One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

EDIT: since this announcement, collabs have been made free to post for all devRant members!

Introducing two big new devRant features!

First, the one @trogus and I are most excited about - Collabs!

Collabs are an easy way to start projects or work on existing projects with the awesome members of the devRant community. You can post a collab listing for the awesome open source project you started that could use some more contributors, that fun idea you have for a brand new project, or really anything you want to gather some fellow devs for. We think it will be a lot of fun.

Collabs also is a devRant first - it's our first paid feature. For each 2 week collab posting, we're charging $14.99. But we wanted to make sure to thank devRant users who have been with us for a while and anyone who contributes often, so anyone with 2,000 points or higher (now or in the future) gets one free collab listing!

The main reason we see collabs as a great first paid feature is because requiring payment or 2,000 points serves to be a slight barrier in posting a collab. We think for collaborations to be successful it's important to have some way to keep out listings where the poster has no intent of following through and we hope this is a good start to doing that.

NOTE: if the collab you are looking to create is devRant-centric (ex. a devRant Chrome extension), we will give you a free credit especially for that so you don't have to pay or use your earned free one. Just contact us (info@devrant.io) if your project falls into that category.

In addition, after tons of demand from the community, you can now change your username and email address! One important note is that you only get to change your username one time every 6 months, so use it cautiously :) You can access this feature in the "more" tab, then settings, then "Edit username or email."

If you have any questions or feedback about any of this, just let us know! We hope everyone enjoys :)

The beginning of my freelancing time. I was so naive. Didn't even used contracts...

This one client wanted a website with 2 specific features until a certain time. It should look nice, but only the features functionality was defined. All seemed reasonable at first.

I delivered 2 weeks before the deadline. The client was furious, as it didn't look like they imagined. They wrote me 8 lengthy emails with very fractioned feedback. It was becoming unreasonable.

But hey, I'm a newbie in this business. I have to make myself a name, I thought.
Oh was I naive....

This whole project went on for 2 more months. The client was unhappy with every change and 2-5 emails a day with new demands were coming in. I was changing things they wanted done 2 days ago, because they changed their mind.

Then they started to get personal. They were insulting me and even my family. My self-confidence dropped to an all-time low.

In the end I just sent them all the code for free and went to therapy.

BTW: this was also my most important experience, as things went up hill from then on. As Yoda once said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

One of my worst meetings, as the sheer rage was unbelievable.

Backstory:
Architect: "Stop duplicating code", "stop copy pasting code", "We need to reuse code more", "We need to look at a new pattern for unit tests" etc.

Meeting:
Architect: What did you want to talk about?

Me: I built a really simple lightweight library to solve a lot of our problems. Its built to make unit testing our code much easier, devs only need to change a small bit of how they work.

Architect: I like the pattern a lot, looks great ... but why a library? can we not just copy the code from project to project?

... do you have a twin or something?

Me and my love-hate Linux.

I lost virginity really early. In the age of 5 it was my first time with windows 95. I spend almost 10 years with Windows before something happened that would change everything. I met Linux. Her forename was Arch. I had a crush on her right from the beginning. It didn't take long for me to abandon windows. Arch had everything I wanted. She had latex which was pretty hot and looked simply and elegant on her. Sometimes she was really hard to deal with and almost drove me crazy, but I knew I fell in love.

Until that day. I had to write a short paper which was quite fun and Linux helped me alot. It was a breeze to work with her. The evening before the deadline she was quite thoughtful. She sometimes was, so I thought it'll be alright, but this time was different. She struggled a bit, so I put her to sleep and she never woke up. I brought her to the emergency lab which was open 24/7. Since no one was there I had todo the surgery myself. After 5 hours I was almost to tired to continue when she finally woke up. I asked her about the things she should remember for me - then I killed her. I started to hate Linux for what she had done to me. The unbelievable stress and horror.

I returned to Windows. Besides that she got a bit more curious what I was doing when and where nothing really changed and she was glad to have me back. I just was happy how simple our relationship was.

One day then, I couldn't believe it at first, I met Archs sister. Manjaro. No matter how strange that is, but it was as if I would meet Linux again for the first time. She was just a bit simpler but as flexible as arch. Since then we are happy together. It seems that we both just grew up a little.

And with Windows? She got even more curious! Actually I have the feeling she is stalking me now, but I don't regret anything!

Boss: Can we add a [Close] button at the top right of the modal instead for all the items, the back at the lower left seems out of place.

Me: What modal? You mean move the back button to the top right of the page?

Boss: And make it say [Close]

Me: But it navigates Back. It's not a modal so it doesn't close. [Back] makes more sense than [Close].

Boss: Ok
...
Boss: Change the [Back] on the modal to [Close].

Me: But... fine...

Buttons all now say "Close", they all have double quotes. No one has said anything.

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

Client: Please fix the logo.
Me: Okay, what needs to be fixed exactly?
Client: Put this word next to that word(shows me an example).
Me: Okay, no problem.
*after 5 minutes*
Client: You did not do what I asked for. Please fix the logo. Make it look better. Make it bigger and more outstanding. Dont change my logo
Me: Okay, I will revert the changes.
*Reverts to the old logo, and only does that as I do not fucking know what to do with oudstanding for fucks sake*
Client: I will talk to your boss. No one cares. My web site is not even finished and no one cares.
*It is finished, now the client looks for small things to make a big issue of*
Me: Could you please tell me in detail, what do you need to be fixes?
Client: I want the wording better. Im going to talk to your boss...

well fuuuck fucking fuck Im pissing blood!!!!!!!!!

This isn't really a hacking story but it does remind me of something I did as "revenge."

In middle school, this one fool kept bullying me. Always tried to harm me, always tried to insult me, always tried to make me fall during PE.

I hated him a lot, so instead of trying to kill him as planned, I did a harmless little keylogger prank thing.

I installed a keylogger on the school's laptop before class. (I did it during break, and when class started, I placed it on his desk.)

He took the bait, and instead of doing work, he logged onto his social media accounts. Now I had his passwords and everything.

When I went home, I logged onto his social media. I checked his messages so I can get some dirt on him, didn't find much except for the fact he snuck out a few times, and smoked before.

I changed his profile picture to some cringy anime thing and messaged one of his friends (the one who always copied my test answers in History and would steal my homework) and I said, "tell --- that if he doesn't stop being an asshole, I'll do worse than "hack" his social media."

It freaked them both out a bit, but didn't change their behavior, which is a shame because my threat was empty. It's not like I was able to do anything more than that in middle school. To this day, they still have no idea who did that.

This was about 4 years ago.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

So the remote manager who won't reply to my emails or slacks, won't invite me to meetings with product / design, won't ask for my opinion on deadline dates and won't tell me whats being said in meetings (despite repeated effort on my part to change this);

Has decided to send an angry email, cc'ing a bunch of people, about "constant deadline slippage" and poor planning on our part focusing on features that should have been de-prioritised.

ahem
*clears throat for maximum yelling rant-ability*

<rant>
I HAVE BEEN EMAILING YOU FOR FUCKING WEEKS ASKING TO TALK ABOUT THE DEADLINES YOU FUCKING COLOSSAL ASS CLOWN.

I'VE BEEN REPEATEDLY TOLD THAT THESE FEATURES ARE A MUST HAVE AFTER ASKING TO DE-PRIORITISE THEM, AND HAVE TOLD YOU THE DATES ARE NOT FEASIBLE.

ONE MORE, ONE MORE EMAIL OR BAD COMMENT AND I'M EXPENSING A TRIP OVER THERE, TO KICK YOU SQUARE IN THE NUTS AS HARD AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. I'LL HAPPILY BREAK MY FOOT OFF IF NECESSARY, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT.
</rant>

... the above is work appropriate to email back to him and all the higher ups right?

Client: Please remove the address inputs from the inquiry form. Our marketing strategist said that more people will fill out the form if there are less input fields.

Me: But you are required by law to include the address in the generated inquiry PDFs!

Client: Can you remove the fields and still include the address in the PDF somehow?

Me: No. How would the website know the users address without asking for it.

Client: Okay. Wait! Can we change the form to just one large input where the user has to enter everything at once? That is even less inputs so more users would do it, right?

Me:...

Ask for one more change, I dare you, I double dare you mofucker!

- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one

- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!

- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!

- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts

- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..

- netikras, please share your scripts with your team

- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script

- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!

- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered

A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.

When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.

It just makes me tick!

Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time

Client: This blue looks a bit too white against the white background, please make it more standout.

Me: But this is your corporate colour and it is one of the colours in your branding guide. In it, there is also a warning saying “don’t use colours outside our palette” and “don’t use coloured typography on coloured background”. So you should use this blue only on white and you are not suppose to change the colour.

Client: Yeah, keep the colour but make it more saturated and change the tone a bit, so it has more contrast.

Me: 🤔

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird and scary.
Very scary.

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

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

*on call*
hr: hello , are you looking for a job change.
me : yes
hr: ok congo we have one opening for full stack developer
me : ok whats a jd?
hr : do you know reactjs?
me : yes
hr : do you know nodejs?
me : yes
hr : do you know bootstrap, jquery, photoshop, blender?
me : wait is it job for developer or graphic designer
hr : some time we give little task to our developer about editing photo and video
me : hmm intresting, I never tried blender but I can try if necessary. photoshop and other are ok for me
hr: that's great, we are looking for few more skills
me : ok
hr: . net and django

I started laughing😂😂😂😂

hr: what happened?
me: thank you for entertained me today, day was really rough.

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

*rants to some people I met in a cafe about how irresponsible making a ground rail live is*

Girl: "well people do make mistakes, right"
Me: "but they shouldn't! It's civil engineering ffs!"
Girl: "that doesn't change the fact that it's impossible for people to not make mistakes"

*realizes that I'll have to explain redundancy*

Me: "okay, so I have 2 mail servers. If I make an inevitable mistake, during an update or so, it only affects one of the servers but not the other one. So service is uninterrupted."
Girl: "that's far too complicated and technical.. explain it more easily."
Me: "alright, what job do you have"
Girl: *tells her job*
Me: "alright, so imagine that you get sick or go on a holiday or something. When there's someone else in the company that's got the same skills, they can ensure that the job gets done regardless. That's redundancy."
Girl: "aah, still too complicated!!"

What the fuck?! I removed all of the technical stuff and it's still too complicated?! How willfully ignorant or plain stupid can you be?!! Well fuck her then, but not in the way of taking her home. Now guess why I don't really like the muggles in my town. Fucking idiots!!!

"But muh BuzzFeed, conspiracy theories, deferring updates because they hog my WiFi, and casual games on my iPhone"

FUCK!!! FUCK PEOPLE!!!

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

I love when job postings are like, you will use THIS tool, and THIS is how it will be accomplished!!!! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

bitch, i'm the senior engineer, I should be the one picking and choosing tools to match your needs, not you and HR pals!

no wonder your job offer still isnt' filled!

i'd love to ask these organizations why they chose such boomer technologies in the first place and why there is no effort to change to much more developer / user friendly tools.... just a red flag from the start

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."

🤦‍♂️😬😠

Today I've been mocked by a fucking coffee machine.

So I was at a small train station, everything was already closed except for a small coffee machine

Dumb I, for whatever fucking reason, decided it'd be a great idea to get a highly overpriced cup there.

Now, the fucker made me the drink but instead of giving change, it started "shooting" coins in my direction (there was no flap on change box)

As I'm picking up my change, this abomination of a machine performs a cleanup, spitting some shit into my drink

I couldnt drink it obviously .. threw the overprices drink away, bought another one... Got shot with coins again... Whata pain... Just to figure out... There's no more cups 😭😭

It made the drink into the tray...

AaaAaAAAaaaaAAA

Fml

begin_rant()

I like that coding is becoming more and more popular.

I like that more and more people are taking steps to manifest there ideas and potentially change the world.

But for fuck's sake... can't geeks be allowed to be the fat pimply introverts of the olden days?? This used to be a realm for the misfits, and now the same assholes who tormented said misfits are joining in and making the rest feel inadaquit all over again. You can't just be a coder anymore, now you have to be a good looking and health crazed professional with great personal skills and then somehow be able to also be a master of your craft.

I don't want to hear about how you write code in between your 100 pushups and avocado toast and having a few cold ones with the boys after your <insert sport here> game. I want to hear about how you ate pizza with one hand and crushed your build with the other in between sips of shitty soft drinks and fistfuls of candy while pulling an all nighter for the nth time cuz daylight is for pussies.

Too much pressure these days as it is, and this isn't helping.

break

FUCKING FUCK! THE TEAM LEAD WANTS ME TO MAKE AN UNNECESSARY UPDATE, AND IN THAT TOO HE WANTS TO IMPLEMENT A HALF ASSED FEATURE. Upon telling him what it takes(which he doesn't understand shit about cuz he's not from webdev background and has the level of experience that I had when I was midway my first webdev book), not to mention that he hasn't even seen the code of the project I've worked upon, which I got from an intern they fired last year cuz of not working and shitting around everywhere in the code(I asked if we could start afresh and he says that it'll take too much time - guess what, it took us two extra weeks already cuz of that and half of our required features can't be implemented cuz the code is beyond any hope), he tells me that "The client won't need this feature, but we're thinking of more and more features to provide (WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK).
Okay, you wanna sell your product; fine. I suggested that if we're letting the client select the time stamp on the initial date, then we should let him select the time stamp on the ending date too, right?
"No, we'll not provide this feature" ARE YOU FUCKING BONKERS?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM WITH YOU?!?!
I'll have to make major breaking changes in the code, for which I'm not the only one working on. Great.
This, coupled with the fact that he speaks unbelievably slow and it's so irritating cuz he repeats himself thrice.

What happens(has already happened), when he'll show this to the seniors, he'll say that this is either unnecessary/will suggest a major change, which WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH FUCKING BETTER IF TOLD BEFORE I START WITH THE CHANGE, YOU FUCKING CUNTS

I thought this would be fun. Well fuck me.

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

New semester, new problems....

Just started my 6th semester at uni and my teammates are already proving to be serious dumbfucks..

They want to keep all files neat and organized, sure, fine, good idea.
They want to use Dropbox to store code and our LaTeX report, no, never! Somehow managed to get them to switch to GitHub, yay!
They want to have everything in one fucking repo! Why? Oh god, why? And I can't change their mind on this!
And they still want to use Dropbox to have a backup and sync between their machines...

So during this semester, we will store our LaTeX report and the, at minimum, 3 code projects, in the same repo organized by folder!
Why not one project, one repo? Then I won't have to pull all the shit code that I don't have to work with!

Expect more rants in the coming months...

Sometimes I wonder how compromised my parents online security would be without my intervention.

My mom logged into her gmail and there was an red bar on top informing about Google preventing an attempted login from an unknown device.

Like typical parents / old people, that red bar didn't caught her attention but I noticed it immediately. I took over and looked into it. It showed an IP address and a location that was quite odd.

I went ahead with the Account security review and I was shocked to find that she had set her work email address as the recovery email!!

I explained her that work email accounts cannot be trusted and IT department of the workplace can easily snoop emails and other info on that email address and should not be related to personal accounts.

After fixing that issue, me being a typical skeptic and curious guy, I decided to find more info about that IP address.

I looked up the IP address on a lookup website and it showed an ISP that was related to the corporate office of her workplace. I noticed the location Google reported also matched with the corporate office location of her work.

Prior to this event, few days ago, I had made her change her gmail account password to a more secure one. ( Her previous password was her name followed by birth date!! ). This must have sent a notification to the recovery mail address.

All these events are connected. It is very obvious that someone at corporate office goes through employees email addresses and maybe even abuse those information.

My initial skeptism of someone snooping throguh work email addresses was right.

You're welcome mom!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FUCK ME!!

Wow my job sucks right now. Un fuckin believable.
I got hired a month ago as a programmer. Everything went fine at first, then my Boss asked if I could do 3D modeling, and I could, I used Maya for 4 years, but I told him I only can do simple low poly models. A partner company of ours needed some help in their 3D department and I had to help.
Well, I thought, a small 3D project from time to time would be nice and refreshing, especially since it was very easy geometry, my Boss even showed me some previous projects and That was totally doable even for me.

So i started out making the first few models in blender, because we dont have anything else. After a day of getting used to blender i sent off the first models and it all began.

They wanted detailed, high poly models of some mechanical parts, my Boss originally told me it was just an abstract visualisation... fuck me...

Well I agreed to it so had to do it. The partnering Company started to change things, seemingly at random. Had a model completely modelled, textured and animated, now they want to change the model so I have to redo the UVs, the texture and the Animation god fucking damnit.

But still I thought ok, its only for a bit. Now my boss accepted even more work. Because of endless reworks I couldnt finish even one model and have to already make the new ones.

Now my boss is pissed because that company is pissed that i cant know what they want.

Big pile of misscommunication.
I hope this is over soon but I overheard that more is coming...

Recently, one of our passwords was accidently published on a public page for a few minutes before it was noticed and removed. Unfortunately, this password opens nearly every locked account so it's a pretty big deal.

Management was informed of this mistake and told that we should change the passwords as well as implement a few other protocols to make sure this doesn't happen again including things like unique passwords, more secure passwords, using a password manager, etc.

Their response? It wasn't online long, probably no one saw it. There will be no changes in how we handle ours or our clients' secure passwords.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

A few months back, me and my friends built our own Web Dev firm. I'm the one who talk to clients, customers, etc. and these have been the most ridiculous messages I received from them:

1. I don't like it, but I don't know why?

2. I have an idea! Can we change the design?

3. We want something with more of a `wow` factor.

4. Can't you just copy their logo?

5. But we are also a startup. You must understand that we can't pay the full price.

6. So do you have the file open and ready to edit/

7. Can't you just copy and paste it in?

8. We don't have much of a budget but there are plenty of projects coming your way.

These are just a few of the huckleberryfuck our clients sent. I'm not sure if I can handle them anymore.

I think we're going two sides:

For one, more and more technology is being developed/engineered which is even more and more and more intrusive as for personal privacy, I'm genuinely worried how this'll go as privacy isn't just a about not exposing certain things like passwords/bank account details and so on, it's also about being an individual who has their own thoughts, opinions and so on. If we keep taking that away more and more often, society will change and go towards the Orwell scenario (we're on our way there right now). We can change this as software/design/server engineers but that's up to us and I sadly don't see that happening quickly, also due to the 'nothing to hide' bullshit.

Second one is that were going more and more towards open source.
This is a good thing as this:
- gives freedom to devs around the world to improve software and/or modify it to suit their needs.
- gives people the opportunity to look through the source code of softwares in order to verify it as for backdoors and find security vulnerabilities which otherwise can remain hidden for the general public while spying agencies have way more resources to go vulnerability hunting.

For the people who think this isn't a good idea (even more open source), without it we'd be completely fucked as for moving forward/security/privacy. (I can give examples if wanted).

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

TL.DR.: Emojis in commit messages + bad commit messages made by Microsoft™ employees.

Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. It would be helpful if I can, you know, understand your commit messages instead of trying to guess wtf _that_ emoji means. That is, if it is the same emoji on my machine. We didn't figure that one out yet. And no, "Some 💄 changes ✨" is not a good commit message, even if you interpret it correctly (which depends on your emoji icon set).

idk about you, but that shitty 💄 emoji tends to be (see image) and I happen to associate that with an XLR audio cable. I had to ask someone else to understand a commit message; a message supposed to be explicit—stating what you changed and optionally why you changed it (you can off-load that part to an issue tracker).

Furthermore, that "Some 💄 changes ✨" commit did none of that. "I made cosmetic changes somewhere for some reason without linking to an issue." If you didn't catch that little detail yet: "COSMETIC CHANGES" is vague as fuck. What is a cosmetic change?

* Does a cosmetic change mean adjusting indentation?
* Does it mean deleting unnecessary abstraction to make the code more readable?
* Does it mean refactoring code to add that beauty factor?
* Does it mean all of the above? Or perhaps a specific combination of these?

Human communication is shit enough, don't make it worse than it already is.

My father's PC is almost dead.
The PSU is damaged and it turns on correctly 1 time out of 250 or more.
There are days that he tries to turn it on at 8am, and it can finally use it at 8pm.

Also the other HW components are old, so I tried to convince him to buy a new PC, there was an offer where they also give you for free a new 24 inches monitor (now he has a fucking 19 inches old one).
But he doesn't want to invest in a PC.
Even if he spends almost the entire day by surfing on internet and watching movies!

So, I recommended him to change only the PSU, the same identical model costs only €39.
But he doesn't want to invest in it... he prefers to lose the entire day trying to use his fucking PC.

I really don't understand why some people just don't want to spend a bit to improve their life!
The comfort is worth it... the time of life you're wasting to use that fucking PC is more important than €39.

I tried different times to find other possible issues, but it's clearly a PSU problem, so obviously I can't fix it using magic.
Not in my father's opinion... "You don't know anything about computer science... nothing! Go to your fucking university (I'm studing Computer Engineering), and study how to fix it!".
While he was saying that sentence, he was beating the case, because he's convinced that it's a better way to fix it.

I want to leave this fucking house right now.

Several rants ago I promised to drop a bombshell about Android. What took me so long was my research.

I wanted to measure the extent of Google’s background data mining. I put Android at a significant disadvantage — it was Redmi 6, a device with a 5-year-old half-dead battery that was heavily used by my partner. The only change was me installing Lineage OS + microG — a private, degoogled combo that has no quality of life ramifications. Google Play Store opens, apps download. MicroG emulates Google Play Services — maps, banking and other Play Services-dependent apps work flawlessly. This made a huge difference.

Before degoogling, this phone lasted one day tops on standby. Now, with Wi-Fi connection enabled, apps auto-update working (one game I had installed auto-updated during the test), and no battery saver engaged, I was able to pull ELEVEN DAYS on full charge. Battery saver promised even more uptime, but I considered that cheating.

Modern phones have modern screens that drain battery quickly. Yet, they also have 4000+ mAh batteries. If your Android smartphone performs worse than mine in a test like this that doesn't use screen, kiss your privacy goodbye.

Not really hacking, but my roommate says otherwise. So we share a router in the apartment and I’m the only one that really knows how to access it, so of course I change the password and tell no one (not like they’ll try to get in anyway).
Occasionally set roommate likes to get blackout and play music very loud at 2am. To be petty, on those occasions I set up an RPi Zero to connect to the WiFi, restart it, and sleep for a minute, and repeat. He’s still convinced we are getting DDOSd, and suspects nothing.

Reason I don’t just set parental controls - he gets more frustrated when the WiFi appears for 10secs, the music is just about to start and shuts off again. So he gives up quicker. Otherwise, he resets the router and I have to set up everything from the start.

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

I got unemployed 6 months ago. I tried to find work for about a month but the answer was always "we call you back when a position is available" and "let me ask the team if they think you are good". So far no one responded, then I got tired of that.
The next month I became self-employed so i can make contracts and work for more smaller projects. Not too much time later I met a company that offered me a long time contract for them. I don't hesitated to accept it.
Luckily since then I have this company and a few smaller jobs.
It was a steep change in my life but was worth it.

Just finished our BIG update including a big change in the backend (PHP => NODEJS). So I hope our users will enjoy this one because we are not yet public and our competitor get a lot of clients each day but if we compare our product to their product: Ours is responsive as fucked and have much more stability but less fonctionnalities so we have to add more fonctionnalities before releasing our product to the public. I hope we will be able in a few weeks! With only me and my back-end dev (My employee and friend at the same time) to work on it and they have 2 more devs to their team to use Bubble.. (They are now 6 or 8 devs (wannabes and using a drag and drop website) in total vs 2 (us) real programmers).

A well deserved night of sleep :P

Clients are SUCH FUCKFACES!
So me and 3 friends developed a website and logo for an hr company, run by this woman and she loved it
She was our client for GOMC. Now, since it was a "project" she assumed she didn't had to pay for the whole thing....fine I agreed to just getting maintenance, to maintain goodwill and getting some more clients maybe

One day she wakes up and wants half of the shit altered....NOW, after almost over a month..Fucking bitch
She now wants a fucking RAINBOW colored logo...And she added "it must look professional OK?"...The fuck? Now we have to change the cards, letterheads, UI (entirely). Basically everything and doesn't wanna pay for shit
FML

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

The management brought some devs from another outsourcing company into our project to overcome the fact that we, the existing developers, are retarded. We are retarded because they change the scope continously (aka daily) and we can’t keep track with their requests. They want something and after we implement it, they want it changed. Completely.

Instead of getting the project and deep dive into it using the materials (setup, architecture etc.) I prepared along the way, their PM said that we have to make some low level knowledge transfer. This knowledge transfer session happened on Friday.

The presenters were me and one of my colleagues. After 2 hours of training, we found out that the supposed senior devs don’t know how to use GIT, they don’t have a clue about Spring nor Angular (nor any SPA framework), their only questions were ‘why didn’t you use X?’ (where X = bootstrap, jQuery etc.) etc.

What is even funnier: during the presentation we were asked to keep a screen sharing opened during working hours for a couple of days just so the new devs could see how we are working.

Guess what happened with the scope on Friday evening: it changed again because ‘you got new devs so there will be multiple resources to handle tasks’.

2 more weeks and i’m out of there...

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

I HATE SVN! >:v v:< >:v v:< :@

I used to use git for my personal code repositories and for my work. In the office I moved on, they use Subversion. I’ve been using it for months, but it’s a pain in the ass :/

We use TortoiseSVN to pull code repositories, and the AnhkSVN for Visual Studio Plugin. It works fine until two or more of us have to work at the same code project at the same time.

Last week we had a very VERY urgent code to release. We had 4 days to finish it (from thursday to sunday, tests included). We had few changes to do, but the problem was that, when one dev commited something, my changes disappeared, and viceversa. The worst part was that my partners and I had to re-work a lot of bugs that we had already fixed! >:v

This is not the first time this happens :/

The worst thing is that we cannot change our repository system because we don’t have time :(

Is there any advice you, SVN users, can give us?

My code review nightmare?

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

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

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

math be like:

"Addition (often signified by the plus symbol "+") is one of the four basic operations of arithmetic; the others are subtraction, multiplication and division. The addition of two whole numbers is the total amount of those values combined. For example, in the adjacent picture, there is a combination of three apples and two apples together, making a total of five apples. This observation is equivalent to the mathematical expression "3 + 2 = 5" i.e., "3 add 2 is equal to 5".

Besides counting items, addition can also be defined on other types of numbers, such as integers, real numbers and complex numbers. This is part of arithmetic, a branch of mathematics. In algebra, another area of mathematics, addition can be performed on abstract objects such as vectors and matrices.

Addition has several important properties. It is commutative, meaning that order does not matter, and it is associative, meaning that when one adds more than two numbers, the order in which addition is performed does not matter (see Summation). Repeated addition of 1 is the same as counting; addition of 0 does not change a number. Addition also obeys predictable rules concerning related operations such as subtraction and multiplication.

Performing addition is one of the simplest numerical tasks. Addition of very small numbers is accessible to toddlers; the most basic task, 1 + 1, can be performed by infants as young as five months and even some members of other animal species. In primary education, students are taught to add numbers in the decimal system, starting with single digits and progressively tackling more difficult problems. Mechanical aids range from the ancient abacus to the modern computer, where research on the most efficient implementations of addition continues to this day."

And you think like .. easy, but then you turn the page:

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

I am mentally burned out from web development.

Physically I'm fine, but it's getting more difficult each day to open my laptop and write code, documentation or do code reviews.

Web development just seems so meaningless, where my day to day job has me trudging through one web form after another. I'm sick of implementing business logic on the backend and tired of listening to the product owner bitch about users who are demanding.

My productivity has fallen to the level where I'm feeling guilty for spending my time on nothing!

Don't give me advice, I know I need a change of scenery.

I just need to find the motivation to work on another hiring test which has nothing to do with the actual job.

@Apple iPadOS an iOS teams: you puZies.

You release one buggy iOS / iPadOS after another, each piling on features and bugs, without fixing crowd documented long standing defects.

But what really pisses me off is when you don't have the balls to own up to your mistakes. This is at least the 3rd time you have re-released an iOS / iPadOS update under the same version number. This time it is 14.5.1

I have iPadOS 14.5.1 installed and the iPad is now telling me I need to update to 14.5.1. Just own up to it, you released buggy shit and you need to release another bug fix days after... call it 14.5.2. Call it like it is and we respect you. Try to hide it and you lose our respect, you pussies.

If Microsoft did one thing right, they defined the release sequencing:
X.Y.Z

Changing X means rewrite the manual it is so new and improved (🖕🏻 you Adobe and FileMaker)

Changing Y means it is an update with more features than bug fixes but not a generational change that constitutes a rewrite of anything (🖕🏻 you macOS team for bastardizing with 10.X.Y)

Changing Z means you fixed your stuff, we respect you for owning up to your mistakes.

Man-up Apple, grow some balls and stop confusing people with trying to cover up your screw ups. It's all about the Z.

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

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

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

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

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

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Massive payment gateway (not gonna say names) with more then 10k transactions / hour telling md5 is one of most secure encryptions they have. Only to made worse by the fact that they send the key and hashed key in the same request.

I am advising all our clients to change payment gateway asap if they use this one.

So this was going to be a comment but damn!!!!

Windows is seriously about making life harder for power users now, every fucking update lately is moving more easy to change things and fucking hiding them inside hidden menus or stupid links that don’t make sense. I mean fuck I just want to turn on dual screen with my laptop (because for some bizarre reason, just showing the desktop on the plugged in monitor is so hard to do automatically, especially since I just plugged a hdmi cable in) and the fucker was gone with nothing but a “detect screens” button before it would use an external screen.

Fuck I’m so close to pulling the plug on windows, but Linux just doesn’t sell me for daily use (yet... it’s getting there though)

The fucking forced updates (yes I consider a random bsod due to a system interrupt, then as it reboots magically has updates awaiting... a forced update) are starting to get to me, the fucking thing half crashing and not responding due to a network transfer of files (the fucker was 5GB)

If it wasn’t for my gaming needs and someone can show me a very good alternative to MS Visio (I haven’t really found one yet) then I would swap over and just adjust to the not so great (imo) desktop environments.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

Commas.
I fix one display, and another breaks.

Now I’m getting “$$1002.99” and can’t figure out why. Where is this popup coming from? Where does the encrypted URL point to? What does this ajax call do? Where does the amount go? When does it change? Why is it a string now? Where does the total get defined? How far down the rabbit hole do I need to go?

Short short version:

I found something to try fixing. I made some changes, forced a crash to inspect, and… Joy! My log stopped updating. How long have I been debugging on stale data?

Skipping a long debugging session…

I discover a suspect instance var in a suspect method, and… i have no freaking clue where it’s being defined. It’s used in the class, but never defined in it. Oh, and the name is pretty generic, so searching for it is even more fun.

Just.
Qxfrfjkalstf.

WHO WRITES THIS CRAP?!
AND WHY DO PEOPLE CALL THEM “LEGENDS”? Like, really. That’s the word they use. “Legends.” I still can’t believe it.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

Life is hard.

You are born. DNA gets determined. You go through infancy.

Puberty comes and DNA is like
"uh from now you'll pretty much have strong sexual urges, a huge desire to be sexually prolific, nothing weird like being pedo or into rape though".

me: Uh ok.
dna: oh, also, you're gonna be one of those late bloomers, you know, you talk like shit, you dress like shit, you smell like shit.
life: that's true and also you don't have anyone in your life to teach you about that shit, so forget about kissing, having sex, let alone being in a relationship for a long time.

*a lot of years go by with a lot of missed opportunities, mistakes and regrets*

life: ok, you seem to have become a decent sex partner out of a lot of scarring experiences, but there's one problem: you've fallen in love with somebody.

and you're married

and you have kids

me: well, does that mean I can't fuck other people?
life: yeah, no. I'm surprised I even have to explain that, it's called cheating. It will pretty much ruin your marriage, and fuck up your kids.

me: ok, I guess no then. I'm still fortunate enough to have sex with my wife right?

life: yeah... but you still want to fuck other people
me: what???
life: yeah, did you think that falling in love would make you not want to fuck other people? fuck no

me: ok, well I'm very grateful that I get to experience sex at all.
life: yes... there's a thing though, your partner has a much much lower libido than you.

me: ok, well maybe if I exercise and dress better that might change
life: that will definitely help, you'll feel more confident and have more stamina, but every time you retry exercising, you remember how much you hate it and how little stamina you have.
oh, I'm sorry, I forgot you had kids and work, yeah no time or energy for that.

me: ok, then should I just embrace a more liberal lifestyle, like becoming a swinger?
life: ha, fat chance, it's a very taboo thing and you're not that liberal, neither is she.

me: uhhh, i guess i can sometimes watch porn then...
life: watching porn regularly will make the only sex that you have worse, according to statistics.

me: ok, I guess I should get ripped

So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)

He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol

So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.

What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst

well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol

btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear..

Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.

Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.

Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)

Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.

Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.

Tl;dr
Just my two cents.

So we are implementing a big and very complete localization management system on my company. The system has great features, indeed, but:

1. We cannot use the browser back button, because it is js and it appears no one cared about it (I am not a js Dev, but you can UAE the back button on my site that has js);

2. It is very customizable, but not intuitive. So you have one million options and you never know where to change what you need;

3. It has a save button everywhere, but most options are saved automatically, so you never know when you need to save. Actually, people from the webapp company use the save button as refresh, once we cannot use the browser refresh button;

4. Combo boxes load the elements while you scroll them, so to scroll to the bottom, you need to keep scrolling several times, waiting it to load the elements;

5. It does not allow you to open more than one tab of it at the same time. So if you need to see more than one information from different items, you need to navigate and wait the loading times to see what you need;

6. Emails are not sent in a different thread. So each action that send emails you need to keep waiting until the emails are sent (sometimes there are several emails sent in one action) to continue using it;

7. They not only store and send back your password by email if you loose it, but, as admin, if I click the button to send the user password to him/her, it keeps a copy of the email with the user password in my sent items;

8. To be able to send emails (they are really necessary), I need to include my SMTP info with login and password. So they have not only the system password saved, but everyone email login and password as well.

I am sure there is more, but I can't remember for now, and we are still trying to figure it out how to back our data, as it appears the only possible backup is their own.

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

New episode on my clients being morons.

Got a call this morning:
Client: hello, we've got a problem here...
Me: tell me about it
C: well... Do you remember the 1200 account we loaded last week ?
Me: yes? What's wrong, we tested them, everything was alright.
C: yeah... But we just noticed we loaded them in the wrong status... Fix that!
Me: easy, we clear the database and load the correct data back.
C: NO WAY! We already worked on 3 accounts. Don't want to lose any of that. Just change the status, it's easy
Me: well not really, there's a lot more going on when you go from one status to another.
C: Don't care, just do it

So... now I need to delete the bad data, checking nothing else gets impacted in the application. And then reload that same data with the proper status this time.

As weird as this sounds like, this is the reason why I love my job. You get challenges like that every single day.

"I'm not very smart with computers"

Why do people say that? Obviously you may not know 100% of what you can do with a computer, but NO ONE does! I get that some people know slightly more than others, but it all comes down to how much time you put into learning it!

And how do you even respond to that? "I know, I'm dumb." You can't ignore it or affirm it, you just have to awkwardly acknowledge and then change the subject. Ugh...

Sales guy: Hey, you're technical. Can you tell me how I'd go about doing (foobar) in this webapp I have here?
Almond: Err... I've never dealt with that webapp in my life. I wouldn't have a clue.
Sales guy: ...but you're a dev right? Oh well, never mind. Anyone more experienced around here that may know?
Almond: No idea, but I seriously doubt any of the devs will have used it. Maybe one of the other sales guys will?
Sales guy: So you're telling me *none* of the devs around here will know how to do this?!
Almond: Very unlikely (thinking why the hell would any devs be using a sales app, but whatever)

...15 minutes later...

Sales guy: Ahah, I figured it out! (Explains what buttons he had to click in crappy app to do foobar)
Almond: Glad you got it sorted!
Sales guy: I'm really surprised none of you devs could figure this out, but I could. Perhaps I should change careers and be a dev.

...what?!

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.