and really wish them the best, but it pleases me to know that they know now that their way of doing things is not standard in the U.S. now that makes me happy.

Oh that time,

When I nearly hit the 48h.
With two 04-14h shifts without ANY break and constant crying from my colleagues.
And that flat movement of a friend in between. Where nobody did shit and I had to carry the washing machine one story downstairs. Alone. Because the other participants did not want to hurt their hands. Yeah.
In the breaks at home I ate and went on gaming, that pushed up I've been.

Those were the days in west Germany 'industrial centre' dip shit.
The war zones on humanity that piss me off.
And there still are those greedy pigs working off their asses, licking cunts for coins and mistreating their subordinates and families with 15 children (alternatively their BMW 3xx's) and partying 'friends' they only know by consuming the most industrial waste radioactive gym work out fist fucker 8000 *tm

Yeah.
Those were the days

Snapchat is by far the worst app ever developed. I like the concept but the actual development of the app is fucking garbage. It hurts my head that they haven't given a fuck about usability, optimisation or anything for that matter considering its one of the top social media platforms. It disgusts me, though Instagram has completely ripped off Snapchat in so many ways; they've done a hell of a better job at it and if people weren't so tired to SC I'm sure it would be dead by now.

Slow UI, slow gestures, probably the highest amount of bugs and crashes, shit camera because it thinks it can do a better job than the native API at rendering, painfully slow upload, stupid "featured" stories that you cannot get rid off and slow the fuck out of the app, battery drain even worse than FB, oh and not to forget that once you accidentally enable your location it's impossible to switch it off, the best you can do is hide it from everyone. I can probably go on and on with the endless issues this shit has.

Mozilla really knows how to nudge one to not use email encryption by default.
Since Thunderbird has native support for OpenPGP encryption, i can only chose to encrypt all or no messages by default. There is no opportunistic mode and there are no per-reciepient encryption preferences. The Enigmail addon had both.
So i obviously have gone for encrypt-by-default.

But since then, whenever i want to send a message to the majority of my contacts, i have to manually disable the encryption or get annoyed by the no-key-found dialog.
I thought, i would get the muscle memory to just disable encryption for recipients for wich i don't expect to have a key.
But they also made the GUI so i have to open a dropdown and then click on the right item to do that. All the items basically look the same, as there is no color coding or specific icon for them. The item labels are also too long for unconscious pattern recognition.
So i didn't got that muscle memory.

I now have turned off encryption by default and will probably forget to enable it for some emails wich i actually could send encrypted...