An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Another day, another hit piece against gaming.

So, a 15-year old boy hanged himself and the media goes all „This was caused by this game“, even though NO FUCKING TRACES OF THE GAME WERE FOUND ON THE LAPTOP OF THE DECEASED!!!

And then of course my freaking parents go all lecturing me about how the internet twists the brain into not being adequate towards reality etc.

First off, CAN THE FUCKING COLLECTION OF COCKSUCKERS that is the fucking media just fucking get a grip on reality? It was literally said in the same sentence that the supposed game that caused that was not found in any form on the person's laptop. You would think an online game that you take months to play through would need at least some fucking download to run, right? Unless it was a freaking video chat bullshit that they call a „game“ just for the fucking spite of gamers.

Second, HOW FUCKING LONG WILL IT FUCKING TAKE FOR PEOPLE TO FUCKING ACCEPT THAT IT'S NOT THE TECH THAT MAKES PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES? How hard is it to fucking understand?

Third... How do people in their 60s freaking think they understand anything about modern gaming when they have no freaking way of interacting with it other than these hit pieces? They certainly give more fucks about what a hired bitch of a lying „journalist“, that cannot even talk properly, says. Oh, they care so much about the children. Have they never thought that people are killing themselves exactly because they feel nobody cares about them?

Fourth. How fucking long do parents like mine deny the reality that just as long as they see me as an incomplete copy of my sisters I will be suicidal? Let me guess... It's video games causing me to be oh, so inadequate when I've not played any of them for quite some time...

Fifth... How am I out of touch with reality when these people have never known how I „work“, so to speak, as a person, and they've been the ones basically dictating all my life? Let me see why I'm unhappy...

I know I complain a lot. Sorry for that. But I just cannot stand people like them. People that lie all the time and project that on you while depriving you of any means of defending yourself in a debate...

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

When I finished my studies, I was looking for a job and had an interview at a smallish company.

Boss: can you do C?
Me: yes, I have already done some stuff in C.
Boss: I mean, are you really good in C?
Me, growing suspicious: well yes I already have been using it - but anyway, there's also the project documentation for looking up, right?
Boss: uhm, the code IS the documentation.

I envisioned myself being drowned in undocumented spaghetti code and wasn't really keen on that job anymore, but my following question pretty much ended the interview:

Me: oh, I see. Do you have any roadmap for getting your development to a more professional base?

His looks, priceless! He was just shocked when he realised that he had failed my interview, and that I was a fresher made it even harder to digest for him.

She: Do dates make you nervous?

He: Oh yes, especially when the client and server are in different timezones and I need to calculate the difference and they are in different formats and I mean why can’t everyone just use ISO8601, right?

She: Okay never mind bye..........

Boss: We are using Angular 1 in our project, right?
Me: AngularJS, yeah, we are using it.
Boss: I heard they have AngularJS 4 now and it's faster and better.
Me: Angular, yeah that's much better.
Boss: So shouldn't we upgrade it? Can you do it this week?
Me: Erm... It's gonna take more than a week.
Boss: How much time do you need?
Me: 6 months, at least.
Boss: What if I put one more guy with you on this? How much time will it take then?
Me: Let me rephrase. It's gonna take 6 months for the entire team to upgrade all the modules in our product to Angular 4. Not including the time to train everyone on Angular and TypeScript.
Boss: Oh, Angular 1 is suddenly seemed to me a better option now.
Me: Smart move 😉

Customer: I need a program that can do this.
Me: Okay. We can do this. But we recommend you a gui.
Customer: Oh I don‘t need a gui. We have Windows.
Me: you will need a gui. Here you are a dummy programme without a gui. Try it out. Find out yourself.
Customer: I trust you. Dummy is fine. But it’s not ready yet, right?
Me: It’s just a dummy to show you what it means, having ni gui for that.
Customer: all fine i need this programme. Go ahead.
Me codes and silently makes one build with gui... ;) xou know what comes:
Me: here you are your programme.
Customer: how to use it? It is cryptic. A black window opens. I cannot click. The manual is full of text i habve to type. I don’t understand!?
Me: you need a gui.
Customer: Oh. I thought since windows 3.11 everything has one...
Me: pay me bucks I make you the gui.
C: meh. Okay here you are bucks.
Me: take this
C: wow so fast. This is cool. Take my money.

This sort of cognitive dissonance I will never understand. In first case ignoring my hints. In second recognizing my hints were true. But in third forgetting own stupidness and paying me extra-extra for what you ignored? Ethically I hated you so much for ignoring me, that I took your money, but you could have gotten me blaming me not selling you a gui... :D

Have a nice weekend

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

Boot up/shut down(different os edition)

Windows:
......eh?....
......zzzz......z...eh?
......
.....
....hold up.....zzz
....eh? Oh right!....
......z.....ok ok I am here...what?
....z...zzzzzz

Mac OS:
........
.......
..eh?
...ok I am here wtf u want?

Linux (most distros)
....snores coke...what?I AM HERE LETS GO MOFOCKA

-----shut down
Windows:
Still eating glue...
....glue....glue....glue...
WINDOWS WILL UPDATE WHE...whst are you doing with that pillow shshuahahhaah..x___x

Mac OS
.....
..ok fuck u bye whatever

Linux (most distros)
Ok bye xoxoxo talk to you lateer
**dead**

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

Relatives: You're a computer guy, right, what are you working on these days?
Me: *should I bother explaining, should I not* Oh, just some stuff.
R: Oh come on, tell us, how difficult can it be?
M: *sigh* I'm working on a custom garbage collector for-
R: !!

They're now under the impression that I'm involved in collecting rubbish from bins. Sigh. My hair doesn't help here, either, lol (I have one of those tangled, unruly mops of hair)

This will take time to explain.

*Romantic candlelit dinner*

GF: "What are you thinking about, my love?"

Me: "The chocolate custard always seems to behave differently under stress than vanilla. It has a lower base viscosity, but a similar shear thickening. I was wondering whether anyone has ever made a database of all custard brands and flavors together with their viscosities"

My brain: *Oh fuck, that's not what I'm supposed to say during a romantic dinner*

GF: "Do you wanna check whether we can find a cheap second hand viscometer.... wait.... no.... you'd need a rheometer for that, right? Do you think we could build one ourselves?"

Me: *blinks in awe*

Even after 15 years, I'm still just puzzled, she really fucking is my soulmate

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

First thing this morning I heard my boss had taken some PSDs to a client today. I thought it was a bit weird because he doesn't have a laptop. Midday I got a call to say all my PSDs were corrupted:

"I'm with the client now. We're very unhappy, we can't get your files to open."
"Oh, right. They should be fine. What version of Photoshop are you using?"
"The latest."
"Okay, what's the error?"
"There isn't one."
"Okay, so it's freezing?"
"No, we can't see the files at all."
"Which laptop are you using?"
"The Nexus."
"The what?"
"That tablet thing."

So after about 20 minutes we figured out he's copied the PSDs and a shortcut to Photoshop on to a USB stick. Then plugged the USB into a USB to micro USB cable and stuck that in an Android Nexus. Expecting to open Photoshop.exe and the PSDs.

I don't mind people being confused with technology but when it's your own boss, who doesn't even bother to let you know anything, then phones up and tells you off you just want to strangle him.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:

Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!

That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.

You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Friend: "You are good with computers right?"
Me: "Yes...."
Friend: "Can you put an eye on my computer? Mint crash at every startup"
Me: (Oh Linux! For this time ok) "Yeah, show me"

My friend open the pc...
Pc: "KERNEL PAAAAANIC!"
Me: ".... WTF!?"
Friend: "Can you repair this?"
Me: (shit.)

That was a long day...
(My friend closed the lid without the drivers and then the pc from the standby did not wake up correctly)

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

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

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

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

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

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

I've had this twice in a very short period of time now and it really pisses me the fuck off.

Sitting in the train (I think the grammatically correct version is on the train but no that would be a little too dangerous for me I think), on my phone devRanting/Signalling/Rioting around when an an elderly person says (aiming towards me):

"Oh, youngsters and their technology, where has socializing gone? Why are you people always on your phones? Go socialize sometimes!"

Excuse me but fuck right off.

Because you know what, I am currently socializing.

Just not in the way you are used to or maybe even 'okay with'.

I'm talking with friends from all around the world (Signal + Riot), participating in interesting discussions (on here) and what not.

I do have very strict rules for myself though. When in company with people I am actually going to socialize with or when hanging out with friends, the phone goes the fuck away unless I NEED to be reachable.

But I'm on a fucking train with people I don't know and frankly I'm done with socializing for the day as I've had to hear (often stupid) people asking for help all day long.

Next to that, I don't know you, you don't know me, who am I to judge you? I'm not going to socialize with anyone here anyways and even if they'd like to, I'm fucking done with people for to-fucking-day.

Sincerely fuck off please.

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

Mam: Hey can I ask you a question about Facebook?

Me: (Christ give me strength) ... sure whats up?

Mam: You know when you get a notification and you click on it and see what someone uploaded?

Me: ... you are not on Facebook, you can't be getting notifications

Mam: well I do. Is it possible to...

Me: No hang on a second, it is 110% not possible for this to happen. Something else is going on that you think is a notification.

Mam: You know when you are on, and you see a message like "12 new notifications"

Me: on? on what? this is happening on your phone is it? Can I see?

Mam: No its on my laptop at home.

Me: ... you have an old laptop with an old windows, you can't get notifications on it.

Mam: OH FOR GOD SAKE! ... you know when you are in your emails and it says "12 new notifications"?

Me: ... right so we are talking about EMAILS about unread notifications and not getting notifications on your phone. So you have an old account then that you don't use?

Mam: Yeah I don't know the password to it, haven't logged in, in years.

Me: of course

Mam: Right anyway. When I get one and click on it, lets say its about you, can you see me reading your notifications?

Me: ..... you can't not read my notifications.

Mam: uh, can you see me reading your emails then smart arse?

Me: ... can't do that either.

Mam: So what the hell am I doing then?

Me: You are reading a post someone uploaded, which you got alerted to from an email.

Mam: Right, can you tell when I've read your POST then?!?!?!

Me: no

Mam: was that so hard?

Me: ... yep

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

If the below is you, please stop. I'm starting a revolution called #AnswerTheQuestion

A: Hey, just checked your code, you have a huge security issue in XYZ, you should really address that.

B: Oh god I had no idea, how do I fix it?

A: Well it depends on how you *want* to fix it, no one solution is always the right one.

B: ... Ok, well could you give me some advice?

A: Well, there are many ways to approach this kind of work, but all I can say is that this way, is definitely not the correct one.

B: ... Ok, well how would you do it?

A: That would depend on the customer requirements.

B: ... the requirements is to have a website that isn't easily hackable, what do I do?

A: Nowadays, its pretty hard to make a website completely not hackable.

B: ALL THE SERVERS ARE SHOWING RED, PLEASE HELP ME!!!

A: ........ you really shouldn't prejudge colours. The colour red doesn't always mean danger, depends purely on the use case.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Customer is always right.....

Committed to sustainable productivity..

Misunderstanding between the IT Department Staff member and the Finance Department Staff member in one of the establishments...

User: Hi, our printer is not working.

IT Service: What is wrong with it?

User: The mouse is jammed.

IT Service: Mouse? Are you sure it’s a printer, as they don’t come with a mouse?

User: Do you think I’m stupid? I’m telling you it’s the printer!

IT Service: I'm telling you, it can’t be the printer! They don’t have a mouse!

User: Oh really?... Mmmmm... I’ll send you a picture.

Scroll down...
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The customer is always right.
Listen to him/her and believe what he/she says.

Don’t jump into conclusions!

"We care about your privacy [...]"

That's why we make it ultra inconvenient to turn off all of our advertising trackers and give you a broken list of on/off sliders that are slow as fuck. Also, why not just press the 'accept all' at the top of the page? See that big green button? Yeah green is good let's just press it and get this over with right?

Oh and that 'deny all' button? Yeah, a shame nobody actually put some programming into that thing, why not just press the green button next to it? You're only making it harder for yourself y'know...

So I've been looking for a Linux sysadmin job for a while now. I get a lot of rejections daily and I don't mind that because they can give me feedback as for what I am doing wrong. But do you know what really FUCKING grinds my FUCKING gears?

BEING REJECTED BASED ON LEVEL OF EDUCATION/NOT HAVING CERTIFICATIONS FOR CERTAIN STUFF. Yes, I get that you can't blindly hire anyone and that you have to filter people out but at least LOOK AT THEIR FUCKING SKILLSET.

I did MBO level (the highest sub level though) as study which is considered to be the lowest education level in my country. lowest education level meaning that it's mostly focused on learning through doing things rather than just learning theory.

Why the actual FUCK is that, for some fucking reason, supposed to be a 'lower level' than HBO or Uni? (low to high in my country: MBO, HBO, Uni). Just because I learn better by doing shit instead of solely focusing on the theory and not doing much else does NOT FUCKING MEAN THAT I AM DUMBER OR LESS EDUCATED ON A SUBJECT.

So in the last couple of months, I've literally had rejections with reasons like
- 'Sorry but we require HBO level as people with this level can analyze stuff better in general which is required for this job.'. - Well then go fuck yourself. Just because I have a lower level of education doesn't FUCKING mean that I can't analyze shit at a 'lower level' than people who've done HBO.

- 'You don't seem to have a certificate for linux server management so it's a no go, sorry!' - Kindly go FUCK yourself. Give me a couple of barebones Debian servers and let me install a whole setup including load balancers, proxies if fucking neccesary, firewalls, web servers, FUCKING Samba servers, YOU FUCKING NAME IT. YES, I CAN DO THAT BUT SOLELY BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE THAT FUCKING CERTIFICATE APPEARANTLY MEANS THAT I AM TOO INCOMPETENT TO DO THAT?! Yes. I get that you have to filter shit but GUESS WHAT. IT'S RIGHT THERE IN MY FUCKING RESUME.

- 'Sorry but due to this role being related to cyber security, we can't hire anyone lower than HBO.' - OH SO YOUR LEVEL OF EDUCATION DEFINES HOW GOOD YOU ARE/CAN BE AT CYBER SECURITY RELATED STUFF? ARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING RETARDED? I HAVE BEEN DOING SHIT RELATED TO CYBER SECURITY SINCE I WAS 14-15 FUCKiNG YEARS OLD. I AM FAMILIAR WITH LOADS OF TOOLS/HACKING TECHNIQUES/PENTESTING/DEFENSIVE/OFFENSIVE SECURITY AND SO ON AND YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT I NEED A HIGHER LEVEL OF FUCKING EDUCATION?!?!? GO FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF.

And I can go on like this for a while. I wish some companies I come across would actually look at skills instead of (only) study levels and certifications. Those other companies can go FUCK THEMSELVES.

Me: Boss, your new project is ready, we've tested the technical aspect but we're waiting on your approval before deploying, will you test it?
Boss: yeah sure, I'll test it in 5

*2 weeks later*

Boss: why isn't that project deployed yet?
Me: you haven't tested it, and we haven't gotten approval
Boss: oh right, I'll go test it right now!

*2 weeks later*

Boss: I NEED that project to go live RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!!
Me: sure, have you tested it yet?
Boss: nope, but I need it
Me: well, I'll put it live, but me and my colleagues are shifting responsibility to you, since you haven't tested it. Are you sure?
Boss: yeah, yeah whatever...

*put product online*

*2 days later*

Angry call from boss, bugs have been found, tell him that he approved the state of the product and that the bugs will go on the to-do list...

Boss is extremely pissed, but recognized his mistake...

Now, the boss actually tests everything thoroughly at the moment we tell him to! No more bugs, complaints, and I got a raise!

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

!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.

Millennials are getting right f*cked.

Low paying jobs,
Many hours of travel to work because one can't afford to live closeby,
working 10 hour a day, and
there is no hope of owning a home.

Then people say 'oh what do you do when you get home?'

Sleeeep for the limited hours left!

Then your partner says 'oh you just come home to sleep'

Then you have instagram and all these 'influencers' saying go after your dreams... while they very well know they only get paid for heavily edited images.

Wish things were better for everyone.

*sees that the high voltage generator kit got delivered today*
Cool, let's build this thing and integrate it into my old bugzapper! Mosquitos beware 😈

*starts building the kit, all is going very well*
Oh wow, isn't it Monday? But it's taking only 15 minutes of soldering and everything goes super smooth.. what divine power is giving me such good luck?

Alright, last thing, the transformer and then this circuit is done!!!

*solders in the transformer without realizing that the wires are coated, and the solder isn't protruding through*
Fuck. Time to desolder this shit and blast the wires with my lighter to flash that coating right off!

*engages solder pump and solder goes off extremely easily, because it only adhered to the pad*
*takes off transformer*
Me: "Nnngh..!!! Get off you piece of junk!!!"
Transformer: "Hmph!! I will stay in here no matter what!"
Me: "Get the fuck off already!!! 😡"
Transformer: *leads break off* "Alright, but these leads stay here!!!"
Me: "MotherFUCKER!!!"

Yep, it's Monday after all.

It's funny to see how a coworker of mine and me are very similar minded on some privacy stuff. He's a very cool/open guy and just a regular consumer (used the default services etc) but he shares quite some of my views. This is a convo we had today:

*got to the WhatsApp subject somehow*
Him: oh right, you didn't use that haha
Me: yeah 😅
Him: why was that again, privacy reasons or something, right? xD
Me: uhm yes *help*
Him: Well fair enough.
Me: so you'd think I'm right? I mean it uses end to end crypto... (I'm entirely with him in the next few lines but I always approach it carefully)
Him: they veeeery probably have some kinda fucking masterkey.
Me: why'd you think that?
Him: it has over a billion users, the owner is facebook, fb is directly integrated with several mass surveillance programs, they are known to work closely with one particular one, the intelligence interests are way too high for letting such an opportunity pass and after all, THE FUCKER IS CLOSED SOURCE AKA NO ONE CAN FUCKING VERIFY THE CRYPTO NOR THE APP ITSELF.
Me: I agree haha 😅
Him: it's not rocket science, it's modern day mass tracking/surveillance logic :)

I like that guy.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

!!politics

My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.

It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!

As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.

To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.

Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.

I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.

Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.

Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.

Trashy Girl that literally did not talk to me in over five years and even back then only talked to me if she needed something texts me today:

Girl: Hi :) How are you?

Me: *oh fuck no* Hi! Good, how about you?

Girl: Great! You know how to program apps right?

Me: *Fuck you* Yeah, whatcha planning?

Girl: Sooo my boyfriends brother has an idea for an app, it’s basically like instagram and snapchat but it’s actually *insert location based snapchat ripoff idea*

Me: Well sure but that’s quite a long term project and App Development kinda isn’t cheap to outsource!

No answer.

I’m like what did you expect?

Same shit everyday. Sometimes I consider starting a new life in a country where noone knows I can code, work remote and answer with “pleas” when people ask me what I do.

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

I'm currently on my way to Japan on vacation.
This is how it went so far:
😁 - Arriving at airport early and excited
🤔 - Find out our flight is delayed. Oh well it might now be by a lot
😥 - Find out that it's 2 hours delayed and we will miss our next flight
😤 - Arrive at Frankfurt airport, and stands in line for 2 hours to the service desk
😡 - Arrive at service desk to get told that we have to go to a special service desk to get rebooked
🤬 - Get a ticket with our number in the queue. 125 people in front of us.
😴 - 4 and a half hour later, get get informed we will need to stay at a hotel for the night, and that we'll be flying at 6 pm the next day
😑 - Get to hotel and crashes (this is by 1 am now)
🤬 - Wakes up 6 hours later because we have a room right next to a construction site

Pro tips for Lufthansa and the imbeciles in their management and staff:
1. Inform people. You fucking knew the flight was this delayed, and you could actually have given people a choice at the beginning of their travel.
Now you had to put 100+ people in a hotel.

2. Bring food to people. Spending so much time in an airport leaves people very hungry. (Pssst, chocolate, candy and French potatoes are NOT food)

All in all, just fuck Lufthansa and their handling of this situation.

Fucking great start to the vacation. I'm already more exhausted than if I just went to work...

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

Me and co-worker troubleshooting why he can't run the docker container for database.

Me: Check if the port is busy.

Co-worker: To my knowledge, it isn't.

Me: Strange, it just works fine for me and everyone else.

Me: And you're sure you didn't already start it previously?

*We verify that it isn't running*

Me: I'm pretty sure the port is busy from that error message. Try another port.

Co-worker: Already did, it didn't work.

Me: And by any chance restarting your machine won't solve anything?

*It doesn't solve anything*

Me: Alright, I have some work to do, but I'll get back to this. Tell me if you find a solution.

Co-worker: Alright.

*** Time passes, when I get back he has switched to windows, dualboot, same machine ***

Me: I don't think you'll have a better time running the docker image on windows.

Co-worker: Oh, that's not what I'm looking for. You see, I had a database on my windows partition recently and I thought maybe thats why it won't start.

Me (screaming internally) : WTF ARE YOU STUPID, WINDOWS AND LINUX ISNT RUNNING AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.

Me (actually saying): I don't think computers work like that.

Co-worker: My computer is magical. It does strange things.

Me: That's a logical conclusion.

*** More time passes ***

Co-worker solves the problem. The port was busy because Ubuntu was already running PostgreSQL on that port.

Third co-worker shimes in: Oh yeah, I had the exact same problem and it took me a long time to solve it.

Everyone is sitting in arms reach of each other.

So not only was I right from the start. Someone else heard this whole conversation and didn't chime in with his solution. And the troubleshooting step of booting into windows and looking if a database is running there ???? Wtf

Why was I put on this Earth?

So here I am... thinking to myself how does this kid not know about the shift key?

Me: "Ok we're going to test see if you have sudo access. Please enter your password, now"
Student: ~stares at the black terminal box and begins pressing the caps lock key. The light doesn't display~
Student: "Um... what? Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No"
Continues to click the caps-lock button and waiting for a light to appear on the keyboard. It doesn't. He continues clicking.
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "What???"
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "Um.. I don't understand"
Him: Presses shift button, nothing happens. Goes back to pressing caps lock button.
Me: "Your password has a capital letter in it right?"
Him: "Um... yeah."
Me: "Press the shift button to capitalize your letters."
Him: "I don't understand... Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No... you need to press and hold the shift key to get a capital letter"
Him: "................................ ............................................ . . . . . .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................... . . . . . . . Oh..."
Him: "Presses and holds the shift button with his thumb and then presses the Z key."
Me: ~What in the hell are you doing?~ 🤦
Me: "Perfect it looks like you are a part of the sudoers list."
Me: "You can take you computer back."
Me: ~Do you fucking use the caps lock key to capitalize all the first letters in your sentences? Please tell me you don't!~

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

follow on from my last rant.

I've finally gotten my new Jira project. Only thing I seem to have access to change is the Kanban board columns. Still has 50+ fields when creating a ticket etc.

Asked the support team handling the request if this was a mistake. He said no, i'll need to open another ticket to have those changes requested.

Opened and got a reply. Currently there are 2 versions of Jira running. They are working on consolidating them atm and won't help me right now until this is done. I've been asked to re-open my request after the consolidation is done in March 2019.

5 ... fucking ... months, so I can have a competent ticketing process.

He pointed me to a page explaining the move and listing all the changes taking place. Well lets look at the changes they are making that are so critical:

Change 14: Rename "More info" status to "Needs more info".

... Oh pardon me. I didn't realise such critical show stoppers were being addressed. Please do continue. Don't mind me, i'll just be over here taking 4 hours to create an Epic and 6 stories. As you were

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

So... Just overheard a conversation at an Apple store...

tl;dr;

The customer gets furious for not getting to buy a mac pro for the price he wants and it doesn't even include the monitor there.....

C - customer, S - Sales person.

C: Hey, I've heard that apple released new home computers. May I get one?
S: Hello, they are not out yet.
C: WHAT?! How can they not be out yet? They released it like a week ago.
S: Well, they announced it, not officially released it for sale.
C: Ah, whatever. Can I pre-order it now?
S: Sure, we'll need your details and a deposit.
C: What? A deposit for what? That $1000 machine?
S: Sir, do you know the prices?
C: Of course. They have released a new machine and it will cost like previous ones - from $1000.
S: Then you might be talking about Macbook Air...
C: *Interrupts* No, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the whole box.
S: Ok... It starts at ~$6000.
C: WHAT?! It can't be... Oh well, I'll buy it. I hope it's the fully-specked one. Oh and does it come with a monitor?
S: No sir. It's the base model and it has no monitors.
C: WHAT?! How can this be?
S: You see, these are devices created for professionals. They are not for home users since our iMac line is....
C: *Interrupts again* Are you saying I'm not a professional?
S: I'm sorry but by the questions and lack of information - it seems to be true - you are not a professional.
C: FUCK YOU, I'm going to another store and they will sell it for me for $1000. What a piece of crap is this.
*Customer leaves furiously*
S: *to another S* - What is wrong with that dude? Is he high or what?
S2: *shrugs* and tells that it's the 5th time someone came to order that pc and was scared by the price.

---

So yeah... It's fun to see how idiots think that anything apple releases is for them... Once again I was made sure that apple fans are brainless fucks that will buy anything it produces and if that is not in the right price - they'll get furious.

ps. I own apple product, mac pro 2015. Would never buy a newer one NOR an iphone. I don't think that anyone is dumb just for buying it - people buy whatever fits their needs and that's ok but... More than we would like to admit - people buy it because it's an apple product....

Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.

Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"

Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.

Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

Story of every failing tech startup (from personal experience, but a bit exaggerated):

Step 1: Come up with AMAZING idea that blows your mind!

Step 2: Run to investors to do presentation, continue to constantly repeat CLOUD, CLOUD, AI, CLOUD, MACHINE-LEARNING, MUCH WOW, MORE AI until investors are confused but mesmerized as fuck and decide to give you a shit ton of money.

Step 3: Hire all the developers you can find, a JAVA dev, a Python dev, a PHP dev, a Ruby dev, and ask them to get along with each other! I mean hey, they're adults right, they'll figure it out.

Step 4: Ask devs to launch the app, meanwhile, throw a LAUCH PARTY! HELLS YEA WE'RE ABOUT TO BE RICH BITCHES!

Step 5: Find out the hard way that no one needs a product that was launched! :/

Step 6: Pivot, and pivot next month again, and pivot again, and pivot in a middle of a pivot, and pivot pivot pivot pivot... and OH FUCK WE RAN OUT OF MONEY!

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

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

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

Series of events between me (Mi) and dude in office (DIO).

Instance 1
DIO: There is not psql installed on staging.
Mi: Install it.
DIO: YUM is not working.
Mi: *tries yum it works* It is
DIO: Oh. Didn't work earlier.
Mi: *blank* Make sure you install 9.6
DIO: Cannot find psql
Mi: *types psql, it is already installed*
DIO: Oh, didn't work earlier.

Instance 2
DIO: Made this change to the API, the endpoint is not returning the right value
Mi: *restarts server, shit starts working*
DIO: I am pretty sure I did that, don't know what happened.

Instance 3
DIO: Cannot alter role to give login to this db user.
MI: *runs alter role db_user with login* works
DIO: Don't know why it wasn't working before.

Instance 4
DIO: I have been stuck on this test for the past 1 day, cannot get the API to return the right data while the Rest Endpoint works fine.
Mi: You are hitting the wrong endpoint in the test.
DIO: Oh, I put an extra 's'
Mi: BTW you are testing Spring-Boot with that test and nothing else.
DIO: Yes but what if Spring Boot has a bug?
Mi: ok.

Campaign manager: I don't see my campaign on portal xxx.
Me: Are you sure? I can see it correctly...
CM: Yes, I don't see anything.
Me: Do you have an ad blocker on?
CM: ... Oh, right.

#eyeroll

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Tech support to family member:

Mom: "App just goes black after 30 seconds"
Me: "remove it and install again"
Mom: "how?"
Me: "tap the icon and hold till icon wiggles"
Mom: "doesn't do anything"
Me: "did you tap and hold?"
Mom: "hold what?"
Me:"Tap and and don't pull your finger up"
Mom: "Nothing... oh wait, yes it jiggles"
Me: "lift finger, tap the x that appeared on the icon, follow instructions"
Mom: "ok did that so what do I do now?"
Me: Grrrrrrrrr
Mom: "ok it's deleted"
Me: "Go to app store, and search for the app. after you tap the appstore icon, in a moment or so you should see a magnifying glass icon with the word search, tap that"
Mom: "nope no magnifying glass"
Me: ggrrrrrrr "yes their is one"
Mom: "nope"
Me: "yep"
Mom: "nope, it isn't their, I'M NOT STUPID YOU KNOW JUST BECAUSE I'M OLD!!! WHY DO YOU ALWAYS THINK I'M SO STUPID? THERE IS NO MAGNIFYING GLASS!!!"
Me: Deep, deep deep breath to the point of bursting my lungs (which is the preferable outcome)
Me: "top right corner or bottom right corner"
Mom: silence.... a few crickets in the background then some giggles followed with "Oh yea, their it is "....

20 minute call. no hi, how are you, how's your day. Just hello, I have a problem, it's fixed, bye.

Sometimes, and I don't want to sound mean BUT I wish we could pick our family.....

Shit just got legal

There's the lead dev, I'll call him John. John is not from the US, Europe, or any of those developed countries. The rest of management are from developed countries.

John found himself in the US for personal reasons, on a non-work visa, and his visa will expire soon. In the meantime, management found an opportunity to raise capital in the US, and they want John to be there because it'll look better in the presentation.

John: Oh but that's a month after my visa expires. You'll have to provide me a work visa.

Management was uncomfortable, because we're not registered in the US. and coz they don't wanna spend money.

The French: Don't worry, the US allows you to come in for 3 months without a visa.

The other management seemed to agree with the French. John had to explain that, no, only very few privileged countries have that right, and for the rest the US border is very, very hard to cross, and the visa process takes months. Most US embassies abroad have a year-long waitlist, though you can pay a (hefty) extra fee for it to be expedited. Fucking management was seriously surprised by this.

The Canadian: Don't worry, I own have an apartment in the East Coast. I could give you the keys and you could stay there for this month until the presentation.

So management wants John to stay in the US illegally for a month because they don't wanna pay for a work visa and the expedition fee.

One time I had this conversation with my then PM:

PM: …so in total we need like 3 extra pages; the leaders profile, event showcase and lastly a contact page.

Me: Sure, already on it.

PM: Make it simple and quick, I told the client the updates would be live in an hour.

Me: Okay.

*{5 microseconds later}*

PM: Also the page headers need to be different from the other pages.

Me: Yes, you told me that earlier.

PM: Okay, just needed to re-emphasis.

*{sad disturbing minutes later}*

PM: I don’t know if deploying on azure would be better than having the website on AWS. The pages seems slow.

Me: Yep.

PM: Or maybe we separate the asset files from the main site using a CDN.

Me: You right.

PM: The other projects on AWS seems to perform better in terms of SEO. Don’t you think?

Me: I think.

*{this dude literally just lent me a jacket and won’t allow me put it on}*

PM: So after we are done with this update we need to inform the client about the benefits of switching servers to AWS. I believe they will agree or won’t they because the event is close by?

Me: {{pointed both hands at my PC hoping they’ll get the message}}

PM: Oh you done?

Me:

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

6 months ago:

Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner

Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?

Boss: Explore it

Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?

Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again

Yesterday:

Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly

Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago

Boss: ......... oh, really?

Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else

Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?

Me: nope

Boss: ... what do you mean?

Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this

Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm

Me: *sits with resting bitch face*

Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?

Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?

Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...

Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be

Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure

Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it

Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...

Me: Its that or we cut feature X

Boss: ... well we need that

Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets

Boss: ... ok

Fresh internship story/conversation (Part 1)

Happened today:
- "Can you hack someone via cmd?"-cheap coworker at my internship workplace
- "Can you hack the NSA from any device?"-cheap coworker
- "Can the police identify me, if my face is on a Youtube video?"-cheap coworker
- "I can see all devices I have been through when I want to connect to a target as a route.
*talks about hops in a trace route, but uses non-technical terms for it*
*uses "ping host wikihow.com" instead of "tracert wikihow.com" to demonstrate it, besides of that "host" was not supposed to be there in that command*
*he had to google how to use the ping command on Windows*
*finally uses the ping command properly*
"Here, you can see all the devices our machine has connected to to reach the target"
ME: Aha. But dude... you know that all these ip adresses are in fact the same ip. These IPs are not any different. They are all the same. Besides of that this IP is the IP of this *points to domain name on windows cli* domain.
Him: Oh... I had a friend named ... *continues telling me some "hacker stories" from his past*
Me: *ignores him and always just responds with "Aha" to him* -cheap coworker

Happened yesterday:
- "You have programming classes? You must be an expert in Excel then, right?" -internship boss

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

Thinking about this makes me pull my fucking hairs.

The fact that I have to look for the actual content in a website, among all the ads, prompts and fucking stupid design is fucking ridiculous.

Every fucking website is following this designs now. Always showing popups to subscribe to their fucking newsletter the moments you visit the site.

Can you please let me fucking read the content I require first?

"No fucking way. I will block 80% of the viewport with unnecessary stuff. I will place my ads on the left and right side. On the bottom, I will have a blocking div that will prompt you to subscribe to our newsletter. And on the top, we will have this huge fucking navbar which will take 30% of the view. That 20% area left in the middle? yeah, good luck on finding something useful in there"

Then there are this fucking cunts, that blocks the whole website the moment you enter.

"Oh, you need some information, right? Why not just subscribe to our emails first so that we can send your useless junks every now and then".

Oh my fucking batman, don't even remind me of those stupidass videos. Now 90% of the popular website will play a video immediately after you enter the website.

And guess what?! The volume will be amplified to 500% so that that's the sound you will ever hear in your lifetime.

The fucking web is becoming absolute shite right now. We really need a revolution here which makes the websites show the appropriate amount of ads and prevents them from doing all these stupids shits.

Job BS that made me consider quitting? If you find my previous rants, you find a lot of BS.

Here is one (attached is the actual email sent to me.)

TL;DR. The biggest BS part is the fact that I *got approval* from my boss to work on the migration and we already 'owned' specific project and no one else was working on it.

After I got the email (my boss sits right next to me)
Me: "Whoa..what's this!? Two weeks ago you gave me the green light to work on it."
C: "Oh yea...I forgot. Sorry."
<yes, the BS flags thrown all all over the place>
Me: "I'll schedule a meeting with everybody and straighten this out."
C: "That's a good idea, but I'll take care of it."
<10 min. later>
C: "Sorry, J said his word was final. You are not supposed to work on the project."
Me: "I never said I wanted to work on the project, it's already finished and with your approval. That's what I want straightened out."
C: "Yea..yea...I know, but J said to roll back your changes. I tried everything I could to change his mind."
Me: "I don't want his mind...never mind...I'll go talk to the boss if J won't listen"
C: "About that..um...the directive came directly from the boss. It's probably best you roll back the changes and forget this happened."

I knew then the well was already poisoned, so anything I said could be grounds for dismissal (the boss had an itchy 'firing' finger)

Time and karma took care of most of the rage. Not really a month later my boss was demoted back to developer and working on dead-end projects (porting data for reports).

First time my laptop acted as a CV.

I've been in a personal project with my pal for like a three months. We meet sometimes at a cafe which is a very nice workplace, we often see more people with laptops, so we are not the only ones that thinks so.

My pal was waiting for me, he got a table early and then I arrived. there was a guy nearby us.

Me: (this guy has a newest new macbook pro, fucking riche)

-- I sit, put my laptop and start to work with my pal --

The guy starts looking at my stickers without hiding his doing at all. I noticed that instantly

Me: (Crap, he's gonna ask something :( )

-- I kept discussing stuff with my pal for like 5 minutes and then it happened. the guy stands up and... --

Guy: hey! how are you? sorry for bother, are you perhaps developers? I'm asking because I saw your stickers

Me: mmm yes

Guy: Do you have a job currently?

Me: We are in a project (No need to mention this is personal project and I got my full time job)

Guy: Oh, ok, no problem, you see I got a company, and currently we are looking for people to work with us, we want frontend developers with javascript skills preferable, but anything is welcome. Interviews starts next week, so if you are interested or know someone that could be, I'll give you my card and please write me at my mail if anything.

Me: got it, no problem.

-- I tried my best to hide my displeasure face(but I think I showed it a little), for him to being a riche with a new macbook pro, and you know, the interruption, I wanted to be focused while working in da project --

-- I got the card, I read it a bit, didn't dig into too much, there was stuff to do at the moment. the guy already returned to his chair and my friend --

Pal: Excuse me Mr Guy, what's the job tittle?

Me: (FUCK! dude!, we're working in our shit, don't give him more reason to try to scout us. we are behind the schedule and I need to explain this shit to you FFS)

Guy: Oh yes, will be frontend developer(again), but if you are a full stack that will be a plus too, we got some stuff with angular 1.x(ugh), and sencha touch(ugh) and ...(don't remember what else was it)

Pal: Ok and the job is full time in site? or are you open to work remotely

Me: (ok man, you sound interested, that makes me look interested too >:( )

Guy: preferable in site, but we would consider remotely depending on the person.

Pal: Good! thank you very much Mr. X

Guy: cool

-- Later on, like two hours, my friend goes to the counter for more coffee --

-- I text him: dude, I feel the guy will kidnap me or something --
-- then the guy start looking again at my laptop and... ---

Guy: hey! Jhon was your name right? Do you have experience with devops? I see your aws stickers

Me: yes

Guy: do you have experience with microservices?

Me: yes, a bit with lambda, also I've done some stuff with kubernetes, opsworks, rds and whatnot. no biggie

Guy: oh cool! we have a devops job too, there is a migration we need to do for an app to micro services. again if you are interested or know someone that it does. please mail me :)

Me: gotcha

There were no further interactions with Mr. Guy the rest of the day.

I'll be thrilled if someone ask me about my bee and puppycat sticker

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

Let's portray Stallman as a malevolent criminal, dying on the creepiest hill, shall we? Apparently there's even people that make statements such as "if you defend RMS, you're just as terrible as he is".

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Do you have any idea what the case even is?
Richard Stallman has a controversial opinion about a rape case committed by someone else. Gee, what a shocker, people have opinions. Does that make Stallman a criminal himself?

Oh but he's representing open source software. That's why he can't be there.
Oh yeah. Shunning him (and erroneously so) as another Reiser is gonna make open source look so good, isn't it.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writer of Voltaire

People are entitled to any opinion they may have. Just because you disagree with it (and in this case I do too!) does not mean that it can be used to criminalize someone and to ruin their career. That is just wrong.

Almond, are you there?

> Sure, of course.

Oh ok, it said you were on mute.

> I was, I always go on mute if I'm not talking to help cut down on background noise **hint hint**

That's very confusing for the rest of us, can you leave your mic on please?

> Right... Okay.

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

I'm tutoring multiple courses in my school, including CCNA 1, html, JavaScript, IT essentials which is just an introduction to particles of a computer.
[Student]: So do you know that course about computers?
[Me]: mhm.....they all are kinda...you mean it essentials?
[Student]:Yes! The one where we type code between tags, right?
[Me]:Wait....html?
[Student]:Yes!
[Me]: yes, I am helping with that course.
[Student]: Oh cool...so how do I do thumbnails?
[Me]: /Opens the IDE/ same as a regular image except for it's a link that opens a bigger version of an image /blah blah blah/. You know how to insert the image on the page, right?
[Student]: Don't we just open the Google and search images?
[Me]:...
[Me]:....
[Me]:...omg my shift is over...

I wish I was making it up.

Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.

What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.

5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.

And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒

Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.

Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?

Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑

Let me tell you a crazy story

A friend of mine got the idea to make a charity gala for the Swedish event Musikhjälpen. It's a charity event that involves a small group of celebrities being locked up in a glass cage for a week, broadcasting on radio 24/7. During the event anyone can wish a song by donating $5 or more, and it will get played on radio.

So this friend of mine books a huge arena two months before the gala that hasn't even been planned yet, and it all came down to this big thing yesterday evening. With over a thousand people in the audience we managed to collect almost 200 000 SEK, about 22 000 USD. Oh, and did I mention it was all done voluntarily - even the scene and video coverage was donated.

So here we are, having collected a total of over 400 000 SEK (44 000 USD) for the cause of this year's theme; everyones right to be they way they are, regardless if you've got Downs Syndrome or any other disability. You see, this was done together with the Swedish Scouts, and during this week that's the crazy amount of money we've been able to collect for this great cause. Damn it's been great!

Just had to share it. You won't be able to believe what a great feeling this is 😊

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

PM: Can you fix this issue with the file upload?
me: Sure, give me the file that's having the issue so I can figure out why that specific one isn't working.
PM: Oh... it wasn't working so I deleted it.
Me: OK, are there any other files that cause this error.
PM: No... it was a single case. You can fix it anyway, right?

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

My code review nightmare?

All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.

PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"

In a morning 'stand up'.. (SM = Scrum Master, PO = Product Owner)

SM: "Sprint item 42399 ... Did you work with Ken on getting the price service ready for deployment?"
Me: "No, I worked with Dave on the service bus queue changes. Its there in the notes"
SM: "Ha ha...no...right there...it reads working with Ken."
Me: "Those are your notes. You re-assigned the ticket to yourself yesterday."
SM: "Oh...um...you told me you were working with Ken when I asked."
Me: "I'm really sorry, I don't remember you asking or me saying anything about changes to the price service. All the documentation I have is for the service bus."
PO: "I'm so confused, Ken was pulled off another project to work on the Price service for you guys."
Me: "I never talked to Ken, I have no idea whats going on. Did you tell Ken he had to make changes to the Price service?"
SM: "No..I never...um...well....yea...this card was blocked and the service needed to be approved and deployed."
Me: "Ken's changes were for the purchasing service two weeks ago and already deployed. The card is already marked as Done"
<PO rubs his face>
PO: "Good god...do I still need to be here?"
Me:"Um...no? Sorry?"
<PO walks out>
Me: "What changes did you tell Ken to make?"
SM: "Whatever the card says...see the price service."
Me: "Scroll down...see..price related to the service bus, not price service."
SM:"Work with Dave on getting this card closed, OK?"

Good fracking grief. Your ego is so brittle and so eager to look like a boss.
I did my job, you fracking kiss ass. I'm fracking sure when you re-assigned the ticket you told my boss you "had to" because I was falling behind in the sprint.

Why The Fuck do you always have to say "Yes"?

I'm asking for a goddamn opinion. Give me an opinion.
But no, everything I say must be fucking gold 'cause it's always "yes", "you're right", "good idea", "I agree".

It's irritating as hell. It's "yes" even when I say something stupid on purpose.

Learn to say no, for fuck's sake.

My company just migrated our mail servers over to office365. My boss has been excited and could barely contain himself when the migration was done he was having the best day ever after he got a good deal on some new toys...Then I ruined it.

Me (setting up) > WTF!? um...well I guess I don't have email on my phone anymore. These permissions are fucked.
Him > Oh why?
Me > They are ridiculous, I won't give away this much control just to read email.
Him (panicking) > and if buy you a company phone?
Me > Not a fuck it's still a personal device. I'll just sandbox the web version.
Him > Your over reacting, they obviously need them for security blah blah...
Me (sends him the pic) > The minimum system requirement is internet.
(...silence...)

I feel kinda bad for killing his vibe - he's a nice guy and he's only trying to do right by us but now he seems down like his toy isn't shiny anymore because he respects me. I wasn't beating on the stack or his choice (mines running on thunderbird). I just can't support this trend of GOD mode permissions for email / calculator and other single feature apps. I'll use the web app instead. You have to draw the line somewhere...

On the other hand I can't deny that I'm loving the irony that Microsoft just made my life easier and have a deep sense of satisfaction that for the first time ever I got fuck up his Friday :/

How my year has gone so far...

Management: Bobby, we are replacing your old hammer.
Me: Ok cool.
Management: Well actually there's so much going on...here is a wrench instead.
Me: But, this isn't a hammer.
Management: Yes we are aware but we are busy and cannot buy a hammer for a several more months.
Me: How the fuck am I suppose to hammer nails with this?
Management: Oh gosh you are right. That sounds difficult. We will grind down one side of it so you have a flat surface to hammer in those nails.

Management: Oh and by the way, those nails are super important so don't screw anything up.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I am so sick of the stupidity and illogical reasoning of clients.

Client: Descriptions are no longer syncing. Can you please fix.
Me: Problem fixed and deployed.

Client: All the descriptions got overwritten by the sync descriptions. Can you please have manual uploads overwrite the descriptions that sync (but basically auto guess what the client wants). We may need a toggle.

Me: Toggle added.

Client: Can you go through the 100+ sites backups and restore all the product descriptions?

It's like are you serious right now!!??

Back to the cheeseburger concept here...

Client: Can I have a cheeseburger (comes with pickles, onions, tomatoes, lettuce), no pickles. A Coke? Oh, but I would like pickles on my cheeseburger.

Tender: Here is your order.

Client: Why did you put pickles on this!!?? I asked for NO pickles!

Tender: You added pickles towards the end, so we put the pickles in.

Client: No! I thought you would have known based off of my original statement that I asked for a cheeseburger with no pickles. That is the override!

Narrator: See how illogical things can get. We can't just assume/guess based off of illogical reasoning.

I used to work for a company in 2017 that was affiliated with a ruling party's tax information agency. The website was janky and the database .. oh the horrors.

Every single record was a JSON object stored in a NEW COLUMN.

That's right. If you had 10K records then the table had 1 row with 10K columns with each column contained JSON data in it.

I understood then, why government websites are so crap.

Anyway, I untangled it and made the performance better to a degree that my then-boss didn't believe what I pulled off.

But yeah, I never got any pay increments or whatever, It was a good dopamine boost to my boss which lasted only 15 mins.

I don't believe in improving code ever since because of the fact that I ain't getting paid extra, so why bother.

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

You stupid shit jerk fucks.

Your request to disable the coming soon mode was hours ago. Of course google will show you coming soon text when you searched for it. It is not like google is under my arse or something.

And what do you mean it is not showing up on YAHOO!
Who the hell is still using YAHOO! ?
And that YAHOO! showed me that coming soon text result just like GOOGLE when I tried. So why is it not showing that to you? Oh right, maybe because you are old and stupid.

Today is already busy enough with packing our stuffs, stop giving us stupid tasks to fix.

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

My dev colleagues, the ceo, a external designer and me (dev) are sitting in the meeting room
and we discuss the result from the designer. He designed a complete relaunch of a
small CRM for the logistics sector.

The designer is a designer as you know him, big beart, small macbook, chai late
and he designed nothing, he hired a freelancer from romania.

My boss studied software development in the 80s but didn't really developed a software
for about 20 years, but he thinks he knows all and everything.

My boss is constantly complaining about the colors in the design and he would like
a iOS approach. Our system should complete copy the styles from iOS.

The really funny thing happend in just 1 minute. My boss is complaining again about the
colors and told the blue color is way to dark and the designer meant thats not possible the
blue color very bright. My boss sat next to the designer and looked not on the wall where
the picture was thrown from a projector, instead he looks from the side in the macbook screen
of the macbook which was in front of the designer. Then the designer says "Oh my god, the color
changes if I look from the side or from the top of the macbook." The Designer was blown away. My
boss couldn't believe it and did the same movements with his head and said. "Wow, you are right
the color changes".

We all other people couldn't believe that they are so dumb and thought this must be a joke. But
that wasn't a joke. After the meetin my boss told everyone in our company his results regarding the screen.

I wrote every story in a document, and I'm planning to create a book with dumb shit like this.

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Life is hard.

You are born. DNA gets determined. You go through infancy.

Puberty comes and DNA is like
"uh from now you'll pretty much have strong sexual urges, a huge desire to be sexually prolific, nothing weird like being pedo or into rape though".

me: Uh ok.
dna: oh, also, you're gonna be one of those late bloomers, you know, you talk like shit, you dress like shit, you smell like shit.
life: that's true and also you don't have anyone in your life to teach you about that shit, so forget about kissing, having sex, let alone being in a relationship for a long time.

*a lot of years go by with a lot of missed opportunities, mistakes and regrets*

life: ok, you seem to have become a decent sex partner out of a lot of scarring experiences, but there's one problem: you've fallen in love with somebody.

and you're married

and you have kids

me: well, does that mean I can't fuck other people?
life: yeah, no. I'm surprised I even have to explain that, it's called cheating. It will pretty much ruin your marriage, and fuck up your kids.

me: ok, I guess no then. I'm still fortunate enough to have sex with my wife right?

life: yeah... but you still want to fuck other people
me: what???
life: yeah, did you think that falling in love would make you not want to fuck other people? fuck no

me: ok, well I'm very grateful that I get to experience sex at all.
life: yes... there's a thing though, your partner has a much much lower libido than you.

me: ok, well maybe if I exercise and dress better that might change
life: that will definitely help, you'll feel more confident and have more stamina, but every time you retry exercising, you remember how much you hate it and how little stamina you have.
oh, I'm sorry, I forgot you had kids and work, yeah no time or energy for that.

me: ok, then should I just embrace a more liberal lifestyle, like becoming a swinger?
life: ha, fat chance, it's a very taboo thing and you're not that liberal, neither is she.

me: uhhh, i guess i can sometimes watch porn then...
life: watching porn regularly will make the only sex that you have worse, according to statistics.

me: ok, I guess I should get ripped

Boss: our team in El Salvador is having problems with the app. Look at the email I forwarded you.

Me: oh yes. They are running the wrong ionic commands they need to run these commands.

Boss: okay, and that will fix everything?

Me:...Let's just have them enter the right commands...we can go from there.

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike."

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Recruiter: Hi! I'm a recruiter, and you have a position similar to jobs I'm trying to fill. What are you doing at your current company right now?

Me: Uhm. Working?

Recruiter: Oh! What would make a good candidate for positions like yours?

Me: Uhm. A dedicated employee?

I fucking HATE when people tell me:
"Oh you are using Unity? What kind of dumb shit uses Unity! Isnt its only purpose to make shovelware and shit?!"
THIS MAKES ME FURIOS AT MOST POINTS! AND I WANT TO PUNCH THOSE DIPWIT COCKS WHO ALWAYS THINK ANYTHING OTHER THAN UNITY IS GOOD, IN THE FUCKING FACE! TWICE!
unity isnt just for SHOVELWARE and CHEAP SHITGAMES, it has some really good potential when in the RIGHT FUCKING HANDS!! FOR FUCK SAKE!
(If you want an example look up dronethegame.com currently in crowdfunding) FUCK THESE PEOPLE...

FUCK

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Working with a client on his "superior idea" and suddenly this happens: (longer rant)

tl;dr;
Client wanted me to move a div by 3 millimetres to the left and blamed me for not being capable of doing so while giving him a nonsense about different resolutions and screen sizes. (Use a ruler, DUH)

Me: Here's the updated design layout as our designer specified.
Him: Looks good but it needs to be moved 3 millimetres to the left
Me: *Confused as hell* - Wait, did you just said 3 millimetres?
Him: Yes, is that a problem for you?
Me: *Amazed* Well, yes, you see, we don't measure in millimetres. We use pixels.
Him: Ahh, can't you do anything right!? Why do I have to deal with your nonsense of telling me that this is not impossible? Just take your god damn ruler and put it on your screen, then move it 3 millimetres to the left.
Me: You do realise that every person has a different size/resolution monitor so it won't work?
Him: I don't care. Just do your god damn job or i'll find someone else to do it.
*
Story continued in such manner - we spent an hour on skype moving the stupid <div> around until it hit his 3 millimetres mark.
*
His: See, you could do it.
Me: *Sends him screenshot of my own screen (his was 1024x768, mine 1920x1080) where page is broken and not aligned*
Him: Oh come on, you break every god damn thing. You are the worst. I'm going to find a better one. *hangs skype call*
Him: *3 days later* Hi, so, umm, I've talked to other developers and they said it's impossible to measure in millimetres. Can you revert those changes we did?

After all this I've fully realised that this person is sits at computer very rarely and does not how it even works...