WINDOWS USER VS LINUX USER

A Windows User's view on computing

I have the blue screen of death again
You'll never hear me say
I'm happy with my computer
At the end of the day
my operating system
dictates
my choice
in programs i use and the features I've
i have complete control
over nothing
i lose sleep
worrying about getting viruses
and
microsoft patching vulnerabilities in time
i don't have time to think about
some thing better.
i've learned
to live with old software issues
There's no way i'm planning
to change, and
its worth it to me

A Linux User's view on computing
(read this bottom to top)

29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

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 this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

My younger sister is 6-years-old and she argued with me saying the moniter was the computer and the system unit was the charger.

I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

Arghhh, rant time :|

So yesterday I completed a database migration of 167,000 products from an old ecommerce system to a new one. Everything was brought over, orders, customer addresses, everything, really chuffed :)

The only thing the client picked up on was the lack of his spammy "meta keywords" data that I intentionally did not import. I mean the tag isn't used and a list of 40 comma separated random words you'd like to rank for isn;t going to help the sites SEO on bit.

Anyway, the client is now moaning a lot and insisting I add them in. Even after I explained that the meta keywords is gone for good reasons he insists on keeping the data.

Soooo, pointless :|

(note the tags for the sake of satire :) )

My first project and the reason I learnt to code. I was a manager at a supermarket and wanted a discount card for the old people so just wouldnt have to walk to the tills.

First I wrote hello world, then a calculator and then a loyalty card system for my store. It was wildly successful and the fact my scrap code even ran is a miracle. Shortly after launching it in my store I met a like minded investor with an actual dev team hooked it up to a web service and I spent the next 3 years rolling it out nationally to 480 stores. It's still running today.

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

I finally built a new PC with 8GB memory, i7 4790K and SSD for OS.

My old system was a core2duo with 2GB memory. Android studio used to take 20mins for gradle sync and another 20min for signing apks. "Live preview" and "emulator" was a thing of the future for me. Never used it.

But now things have changed. This thing boots up in less than 5 sec and studio gradle takes less than 30sec. I'm so happy right now! Its like a dream come true! *cries in happiness*

Joe showed me how the old system worked.

Worst meeting I’ve been in?

Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”

Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.

I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.

June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”

Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.

That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.

Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

Migrating an old system.

I've been doing programming as a hobby since I was 10 years old, I've always found my teachers are good at IT but not that good in Computer Science and programming, this year a new teacher joined the IT department who has actual experience in programming etc.
Our school uses two services, a rewards system which for some reason can also show our timetable, and another service for displaying our homework. In my spare time I made a project which combined these two services and showed it to him. As the first teacher with actual programming experience he was impressed and now I get to 'pitch' my project to the teachers higher up.

TLDR; It's good to have a good teacher

Me, a 19 year old student at a meeting with a "potential new project" today:

Her: So, we would like a website where people could rent a conference room, and pay for it on the website. After they have paid, we want automated emails to go out to us and the person that rents the room. We basically want an automated rental system.
Me: Sounds fair, what kind of budget do you have in mind?
Her: Well because you are a student and you still live at home, we have a budget of about €200 (~$220). We thought it'd be fair because you don't really need an income yet.

At that point I slowly tried to fade away from the meeting... Please help me 😭

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

When I was 10 years old, all kids at my school got access to school emails. The email address book contained everything in my city, like fire department, all pupils of all schools etc. So I decided to "test" the system by sending out a mass email to everyone in the address book (about 3k) with the question "Hi, how are you?".

The sys admins apparently didn't think very far as I got some responses saying like "You have crashed a server in the capital city" and "I have contacted your local IT admin".

So I went to the IT admin and told him the situation. His face turned red of anger and I remember him almost screaming at me.

Who the fuck doesn't set up protection for this and gives out access to 10 year olds? This was 15 years ago, I really hope sys admins are smarter today!

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

Me:, I built you this beautiful site it's super modular, it's really straight forward
Client: urm we aren't tech people if you could..... Set up all the pages for us using the modules so we can just input the data
Me: 😡 yes I could do that or you could take 5, minutes to learn this system. It's simple 😡 see that title there "left image right title module" . I've done the sample for the templates. So if you need to you can duplicate it! There's even a duplicate button!
Client: can you do it I don't want to waste time learning it right now since we are on a tight deadline

Me in head: fuck off you supreme bitch you try to get my mates dad fired! Now I've done you this huge favour getting you out of the shit 😡 and you won't take 5 minutes to just look at the admin section your old site was wix ffs.
My next move(not yet done): here is a word document it outlines what you need to do 😐

If after this see asks again I'm asking to work with someone else or quitting the project

Because my backup system is this old...

An old friend, just asked if I can make thier company a custom Operating system. not an app an entire new OS... and if I have time to do it on the "side".

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

- Let's make the authentication system so the user can only login in one device at time, because this is more secure.
- You know that this will be a general-public application, right?
- Yeah!
- Sou you want to "punish" users with a logoff on the other device when he tries to login in a new one?
- Yeah!
- But before you said we will use Json Web Token to make the backend stateless.
- Yeah!
- And how will we check if the token is the last one generated?
- We will store the last generated token for this user on a table in our DB.
- So... you are basically describing the old authentication model, with session tokens stored on the backend and communicating them via cookies.
- Yeah, but the token will be sent on the Header, not on cookies
- Okay, so why will we use Json Web Token to do this in the first place?
- Because this is how they're doing now, and this will make the backend stateless.

A moment of silence, please.

April 30, 2058

GNU? Linux? Ha! How ancient! Everyone uses systemd-coreutils and systemd-kernel. Nobody needs those useless old programs. In fact, systemd is so good that even Microsoft recently released their own systemd distro, and adopted the motto: “We Really Do Love Open Source This Time”. To show their love for open source, they’ve released the source for Snipping Tool under a BSD license.

systemd is super lightweight! My system uses around 600 gigs of RAM, whereas Windows uses upwards of a terabyte! I currently use the systemd-gnome desktop environment. I used to use KDE Plasma 18, but it didn’t integrate well with the rest of my operating system. systemd-braininterface doesn’t work very well with my Nvidia graphics card, so I use systemd-x11 like a hipster.

I’ve had no regrets switching to systemd. I feel bad for those BSD nerds. What a laughing stock, sticking to POSIX. Nobody writes POSIX programs anymore.

I wonder what lies in the future for systemd... I hope they fix systemd-oomd.

Okay so my weekend project went well :D put my retropie system inside of this old r2d2 I've had collecting dust. Has a cooling fan inside as well as a 16x2 lcd I was playing with. Got a red led tied to the rpis txd pin, ports in the front for easy access and power cord and hdmi coming out the back.

Gotta love well meaning juniors with completely misplaced intentions.

Nathan: "Hey, do you want a quick 5 minute demo of the code we've changed to move to library version x?"

Almond: "Sure (I wasn't that fussed about moving to library x, but he seemed determined and there's some nice to haves with bumping the version, so we approved it.)"

Nathan: "Cool, so we have this built here, and..."

Almond: "...wait, that's not our CI system!"

Nathan: "Yeah, so I moved to a new CI system too because we couldn't get that working in the old one"

Almond: "...right, we'll need to discuss that, because..."

Nathan: "Sure, we also moved the templating engine as well as there were more examples using this one with library x"

Almond: "...yeah, so I don't think we're looking to switch the templating engine because..."

Nathan: "...and you guys also need to change a bunch of your code as it's all broken since we put the new version in, most of the tests fail..."

Great... so we've got a branch that breaks a bunch of code, switches the templating engine to one we don't want to use, and switches the CI to the one the company is trying to actively migrate away from...

Almond: "We're going to need longer than 5 minutes. I'll put something in the calendar."

🤦‍♂️😬😠

The other day, one of my cousin purchased a POS software for his bakery. He wanted me to look at it. Being curious, I did and found out that software was a decade old using MS Access as DB. He wanted couple of changes in the system and I did those in few mins.

Once I was done, he kept starring me like he never believed I could do that.

Moral: Your relatives never consider you a good programmer :-/

At my old job, me and a colleague were tasked with designing a new backup system. It had integrations for database systems, remote file storage and other goodies.
Once we were done, we ran our tests, and sure enough. The files and folder from A were in fact present at B and properly encrypted. So we deployed it.
The next day, after the backup routine had run over night, I got to work and noone was able to log in. They were all puzzled.
I accessed a root account to find the issue. Apparantly, we had made a mistake!
All files on A were present at B... But they were no longer present at A.
We had issued 'move' instead of 'copy' on all the backups. So all of peoples files and even the shared drives have had everything moved to remote storage :D
We spent 4 hours getting everything back in place, starting with the files of the people who were in the office that day.
Boss took it pretty well at least, but not my proudest moment.

*Stay tuned for the story of how I accidentally leaked our Amazon Web Services API key on stack overflow*

/facepalm

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

Seriously, that was me! Old age Educational system sucks...

I managed to take down an entire school network with one VPN.

In short, I ran a personal VPN and eventually the System Administrators at my old school managed to pick it up as unknown traffic. For some reason, they managed to block the port but not the IP so I changed the port to 443 and their automatic system blocked port 443 on their entire network essentially rendering HTTPS useless for a few hours.

I never got approached about it but my school invested in a new IT team.

I'm only two step far from having an intelligent house, just missing finish my own domotic system and then a bot to control, music, TV, and electricity.

Let's do the list:

1.- Kodi on TV ✔

2.- MPD on a hidden PC inside my old grandpa's stereo ✔

3.- a small data server to provide music, movies and series to Kodi and mpd ✔

(This is something that im trying to do with spare PC's running Linux on my free time)

MPD on a PIII (500mhz + 512mb RAM)
Kodi on a dual core (2.80ghz +3gb RAM)
Server on a opteron (1.80ghz + 1.5gb RAM)

Once on my old job I had several ssh sessions and I was running some tests where I frequently restarted the application... Until I entered the restart command in the terminal of the production system and shutdown the whole application. - Still gives me the creeps today, was just lucky the customer was in a break and we could remotely restart it, so probably nobody even noticed.

Now today I run a "rm -rf *" on a folder that is supposed to be local, but after some time I get suspicious because it is taking too long.. Only to discover that the mount point of the remote resource points to my "local copy". Shit.

What is next? The "delete from ...;" without where clause? Fuck, aren't you supposed to get more experienced and cautious?

DevOps required skillset:

* Frontend engineering
* Backend services
* Database administrator
* Security consultant
* Project management
* 3rd party contract negotiator
* Build system monitor
* Build system hostage negotiator
* Paging, alerting, monitoring
* Search server admin
* Old search server admin
* Old-old-new search server admin
* Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostGres, owner
* Agile coach
* No you shouldn't do that coach
* Oh, you did that anyway coach
* DNS: (Optional) It'll replicate when it wants, and how it wants to to anyway
* Multi-Cloud deployment strategist
* Must be able to translate Klingon to YAML, and YAML to MySQL
* Cost analyzer, reducer, and justifier
* Complex documentation generation in markdown that we should have done years ago anyway
* Marketing's email went to spam analyzer
* Wordpress is broke fixer
* Where the fuck does Wordpress run anyway?
* Ability to fix MySql running Wordpress on marketing's dusty laptop

So I looked at our dashboard and noticed a banner mentioning scheduled maintenance set for 7:00 AM. And I thought to myself, "I never released an update, and even if I had, the maintenance would be performed 15 minutes after the build finished, not at 7:00 AM." So I emailed my coworkers, asking if they had put up the banner, no, no. I started pulling my hair out trying to figure out what caused this banner to be created. Was there some old job that was just now running? I combed through the server logs, thousands of entries later, and I found the banner was installed by some user with the IP 172.18.0.1...which was the local machine. I went through all the users on the system, running atq to see if anyone had jobs scheduled. And there was one job scheduled, under the root user. At that moment, I legit thought to myself, "have we been hacked? How is that possible?" It's wasn't! Then I looked under /var/spool/atjobs to see what the job actually was. And then I saw it. My weekly updater cron job had installed updates and had scheduled a maintenance window to reboot the system. And I smiled, realizing that my code was now sentient.

So I had a fun week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

woah.

Here is my list of horrible techs which are common in my current and previous workplace which should be extinct ASAP:

SAP
SharePoint
Java applets
Java Swing desktop apps
C# Windows Forms desktop apps
ASP/JSP
VB
RemoteApp
Shitty insecure php web apps
Micorsoft Access DB
Windows XP
Windows Servers
Closed Linux-based appliances which lack many basic GNU software and are forbidden to tamper with
Every single Symantec product

Post yours below

Since everyone is posting their system, I'll do it now, too:

- Type: Laptop
- Age: about 5 years
- Weight: 2-3 kg (too much)
- Modifications: Paper below problematic keys; Samsung Evo 850 250GB SSD
- Usecase: School-Laptop with every Office-Suite I could find.
- Pros: Wrecks my PC with the boottime (Gnome > KDE); Looks really sick; Really lightweight Arch installed; Quiet when not under load
- Cons: Really heavy; Battery old and unreliable; Bluetooth stops working after closing lid

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

Another non programming related rant although kinda tech related.
So I work in a distribution center and today I learned box packing.

1. THEIR LEGACY ASS SYSTEM ONLY RUNS ON IE (FUCK ME IN THE ASS SIDEWAYS PLEASE).
2. SYSTEM CONSTANTLY FREEZES.
3. THE HAND SCANNERS RUN ON AN OLD FUCKING LEGACY WINDOWS (PRE 2000 I THINK) SYSTEM AND IS SLOW AS MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Yes, it is VERY frustrating to have to work with this FUCKING SHIT THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING DAY.

Plus side today, the locations I had to pick from today included 200, 403 and 404. Had loads of inside jokes about not being able to find locations and not having permission etc 😆

Here's the story of my first month at CERN :) But first, a little premise...
Before arriving, I expected to be scared, alone and unguided in most of my experiences: after all I was a simple 19 year old about to leave home and friends for 3 years heading out in the world with zero experience on stuff like banking, taxes.. let alone working in a huge environment! The impostor syndrome was at an all time high on that front.
Then, I had the luck and pleasure to find an extremely competent and helpful plethora of people, ranging from my team to other CERNies (yes, that how we're called :P) who took me under their wing and introduced me to all the key aspects of living the place. When the initial stress finally soothed down thanks to this, I finally started to manage focusing more and more on my work, by following day-by-day my teammates who taught me the core aspects of the system and the many projects that are in progress during Long Shutdown 2. Within a couple weeks, I already managed to grasp various concepts that got me quickly on track, and now I managed to develop and integrate new temperature monitoring scripts into a system checking on hundreds of Single Board Computer-based servers :) It's a real rollercoaster of learning and applying under all fronts and so far I'm not regretting my choice of departing.
Luckily I've also discovered I'm pretty efficient and good at my job, which surely boosts my morale :D
Keep you updated as usual!

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

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

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

I'm so over the politics....

System team: So, we've rewritten the entire site and the stats are looking pretty great. We're more than a year into the two-month transition period, and hey, that's cool, no judgement. But now we're gonna hit a license expiration on the old site, so we need to shut it down, or otherwise pay a ridiculously big amount to renew the license.

Business: nooooooooo you can't shut down the old site!

Systems: but nobody is using it

Business: yes, they are

Systems: no, they're really not, we checked and everything

Business: ...........

Systems: ok, well are you gonna pay for the license renewal?

Business: oh hell no

Systems: ok then we're shutting it down

Business: ..............

Systems: ok, it's down

Business: how dare you! We didn't sign off on that! Bring it back immediately!

Systems: are you gonna pay the license?

Business: no! now bring it back!

FML.

Managements definition of an MVP:

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

My definition of an MVP:

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

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Jim comes in and tells me that server RENEGADE-DB1 has no more space left and that he tried to remove a few ridiculous sized log files, but that the system wouldn't allow him. So he used some 3rd party tool to shutdown the processes that used those log files and then succesfully removed them.

Now the database is not working and Jim needs my help.

Hello darkness my old friend.

For being a community based around developers, the amount of people managing to fuck up Windows and then blaming the OS while both my 9 year old brother and the old next door lady keeps theirs running perfectly fine will always be a mystery to me. If you are a developer stop making excuses of how a operating system works and get clever enough to work with it instead of against it. I've been using and developing on Windows for the past 7 years and to be frank rarely do I ever encounter the shit some people post here, mind boggling I would even say pebcak. And just to be clear, I'm not a fanatic, Linux is a beautiful OS.

There I had to get that off my chest, have a nice day.

Old client texted me yesterday: the website and pos system you made does not work anymore... Why ?

I saw that their domain was moved to another host and texted back: "some has moved the domain so that's why."

Client: "how can this be fixed"
Me: "move the domain back"
Client: "but then the new system I bought cannot function".
Me: oh well, then you are in trouble, if the new company you hired to make you a new system and website had been using just a little brain power, this would not happen. Now you have to bring your new system up and working before you open your store...

I could have helped them by pointing a sub domain to the server, but he never ever treated me with respect, and never payed in time, and he did not tell me about this move before he initiated it.

Me: shuts down server and thingking: good luck working with those new "professionals"

I recently got mailed by our support department.

A customer using my program experienced performance issues after updating the whole system; attached is a video recorded by the customer clearly showing the difference.

I watched the video: the old version took 20 seconds to load. The new version 26. After querying the data, it's shown in a list.

The updated version showed 61 datasets instead of 6 in the old version.

I asked the supporter if he even watched the video and he answered: sure, and I'm able to see the performance issue!

Do you know what i hate most?

... commented old code!

What is the fucking purpose to comment old code IF YOU ARE USING A VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM?????

Commented old code is shit, because it fucks the readibility! I saw entire class full of this shit!

DELETE IT, YOU DON'T LOSE IT YOU MORON!!!!

So I just finished my first 40 hour work week.
And just an hour ago I had a meeting.

In that meeting I said pretty much this:
"Your old system is rubbish, I want to make a new one"
"Also we can't use the old framework"
"Also it needs to be in a different language that nobody knows here"

And they went for it!

At this point I think I can sell anything to anyone.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you need properly tested backups!

TL;DR: user blocked on old gitlab instance cascade deleted all projects the user was set as owner.

So, at my customer, collegue "j" reviews gitlab users and groups, notices an user who left the organisation
"j" : ill block this user
> "j" blocks user
> minutes pass away, working, minding our own business
> a wild team devops leader "k" appears
k: where are all the git projects?
> waitwut?.jpg
> k: yeah all git projects where user was owner of, are deleted
> j.feeling.despair() ; me.feeling.despair();
> checks logs on server, notices it cascade deletes all projects to that user
> lmgt log line
> is a bugreport reported 3(!) years ago
> gitlab hasnt been updated since 3 years
> gitlab system owner is not present, backup contact doesnt know shit about it
> i investigate further, no daily backup cron tasks, no backup has been made whatsoever.
> only 'backups' are on file system level, trying to restore those
> gitlab requires restore of postgres db
> backup does not contain postgres since the backup product does not support that (wtf???)
> fubar.scene
> filesystem restore finished...
> backup product did not back up all files from git tree, like none of refs were stored since the product cannot handle such filenames .. Git repo's completely broken

Fuck my life

Tooday
Movie sucks
Games sucks
Most programmers sucks
Buying a house sucks
Try to get a grocery under 200$ for nothing sucks
Have child with no future other then capitalisme sucks
Friends that don't take any news in 8 years sucks
Have a girlfriend that don't sucks sucks
Buying pricey shit and thinking i will survive at least 10 years and broke after 3 years with warranty sucks
All social platforms sucks ( other then devrant)
Working for a shit salairy and doing everyone jobs sucks
Lossing mind about idiots in our world sucks
My english sucks
You sucks
My water heater sucks
My landlord sucks
My budget sucks
My old 16 years old bike i use to go work sucks
Government sucks
House builder sucks at 80%
Bank fuck you everytime sucks
Taxes for any service sucks
Medical system in canada sucks
Educational system in canada sucks

Goes on each day i realize something sucks...

Today at work I saw 2 tech guys (Russians) that tried to fix an audio system at my hospital clinic.

The PL-3.5 cable was unable to transfer any sound to the speakers from the secretary PC.

So they tried to plug it into one of their phones, to rule out the possibility that it is because of the PC headphones plug.

(The speaker volume currently is on *maximum* btw)

1st guy said "Let's play something nice and relaxing, so the patients (mostly old people) won't get an heart attack"
The 2nd ask "So what should I search in YouTube?"
Then the 1st said "Metallica"

Sports commenter at AI vs AI deathmatches.
It would probably go like this:

- UltimateGod the Second launches half of the US nuclear missiles to NorthernEurope!
I guess that's it for the poor bugger.

- WankerBot69 tries to delay its doom by channeling old 4chan archives into a devastating ddos attack. UGtS' logic processe go down for a few nanoseconds... Ugh, that's NASTY! It doesn't even have a mother

- Missiles still going up. Looks like UGtS confused the imperial and metric system just like its predecessor.

- WB69 is now has the upper hand. It just used a SMB exploit and is bow encrypting UGtS's storage.

- UGtS is down. We all hope UltimateGod the third will do better. For now, all hail our catevolent overlord WankerBot69.

- See you next time on Bot Armaggedon folks!

Backstory: A few months ago, I wrote an inventory management web app for internal use by the sales team, logistics, and whoever else might need to use it.

Earlier this week: A few minutes before I usually leave, my phone rings. It's some dude I've never heard of. No idea what his function at the company is, still don't, probably never will, don't care. He's never used the app before, and says he's having problems. His cube's on my way out, so I swing by.

I'm not making this next part up. This dude is probably 60 years old, and he's using a very old looking gateway desktop (with the cow print logo thing on the chassis), running Windows XP (not a typo), using IE7.

I don't know what to say, so I just stare at the desktop, look at dude, laugh, and eventually explain that he's never going to be able to use the system via the web app until his rig is replaced.

What the fucking fuck is this. How could this have happened. How do our it people still fucking have jobs. Better question, how did this thing survive the y2k bug?

20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.

I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.

Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.

After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...

“Corporate group accounting?”

After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.

This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.

In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).

We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”

Its my morning rant time... Me and my team are working on implementing our solution into 20 year old piece of shit POS system which:
1. Uses old piece of shit computers - which is slower than average calculator.
2. Uses .Net 2.0 - and no higher versions could be installed.
3. Has 20 year old documentation - outdated as fuck.
4. Throws unknown and non explainable COMExceptions.
5. Works slow as fuck.

And we have to deal with all its issues as 3rd side integration.. FUCK... FUCK.. FUCK....

"Linux is shit because nothing works on my new DOM 2017/2018 laptop!"

Yes it's true that nothing will work if you put your finking ubuntu 14.04 installation with a fucking old 3.13 kernel in your new Laptop!

Update. Your. Fucking. System.

When the head of a department thinks migrating an old system to a new system is "just a copy and paste job"

> 14 years old
> Read about worms
> Making virus sounds cools
> Decided to make one
> Dreamed how I would use it on my friends
> Made a "virus" that looks for all the exe files and append "malicious" content
> Ended up messing my own system

This story makes me feel that I was
1) dumb
2) slow af( took me days to read/write properly)

One of those has changed now 😜

I need bleach...

Lot of bleach.

When you think that not using a JS framework is bad...

Ever saw a Frankenstein of a HTML, PHP and JQuery? Full rewrite of an old project with more than enough time allowed....

Just... That was not awful enough.

*sobs* so the dev added bootstrap onto this pile of garbage... Instead of rewrite....

Think I missed CSS or included it in HTML? Lol. No.

No CSS. Inline. HTML 4 Tags.

?>
<table width=40 class="table table-striped">
<?php
foreach( $table as $row ) {
....
<input onkeyup="..." onkeydown="..." class="form-control"
...

To give you a basic example of how worse it is...

But the best. The lead developer does not understand why I was speechless.

i need more beer. And bleach. Filth and disgust must get out of my system

Let’s see I suppose the most pissed off I’ve been at work would be....

Being blamed for a clients mistake when their newsletter email settings where being changed over to a new mailing system but during the change over they wanted to still send out mail using the old list. So a single endpoint was kept in place so they could send one last newsletter out after it was approved as part of the migration and they were to inform us when they were done so we could change that endpoint over.

Several months later when everyone had long forgotten about it, the client tried to send another mass mail out using the old endpoint and complained when no emails had been sent.

I was blamed for making this mistake even though management approved the fucking old endpoint to be left in place at the clients request against my concerns that someone’s going to forgot about this and I was never informed to swap it over.

I quit on the spot and walked out the door after that.

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

Was cleaning up some of the old files on my system and found the first ever raycast program I had written.. in c++

This was during a time im pretty sure all of you guys just like me learnt the things that you could possibly do using code.

The experience of the first time I ran this and saw the sprites appear was the awe all of us have experienced in our own ways.

The reason I found this picture interesting is many of us end up losing the wonder and sense of excitement that got us into development in first place.

Go back , clean up your drives .. find your old code. I'm sure there is no better feeling than looking at the past you , writing bad code , with a probably bad language on a bad editor with sleepless nights to get nothing more than the output we wanted.

It's amazing when you realise everything is better when it's simple.

Tomcat

manager: "hey, we have this old java software running and need it to be compatible with our brand new crm system"
me: "okay, i've never workes with jsp before, but i'll have a look at it"
code: undocumented, who would have guessed
manager: "oh and btw. you must test your code on our live system, with our production database, but make sure not to brake anything, our last backup was 20 months ago."
me: "..."

for real i can't imagine what all you people are doing wrong getting those blue screens in windows all the time reasoning your change to Linux. been using it like forever and had experienced some in the early days, very few in windows 8.1 when i was messing with some drivers and shit but not a single one since windows 10 while using it normally on a daily base.

sure, there is a lot to rant about in windows generally justifying a change to Linux but are you talking about windows 98 or fucking raping your system till it BsoD's just to point at it and say: oh Linux is so much better because i don't get BsoD's all the time? or are you using 10 year old hardware?

enlighten me pls

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

Just had a scolding from an asshole behind the wheel for using my old BuzzyPazz instead of their new electronic system. I didn't go with the invitation earlier because I don't want a central server to know where I am, and when. Yet that mofo is gonna threaten me with sanctions because I value my privacy, and even showed that I'm a legitimate passenger that's properly paid to get on the fucking bus?! Catch the right "criminals", motherfucker!!! 😤

Me: hey backend, I'd like you to make three external API calls and a system call, then based on the result can you sort out the output and add it to the data base
Backend: sure *goes and does its thing*

Me: hey html/css, can I please have a square in the middle of the screen and a rectangle ok the left that takes up the full height minus 6px of the border?
html/css: *starts loading*
Me: ok cool thanks *anticipation*
html/css: *displays something resembling a 5 year old who just found out about rulers*
Me: oh ffs is it that hard

You mother fucking piece of shit.

Whoever taught you programming should be removed from history.

And whatever form of intelligence you claim to possess, let me assure you: breathing is the limit of it.

--

Some of the projects I'm working on are really the epitome of "YOLO let's turn the poopomat machine on in diarrhea mode".

The worst: I cannot really give examples.

I've seen the last days everything.

(bash scripting, docker, services like nginx /haproxy/...)

Eval as an template generator in bash...

Declaring an whole environment in an Dockerfile, that should never be used as it is only necessary for building... But not checking if an env file is provided, so the whole thing can blow up spectacularly.

A nearly 1k long bash calculator for system limits, reading out all kinds of stuff from /proc and /sys, seemingly partially stolen from NGINX Docker.

Declaring and starting an own DNS Server to bypass the Docker DNS service inside an docker container.

Mkfifo fun for creating several stdout and stderrs for seemingly no reason...

Actively not using bash, instead of creating shell only functions to emulate bash...

I could go on.

But really. I'm getting too old for this shit.

So today i went to another town for a car service, and by accident i met a very old man looking at the cars in the saloon, he was very calm person, in conversation he said he was system analyst and a COBOL developer in a big industry... but what got me the most he said he survided FOUR heart attacks... i don't know if that was a common practice for COBOL developers but i do php most of the time... so... i just wanted to say hello guys... and delete my browser history if i'm not around for some time :)

Working on a module in an old shitty system. It takes 150 seconds to boot the fucker for debugging, which gives me one minute of debugging before the inevitable crash. Four minutes of debugging costs me 10 minutes of watching the loading splash screen.

I'm about to send my keyboard on a journey, straight through my monitor.

My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.

Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.

So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).

The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.

So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.

So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.

I am not on the list.

My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.

Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.

So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?

tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

I've got this customer who for some fucking reason won't change their DNS to point to our new servers, but wants to fucking stay on that old piece of crap, where we have to ask our sub-provider to generate a CSR to send to our customer to use to sign a certificate to send to us to send to our sub-provider. Because yeah, that's so much fucking easier than just pointing your domain to our new system, and get SSL set up automatically. For fucks sakes! And also, your certificate expires tomorrow, and since our idiot sub-provider hasn't responded to my email about CSR in a week, you basically have no option. So get that thumb out your butt and just switch the DNS!

older clients are returning with my old projects and asking for improvements, I did buy a few very shitty scripts from the internet/ and used one of my friends custom php cms for the other client because I REALLY needed money and they needed the projects yesterday.

Now I'm looking at the code and can't start working because of how messy it all is, I want to remake it all with a good framework and system, but it would take too much time (and they want it fast) and they wouldn't want to pay for the improvements because what they have now works..

I guess the shit you throw out when you're younger does come flying back like a boomerang..

Being a programmer is basically like seeing all the cool tech that you always wanted to work with slip right out of your fucking hands and being replaced by an old system that bad programmers have managed to fuck up completely beyond saving. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys trying to create a human out of decaying flesh, but when you question them, they look at you weird. It’s like wanting to create all these crazy cool animations and innovative experiences, but you end up spending most of your time trying to get a fucking image to line up correctly in marketing emails. My pride has been stripped from me.

Start raising tickets/bugs like you were going to the doctors and things would get fixed a lot faster.

X page doesn't work.

Great information there what about the page isn't working?

Doesn't answer the question and gets pissy when you have to ask them again.

If this was a doctor's appointment all you would've done is walked into my office and yelled it hurts over and over.

Then proceeded to shit on my floor as you're leaving because I didn't diagnose the problem fast enough.

What were you trying to do when the system took a crap?
What did the red text say?
Can you take a screenshot? because the old saying a picture paints a thousand words holds some truth.

If you can go to the doctor and give them a full run down of when you got sick and what symptoms you got in the same order they happened why do you struggle to do the same when reporting a bug.

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Several months ago, I wrote the most beautiful Java code of my life. It was shelved and never merged because it added minimal overhead to every call on the system (I'm talking super small relative to the functionality it provided). I've been asked to resurrect it, but master is too different, so I'll have to rewrite it all. 😭 Since that code, I've been doing research and prototypes - nothing production, and looking back on this old code nearly brings me to tears. I might actually get back to writing code that people will use.

I'm just really emotional about it, and I don't know why.

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

This is stupid but i think is my best idea yet.

So i have an old orange pi, with only 256m memory. Its running a few tasks i need but i wanted to use it for controlling a few things from my phone (lights and powering on my pc) so i thought i would make a server for that. Now mind you, my shirt doesnt say "lightweight backend language", so there was no way the pi couldve handled a struts server. I was digging around and found that php has a shell_exec command. Then it clicked, and i wrote the whole system like
shell_exec("java -jar someprocess.jar"). Now this sounds really stupid but it works and php is really light so it doesnt even slow it down that much.

Thinking about making this into some kinda server/framework/something just for fun.

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

I am making an LDAP user manager and porting application for my workplace.

The thing is, i made the first version of it in PHP already. Shit works fine and it without an issue.

But

I had an itch to redesign it using another tech stack that would be speedier, more tested and using a more established platform.

Enter Clojure, a Lisp dialect for the JVM. In a single day I managed to get 80% of the application done. We have about 80k users inside of our ldap system(maybe more) and I tested it with 150 accounts, so far so good.

If this works I will be the first person to deploy a Clojure application, not only for my organization, but for the city as a whole while simultaneously being able to say that I got a Lisp app deployed and working :D

I am loving this. Really wanna have a Lisp app out there and add it to my resume.

The head of my department, an old timer and really ancient dev smiled heavily when I showed him the codebase. Not only is it minimal, it is concise and elegant :D

I love Clojure

And Texas

I am now the only experienced developer and the person responsible for the delivery of a project AFTER WE ARE ONE MONTH PAST THE DEADLINE! All because user wants to replace the old system with new system with all EXACT SAME FUCKING FEATURES!

After several long nights of learning to resize encrypted lvm partitions, fixing grub, finding screws, and waiting....

I finally managed to move my system files from the old drive to the new SSD.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Today, I say farewell to a piece of software that has shared my professional uprising as a dev, today I let go off an old friend, today i uninstall chrome, after nearly 12 years of dedication, hard work and pain staking performance issues from time to time, you went from the child star that fixed what was wrong with browsers back in 2008, and became the abusive man child that crashes my system when I open you now, so enough with your bullshit.

Today I transfer my things to Edge(chromium) and say farewell old friend, there's only so many BSOD's you can cause just by launching a new tab without hardware acceleration before I can not stand the sight of you anymore.

I wish you a good and stable life, but your creators obviously couldn't give a fuck anymore about being the "light weight and fast" browser you once were.

*hmm let's try a new Linux distro... *
*creates backup, bootable disk and everything*
*installs new distro*
*reboots into old system just to be sure*
*boots into new dust to after checking the old system*

Idk I'm weird... (got triple boot Linux by the way)

Your first operating system?
I'm 16 years old but mine was... Windows XP.
I used it for 3/4 years and I loved it. I miss you mate.

I had used MS Paint for the very first time in school during my computers class when I was 5 (somewhere in 2002) and I loved making sceneries on it :P So I requested my dad to buy me a computer for my 6th birthday and he did!! The old huge bulky boxed system that ran Windows 98!

We owned this system till 2014 when we finally decided to sell it off because it couldn't get modified anymore.

So I'm tasked with rewriting the old software my employer uses to track basically anything in his company. They want to stick quite close to the old workflow as much as possible, I get that.

"Why exactly do you need access to the system? No you don't need to look at it just recreate the flow. I'll give you the sql structure is that OK? Oh and this won't take long, you can copy from the old code can't you? Wait why do you need access to the code? No. "

🙄

I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

!Rant
Had the best day at work today.
This summer I got to do a little work at the company my dad works. (typically cleaning and updating some machines. Stuff that the others don't have time for. Pretty boring)

Suddenly I get asked
"Have you ever developed for windows?"
I have only worked with Linux or Mac/ios (python and swift) so I told him I hadn't , but I could try.

Next thing I am making a system check program in c# (had to learn it on the fly) and I get paid to do it! I GOT FUCKING PAID TO PROGRAM! I don't have any education or whatsoever (only 17years old) but I got paid to do what I love😍😍😍

I am so excited to go to work tomorrow!

Client: it's not a feature it's a bug
Me: comparing with the old system and proofing that it is currently definitely working like it did in the old system
Client: I didn't instruct you to check the old system

Wtf?

We've got this legacy PHP system that doesn't really run anywhere else than on it's server. It's not configured with git, and there's no pipeline. Just plain old SSH. How would you go about managing it?

my first day with Linux.

1. downloaded the Ubuntu 16. 04 LTS and made bootable.
2. install it on my system.
3. after installing wifi is not working.
4. searched on internet with my phone and connected my PC with USB thetering.
5. now installed wifi driver.
6. now my Nvidia card is not working installed its driver too.
6.finally i look at my desktop and its looking really ancient and old.
7. installed gnome desktop and switch to it.
8. now gnome is not much functional so added some extensions like dash to dock, dynamic transparency.
9. now setup java and android studio.
10. after that android studio font is looking blurry. finally stackoverflow made my life easy and i fixed it.

now after all this my system is working crazy fast.. Android studio is opening in just 5-6 seconds.
really happy.. 😍 😍

Being 46 and finally having the chance to focus on software development after years of BA/PM roles, flogging the market trying to get a junior gig, then one day painting a shed with my 16 year old who I introduced to programming about 6 months ago and listen to him speak at length on protocol programming, finer variances between python and swift and his own development of a text based RPG system where he is creating randomized map generation, gear customization etc. only to realize as paint glides down my arm:

" I'M FREEKIN' OLD!!!!"

When did my brain stop absorbing like a sponge and behave more like a brick?

So the Computer Science departent at my university has a shelf where people can give away technical books they don't need anymore. I found a giant UNIX system administration book from 1995 there the other day, and i am blown away by how many useful things i could find in such an old book; basically all of the unix flavours mentioned are long dead (with the exception of bsd and linux ofc), and so is 99% of the software, but all of the core concepts and basic tasks still hold true in 2018... Isn't that amazing? :D Where else can you find a system that still works the same after 23 years?

We spent 9 hours taking a vote, across all of the dev team (including junior devs), about how to design the backend architecture and which security measures we should take.

The CTO refused to listen to the person assigned to the design (me at the time) because he preferred fire-and-forget for EVERYTHING, ignoring all of the blatant drawbacks, and claimed that "there is no truly fault tolerant system", which is such a cop-out that my mind still cannot fathom it.

So therefore, since he couldn't have it his way, we took it to a vote (not my decision). Spent nine hours discussing the pros and cons of HTTP vs MQ systems to arrive at a vote.

I "won", and then left the company shortly after, because it was clear that even though the votes were in my favor, I was going to be "nickel and dimed" to death about the changes and how it's deployed, etc. to the point the system will end up like the previous systems they wrote.

Oh and the fact I was asked to help "improve morale" for the team that was working on the old, broken, overengineered project (I don't manage them nor did I write any of that code) by being assigned to arrange breakfast catering because it'd somehow mean more "coming from a senior dev".

I loved the people there - truly, some of the best people - but the company was broken from the ground to the ceiling.

CTO was let go a while after I left, I guess - most of the dev team has since left too and the majority of their work is being outsourced to Indian subcontractors.

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

Upgraded from a gen 6 motherboard and cpu to a gen 11. And the difference is asounding.

My old setup did everything I needed it to pretty well. Hell it got me through college as well as multiple part time and full time jobs. As well as the system that I learned about 80% of what I know specifically for my career

But alas the old cpu's age started showing and I'd consistently throttle multiple threads when compiling or even just using 7z on large folders. Hell deleting anything above a couple hundred mb would pause for a few seconds

The new cpu is immensely faster on such tasks (probably cause of the extra 2 cores and cpu improvements since gen 6)

I haven't been this excited since I got my first SSD a few years ago and saw the immense boot time improvements. Maybe soon I'll get an nvme drive and really be zooming with this setup 🤣🤣🤣

I upgraded a PC with an SSD and had to reinstall twice because windows thought it would be a good Idea just to use the boot partition of the old drive instead of creating a new one on the SSD.

I first noticed that something was weird because I could only delete the system and not the boot partition on the old drive using diskpart. I restarted the machine thinking it would help only for the bios to tell me there was no os on the ssd. I tried booting from the old hdd and sure enough, I landed on the desktop of the ssd install.

To resolve that I had to unplug the other drive, reinstall windows and only then I could boot normally.

60mins of my life wasted as I had just finished installing all the software...

So I work for a store that sells audio and video equipment. My boss asked me to find old stock that is in our system but not on our site.

We have an event at one of our stores in a week. I made a simple quiz - where people can fill out there email and win... something.

So going through the old stock we found something random, and my boss had the "great" idea to use that as the price for the quiz.

Guess what it is...

nah you won't

ITS A FUCKING TEAPOT.... I AM NOT KIDDING YOU - our audio video store is giving away a teapot as a price!?!?

I just got fired. I don't know if I should laugh or cry, I'm finally free from that slow, obscure, shitty 20+ old dated system, but man, it really sucks to be fired.

Two months ago I started working at a new company, who's system is a huge monolith. The company is a bit over one year old, and the code base is huge. The desire to move to more of a microservices architecture is on the radar, but one of the biggest issues in moving towards it is how we should keep our models. The stack is basically Node.js and Mongoose, where there's about a few dozen mongoose models that the whole system uses, and the issue is that, if we moved to a microservices architecture, how could we keep the models in sync. One idea I had was to keep the models in a separate (node) package that would be shared across all microservices, but then there's the issue that if one model needs changes, all microservices that use that model will need to be updated. Another idea we had was to not share models, but instead let every microservice be in charge of everything to do with a certain type of data (eg. Users are only directly accessed by one microservice, companies by another, and no two microservices share responsibility over data), but that might bring problems when one microservice depends on a certain set of data from another microservice. How do you guys manage all that? Any ideas or tips? Thanks ^^

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:

Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.

Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.

We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.

We LOVED that computer.

Browser rant:

I just want to get this off my chest, IE isn't a bad browser. It's highly outdated but it was good back when the alternatives weren't there. And today it's new "browser update" Edge isn't bad either. Edge really is a neat freaking piece of software. Microsoft tries their best to make a browser for their operating system (and a browser engine for their new app format!) that means it has couple of features the alternatives don't (or only with plugins) - oh and plugins, they're coming too. And still it's not slow either. From my own experience (I say this because every user says their browser is the fastest) it's way faster than Quantum. Yet Quantum is still a very good browser because it's faster than the old firefox, I guess it's open source(?) and still a privacy focused browser. Chrome (my personal favorite) on the other hand is really the fastest thing you can get - if you allow it to use all your ram - (if people like linuxxx say firefox is faster for them, I'll just smile) but for everyone worrying about ram usage and "spying", well - you know what I mean. And still I can understand people trying opera or FF/Chrome/Edge mods, I myself love "Monument". Just stop saying a browser is bad because it doesn't have what you like/does have what you don't like. The only bad browser is Midori, okay? 😘

Tl;dr
IE isn't bad but old. Edge isn't bad today. Every high end browser (edge, quantum, chrome) has their perks and none of them is "bad".

Q/A:
What's your favorite Browser? Comment below

Holly crap..... Just fixed a 7 months old bug in a system i worked on and had to leave it for 7 months coz i just wasn't seeing what i did wrong and today..... everything simply unraveled

It's a flask app and i got stuck on updating a column in the database and also it created duplicate configs on one of the configuration functionality

Figured out what was causing duplicates
A different function was creating new configs instead of updating...bypassing duplicate checking in the config function

Dont blame me for making Minecraft plugins, but holy shit i really hate stairs right now.

Im modifying some old code of mine to add extra features, and i just need to be able to rotate stairs 90, 180 and 270 degrees, then im past this bump.

Stairs get their direction based on a byte value that makes no fucking sense to me.

North = 3
West = 1
East = 0
South = 2

Ive been drawingto see if that made me go "oh like that", checking if the bits of each value had a system, and now im here.

Titshit.
I dont know who made it like this, but i really dont want to make some static switch or if/else statement to process this directional trash. I want it flexible.

If you spotted a system to the numbers, please mail me a rock, and then tell me how i fix this.

macOS fuckup continued. Today I used a camelcase name for some new file and a directory. Later I didn't like it and wanted to change to lowercase. Pushed it to bitbucket: now I had both versions! Hold my goji berries, what's going on? Maybe some git config screw up? After a bit of fiddling I remembered an old Linus' rant on Apple's file system when they wanted to adopt case insensitivity. So wait, did they actually do that shit? I thought I was on a unixoid, bastardized BSDish system, that apart from all the oddities that Apple bestowed on it, that there was still some sanity left... But, no there isn't. AFP really defaults to case insensitivity.
I have no words.
So switched to my Debian, where I resolved the duplication in two secs. Now Linux feels even much more comfy and home.

I just had a new employee, barely out of school, question whether or not we are ready to start a big refactor of an aging legacy system. She knows nothing about the system we are about to attack, barely has 12 months experience as a developer and knows nothing about the past 6 years of countless meetings, discussions and experience leading to the decision to refactor. Still, she's not "convinced" we are ready to get started.

Gen Z - they sure are something different. God damn it, I know it sounds old but where's the fucking humbleness? Spoilt little shits, the world is fucked.

Refactoring a method of a 5 year old system. Probably one of the ugliest code I have ever seen. This is just a little piece of the ugliness

Linux software RAID and LVM are pretty powerful.

Bought a new server case for my home file server / VM host. 3U with 16 hotswap bays. Had 2x software RAID1 mirrors already with everything on them. Inserted 2 new disks with system running. Created new RAID10 array using these, with their mirrors as "missing".

Created new physical volume. Extended volume group into it, then used pvmove to transfer every logical volume across. Shrunk volume group to no longer use the old RAID1 array, disassembled that array, added its disks to the new array... Now just waiting for the mirror disks to sync up.

All this, with the system and several VMs still running.

And with a backup, of course ;)

Nothing like good old Adobe flash on Windows 2000 to keep air lines on time... Oh wait, what? Their computer system crashed again? Oh well, never mind :(

Helping a client to update their 5 years old payment system to support the new mobile PayPal library via Braintree.

Found out you need to install a server SDK that requires PHP 5.4.

Installed and then realised the server is still on PHP 5.3 (CentOS 6).

Panic.

Told my client that they require a new server just so that I don’t need to manage the PHP 5.3 to 5.4 update on their live server and I can install Node to use the Braintree NodeJS SDK 😇.
Feels like heaven.

A new currency is emerging in our industry. It is called "blame".
Who is to blame if we don't meet the deadline?
Who is to blame if the rushed release has x bugs?
Who is to blame if nightly build breaks, because our CI-Server is an old hunk of junk and "management" didn't approve the upgrade?
Our customer blames the delay in HIS infrastructure on us, because our system requirements are too high.

Blame blame blame. This currency is the new idol of our management team. Everyone gets blamed. They manage their "blame" ledgers instead of approving the tools we need or give us reasonable deadlines. Why Lord, oh why are there SO MANY MORONS in managment? You know what, dear "managers"? FUCK YOU., FUCK YOU SO HARD YOUR MOM WON'T RECOGNIZE YOU. YOU COULDN'T POUR PISS OUT OF A BOOT WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON THE HEEL.

I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.

So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.

Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.

Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.

BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"

I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"

And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?

I can't for the life of me believe how anybody and fuck up a library so bad.

It's easily over a decade old and one of the core groups of libraries we use.

The abstractions suck so bad it's a pain trying to get anything to work.

What's worse is there's no future for it. Nobody dares to refactor this or some shit in a 20yo system might break. Fml

I'm ashamed of it, but I want to share my tifu-story:
My colleague asked me if I could rename his windows user name because he married and changed his last name. I changed it in the Active Directory, but he got some problems when he wants to log on. On every startup his old name appears. Simpliest task. Let me google that.
Easy going, let me just change this registry entry. Reboot. Old behaviour. Okay, I changed some of the other entries. Reboot. Yeah, his new name appears. But wait a moment. Windows just nulled his entire user profile and deleted all the data. "oh, haha you have a backup, right?" - "no, I saved everything on the desktop, all my work is gone!"
But at the end, the boss was mad at HIM, because he doesn't used the file server or any backup system.

i am not a smart man

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

Me :" bro let's create an operating system named "MyOS"

Him : "ew......"

Me : "What?"

Him : " Why would I create an operating system named "Your Old Ass"?"

Was called on site because my client was having a problem with a system I developed years ago, a LAN based management system. The horror came when I asked for the most recent backup. It was only two years old..

Forgot to do server side verification.

As the service (an injectable game) was expanding and the old system relied on server side calculation without anything returned from the user, the expansion was done a little too fast.
The result could have been anyone passing wrong data and receiving the grand price like a holiday worth $10k. Quick fix ...

We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.

Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.

Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.

Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.

Being assigned an old system that has scarce/cryptic documentation and uses global variables for everything. Not a maintenance nightmare at ALL.

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

System Programmer Saga

I'm an old phone operating system programmer. We had to flash ROMs every time. You Android kids don't know how good you have it. Get off my lawn!

I'm in involved in a situation where one old corporate is helping build solution for another old corporate's Windows 98-XP systems.

Still a better love story than twilight.

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

Oh, crikey: Windows 10 "Inaccessible boot device". Good old "bootrec /fixboot" didn't work, and any claims that "automatic repair" does anything useful is apparently bollocks.

So for the first time ever, I had to use a restore point to revert the system to where it was before Xamarin was installed. The prime suspect for this cock-up is Intel HAXM, since I don't belive anything else in Xamarin possesses the power to accomplish a boot loop.

So, just pulled another all-nighter..

On our platform I switched a quite big customer to another stock keeping system to pull them into automatic FEFO handling etc. Just a better stock keeping system overall.. I made it.. *self hi-5*

Evidently the crons caught that change, and CLEARED ALL THE STOCK LEVELS as they're now managed by said system...

Had to pull the counts, locations, expiry dates and lot numbers from the history table and old database fields, add them to an Excel sheet and then add all gathered locations by hand back into the new system, whilst also setting the new settings for them.

39 unique products that were gathered over 190+ sku objects... (Somebody didn't get object oriented, or was trying to KISS themselves, clearly...)

That's 6 hours of extra work for a stupid fuck up.. Oops? (:

Postman Rant

wow just wow ! just got turned my home internet off by the cable company. And they are right to do !
I apparently didn't sent them their money. But why didn't I ?
Im the typo guy who likes a bill in any type and then pay it. Sorry for beein old fashioned there. Now this lack of human intelligence aka. my postman didn't brought me them. Instead I always receive others Bills and shit( ok sometimes he drops it right ). Does he think the people
in this house live in a fuckin hippie community or some
shit where we all are one system. WTF ????

But my revenge will come you giant shitpile, except from reporting you to your office.
You FUCKED with my internet connection. That's personal

It was in old days when I was working in java and windows systems.

Java and different log4j versions across dependencies caused system not working only on production server.

Turned out some of libraries got log4j embedded and conflicted with other log4j.

It worked in all computers except production one.

Actually that was my main reason to switch my career to python after that dependency hell.

Another one was windows server 2008 tcp connection limit set to 200 or something.
We needed to change registry to get our servers working. After this case we finally managed to convince people to switch to linux.

Anyway any non standard error when you got multiple layers communicate with each other is hard, practice make it easier to solve those problems as your success moment comes faster.

The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.

The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.

I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.

I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.

We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.

"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"

"Duh of course -- but let me check..."

I got to see my paper for information system today and I got half the marks from total.
The teacher wanted me to write the latest technology properly from fucking 10 year old book.,🤐😠😡

I fucking hate Visual Studio!

Don't get me wrong, from time to time I actually enjoy it but not today.
It all went south when I tried to add a new handler to an fucking old asp.net webpage. I had the access the 'Range' headed to stream bits of audio and video files to the client. It was working absolutely fine for the first hour and a half, after that point the fun started...
VS decided that my source code and the binaries won't match anymore. Everytime I tried to add a fucking breakpoint or debug this cunt of an error it would just refuse
The worst part that made me go apeshit was when I finally got a breakpoint and the exception. Some unknown fucking system dll just kept on killing my thread without a proper error message because it's optimized to the fucking moon and back!

Any ideas from the devs here on what's going on and how the fuck I can fix this?

Following my first rant, my boss had the brilliant idea of running the old and the new architecture in parallel. I had advised that it won’t be ideal since the same Scala code was ingesting into 2 different Kinesis streams and one was running an old KCL written in Java where as other was consumed by a Firehose delivery stream(eventually we will be ingesting it into Firehose directly). I had told few manual + automated tests on Code as well as from a functionality of the new architecture and a set of tests for checking the integration of the new Producer code with Consumer.

The statement I got from my boss was “This is the test, we test it on production in parallel”. My boss had a brilliant idea to fucking test the new code on the production directly but running them in parallel without accounting for undefined behaviour it might cause in the current production system. I mean my boss should get a Nobel peace prize for shattering our mental peace.

Anywho, we started the deployment today at 5AM in the morning. I had all the aws services deployed. Was just waiting to deploy the new Collector code which we did at 5AM. Immediately after 5 minutes the system went bonkers, there was fire, blood, demons and I was smoking a cigarette with the biggest “I told you so smile” on my face. I’ve just written an email to my boss and have told him calmly that “Listen motherfucker, 90 percent of the software companies aren’t idiots to focus on testing and quality. We need to start spending time on testing and quality else we’ll again be in the same soup after few weeks again”.waiting for his reply

At my internship we as interns had to work on a CRM system. We used the google api since the company is using google accounts already. Before the project is done my internship is over but I could start my traineeship 4 weeks later.

Together with another old intern/now trainee I spent 4 hours on debugging the login system the first day we came back. Turns out somebody thought we didnt need the application keys anymore and thus deleted the application from the google developer console....

Target: Migration of an old system(not developed by us) to a new without touching existing applications.

Todo list:
[✅] Migrating old webservice from VB.NET to C#.
[✅] Decide if we go to the old system or the new based on the document class.
[✅] Start implementing same logic to the new system so the results will be the same.
[✅] Stunble across a search method with fuck up logic.
[✅] Create test cases to foresee all cases.
[✅] Implement logic for new system.
[✅] Stuck in infinite refactoring to fix existing bugs brougth from the old code to the new while mantaining the response the same.
[ ] Become insane during the process. (In Progress)

When I started with PHP I had to implement an administration system for a small organization.
They using the smallest and most cheap web hosting to host the system and also their websites.
They host three systems and websites on three different web spaces.
Some weeks ago I got a call from them, that the system doesn't work. After a short investigation, I discovered that their '"designer"/boyfriend-of-the-boss created a new Wordpress site and thought it would be a good idea to change the PHP system to 7.2. The system runs on an old CakePHP (don't kill me for that, I had no experience -.-') version, which does't work with PHP 7.2.
I told them what the issue was and that they shouldn't change the PHP version to 7.2 because the system won't run on this version.
Some a week later, the same call, another administration system, the same reason, the same warning from my site.
Today, the third system doesn't work. I told them this is probably the PHP 7.2 problem again and explained, how they could resolve it themselves.
Suddenly I got an email from the designer: no, this time it is another problem, he didn't change anything and it just doesn't work anymore. And it is very urgent.
Guess what was the problem...AGAIN!

Fuck Google! I'm trying to write a fucking parential app that I can install on my little sisters phone, because I won't download something that is meant to monitor activity on a child's phone when I am capable of writing one. Problem is, I test it on my phone which has Android 10, because I am not keen on testing with a slowpoke out of wood brick that the target phone is. Android 10 does not let you do a single shit that is needed for a parential software. You try to turn on airplane mode to prevent messages from arriving and such? Well.... nope, you can't. Okay... airplane mode is too drastic. Let's try turning off WiFi and Data. Fuck me, you can't do that either. I gave the app fucking system permissions and It laughs in my face when I try to access some simple shit like... WiFi state. Miserable. I wonder if it will let me mute the fucking volume on the phone. I guess It won't, because "You shouldn't set these things on a user's phone.". Well, fuck that. That's exactly what I need. That old brick does not have built in parental settings. Jesus.

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

I've worked on a year to replace an old legacy system after years of shitty maintenance. We're almost there. So damn fucking close.

Started a new job this week, picking up the front end development of a property management system, since they're old developer just left.

Oh my god was his code bad, inconsistent use of js versions e.g only sometimes using lambda for anonymous functions, variable names that were a single letter, no comments, no documentation, and over 30000 lines split into almost 30 js files, following the logic of it is as fun as a hedge maze with no exit.

I need help and advice!

I currently work as an consultant at a large corporation. Came onboard for 1-2 years to help rebuild one of their platforms. From the beginning the mindset was that the finished product should not be developed based on anything else than customer testimonials and interviews regarding functionality and design. However, they’re building their platform developed and distributed by this other company. Basically they bought a system that is incomplete regarding to being compliant to the specifications brought to them when they decided which system to go with. Now we’re trying to build around all the issue this platform is causing us. The code base for the system is like something a monkey did with their feet. Nothing makes sense and it’s layers on top of layers of 10 year old code. I f-ing hate it. I don’t know what to do. We have some many technical limitation that it’s impossible to create the vision they had from the start.
I’ve been thinking about talking to the highest chief in the department as he has been pissed earlier about project managers not escalating issue to him earlier. But I don’t want to step on anyones toes. Should I leave the project? Should I talk to the chief? What do I do? I’m miserable🤯

I'm a fullstack dev, but this is coming from the point of view of frontend work in Rails 7. I'm using jsbundling-rails. I tried to get importmap to work, but that was fool's errand.

I absolutely love the module system in modern js. I love how closely it resembles the way python does things.

npm isn't the meme I was led to believe it is. I also don't need things like toString.js, so maybe that's why.

I also love using flexbox. It's so straightforward and I don't have to rely on hacks to do basic things.

Where have I been you ask? Over my head in paying work that never gave me the chance to update old but working code.

jquery and Bootstrap plague me from when I built these things years ago when they were needed to get things done quickly. My skillset and the technologies available to me have also drastically improved, allowing me to do things with fewer libraries.

So I had this thought all of a sudden. (Without any drug in my system)

Why are we still developing same old systems, softwares and web applications till now?

Websites, games and creativity involved development are understandable because people have different taste.

But workflow and process are supposed to be precise, standardized and consistent. No?

Is it because businesses are operating in various ways? Then again why?

Shit. I should stop my thinking at this level. 😑

Meeting about brand new web app system to replace an ancient MFC app.
director: can we just use the old subsystem manager? (horrible mix of management ui and SOAP listeners in the same app...)
developers: No, that's an MFC app... not even just a server.
director: but... can't you just plug it in? you're using web components right?
developers: *weary sigh*

My dumbass colleague thinks the best idea to a Restful API backend is to store some kind of session based on the token.

It'd be great if that remained as an idea instead of this 11 month-old system he built before I got in.

MOTHERFUCKER.

Yes, it does mean that if the server boots for whatever reason, everyone has to login again to get a valid token LOL

Boss thinks the CMS that another dev built over the course of a good year, will make customers say "ooooh yeah, I will definately come to you and pay a shitload of money for a buggy and unfinished system, even tho I will never be able to leave with a working copy of my website like I could with wordpress".

The whole effing things is based on an old, outdated version of a popular PHP framework.

Oh yeah, and I can not update <the framework> because the dev has tinkered with the core files :)
Yay.

The whole fucking thing won't run on PHP7 and will explode right into my boss's face.

Not mine though, because I will be gone by then :)

We take over development of a live customer facing system and PM agrees date for our first code deployment with client CIO
Me: The dev and staging environments don't have any test data currently as the old agency screwed it up
PM: Well you better load some
Me: There isn't any... It'll take 10 days to copy prod db due to hosting provider SLAs, leaving 1 week for SIT, UAT and performance testing (assuming they don't screw up)
PM: Well the date is set, 1 week will be enough for testing