As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

One of those days

You know the truth about young people?

It’s goddamn hard to be a young person these days, or millennial or whatever the fuck they’re calling it now. So give em a break.

It always has been hard, but this time is different. Let me share a few stories:

-my friend said half the time if he walks up to women in a bar and asks their name he gets yelled at because “if I wanted to date you I’d be on tinder.” A few of those times he had no romantic intentions even.
-Amazon and eBay=instant gratification. This stunts mental goal development, and makes transitioning into professional life stressful.
-online dating particularly tinder means people have option fatigue and inflated expectations. Very hard to connect with people personally.
-Facebook shines everyone’s accomplishments in your face, and it’s one thing to be bombarded with that when you’re married and working a good job and emotionally adjusted, it’s another to be pelted with it while in emotional turmoil.
-amplified by the global economy and global social/professional bubble, the world has more people that you can be face to face with now than it ever has.
-global competition, easy to feel inadequate when you haven’t established yourself in a career or adjusted to professional environments.
-social media is a dopamine addiction that companies are actively seeking to hook you on, it’s very alluring and difficult to exist when everybody is doing it and universities and jobs want you to do it, and the consequences of it are purposely hidden from the users. Very difficult to break.
-another consequence is young people are then pelted with advertisments that usually have a negative message and are way more powerful than people realize, considering they seem so harmless on the surface.
-regular young person problems, the older generation doesn’t like the attitude and sometimes it’s hard to get taken seriously at work.
-victim culture, I can attest, watching everyone lust over being a victim is contagious and it poisoned me for a long period of time as it has many others, and thinking of yourself as a victim instead of taking charge of your circumstances does massive collateral damage to emotional and mental health. And it’s not being talked about. It took me years before I even realized that I was doing it, and even longer to stop. I STILL slip up.
-Raised in a culture of participation consolation prizes, and as people graduate college they’re slapped over the face with reality as they realize that there are real failures and even though those failures can still amount to something, there is no consolation prize.
-parenting strategy of “everyone is special” and then realizing when you get old enough that you are unique but there are still others like you, and you are not special in the way you always believed.

Technology is changing our lives for better or worse, and we need to pick the direction it’s going to take us. This is why so many people are struggling with anxiety today.

So if you work with young people, be nice to them and try to think about how you can say something to them that will help them adjust to some of these challenges, rather than thinking of them as weak. They carry a lot of weight on their shoulders, weight that a lot of people don’t take seriously. They can overcome it, but not with people beating down on them.

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

First time poster here. Please be nice :)

My biggest workaround is one that's being currently deployed to 40 truck drivers (trucking company here), preventing printers being out of usage while on the road. We also have to use HP ePrint to wirelessly print documents, but that's another story for another time I guess :)

CEO asked us to install wifi printers in our 40-ish trucks which has wifi on board. However he's always picking one of the cheapest options possible, so we got consumer grade printers (Laserjet 1002w). Those printers often disconnects without getting back on the truck wifi network EVER. I have to get physically in the truck, wire the printer via USB onto my laptop and reconfigure Wifi on it with the HP Windows tool. This means lots of printer downtime, which always happens when the drivers are three timezones away from our office

Then I thought: "What if I could sniff what HP sends via USB while I (re)configure the printer, and replay whats being sent later? Our trucks all have an Android tablet with a USB type-A connector with host capability, so I could write a small app that replays the config when plugged in by the user.

Three days of hacking around later, I have a working app. By chance, HP printers (or at least those models we have) uses HTTP POST via USB, so I could easily replay the request.

Edit: the end result is that truck drivers just plug the printer to their tablet, press "reconfigure" in a home made Android app, printer is reconnected to the truck and they're good to go. They don't have access to the network nor know enough to debug themselves anyways

TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

Linux sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will take time to explain.

Senior: Why did you refactor those ten files?

Junior: There was a method copy-pasted in every one of them, so I moved it to a utils class.

Senior: Don't you know we will have to test all of those changed classes again? Please, rollback!

Junior: ok.

... two days later ...

Senior: Why did you just copy-paste that method? Don't you know it's bad practice?

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

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

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

!rant

You know those dudes that dress up spiffy and try to sell you cable providers for tv and shit. Well, i normally stream everything from my computers and do not really have any need for actual tv, my flatscreen is mostly used for my ps4 or switch and das it.

So these guys stop me at walmart and start trying to sell me this provider, i normally listen and give everyone a chance since they b only doing their job. Afterwards I tell them that i use one of those roku or amazon sticks and that I am fine with it. Well one of them insists in that those are not good since **fake made up technical shit** and that unless I am a programmer I would not know how to work around them.

I smile. Hehe.....hehe.....muahahahaha and tell them that I do not worry about such things since I am a software engineer. My wife passes by and confirms "yup, computer scientist, spends his days thinkering with shit"

One of them looks at the other and says "fuck it dude we lost"

Lol, gracious in the face of defeat.

So apparently devRant is a problem in my life. As those of you who've read any of my stuff here know I work at Victoria's Secret. So two of my friends come in just before I was ending my shift to see what the plans were for tonight. The usual - hit the club, crash at one of our houses.

Thing is, I was scrolling through devRant when they walked up. (the below is paraphrased)

Friend1: Ugh, you're still on that thing?

Friend2: Is she really? <looks over my shoulder>

Me: <eyeroll>

Friend2: I don't get it. <pokes me in the left tit> You barely post on Instagram and you don't tweet anymore. And you haven't commented on any of my posts in like days. Wtf bitch?

Disclaimer: Yes, we are those girls who talk like that and go clubbing and dress up and makeup and all that shit. Don't judge me because I don't give a fuck. Anyway...

Friend1: Seriously.

Me: Really? We're doing this? Because I haven't posted on fucking Instagram? I talk to you every day. I see you every other day. I like coding. I like tech. This place is awesome and the people are cool. If I want to see your ass or your outfit, I can just look at you. I don't need to be on Instagram 24/7.

Friend2: Jeez bitch. Need a tampon

<we all laugh>

Me: This is my thing. It doesn't mean we aren't friend and we won't chill, but my future is in development and technology. So deal hoes.

Friend1: Ugh you're such a nerd.

Friend2: <laughing>

Me: And you're both like totally vapid sluts. But I love you.

Friend2: Jelly

Friend1: Totes jelly. Girl you need some vitamin D

Me: I'm sayin'. But that doesn't mean I won't spend my free time coding.

Friend2: Ugh alright we don't give a fuck. Code or whatever. Just be ready at 11.

We all flip each other the bird and they leave. I guess if that's the level of acceptance I can get from my wonderful, gorgeous, annoying, amazing, asshole best friends, I'll take it. I am not changing my path.

Get ready for one of the biggest AMAZON rants EVER.
I dislike this company so much I can feel it in my bones.
They have NO, absolutely NO idea how user experience works.

PROBLEM #1.

If you have Amazon Prime / Video (ANOTHER FUCKED UP PROBLEM THAT CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE) and you want to watch a movie on your Xbox using the Amazon App, You have to buy the movie ON YOUR COMPUTER FIRST, YOU CAN’T BUY IT DIRECTLY FROM THE APP.
WHAT THE SHIT AMAZON?

So.. go to your laptop, buy the movie, go back to your other device (Xbox or whatever), click “My movie library” and then you can watch it.

OH AND THERE’S ALSO A “MY WATCHLIST”, WHERE YOUR NEW PURCHASED / RENTED MOVIE DOES NOT SHOW UP.

Yes.. there is a “MY WATCHLIST” and “My movie library” or some shit.

HOW, WHY, WHY FUCKING AMAZON, WHY.

PROBLEM #2.

“WE HAVE A ZILLION ALEXA SKILLS NOW !!!1!!!!!11111! EINZ!!!!!”

Yeah, WELL, NOT THAT HARD WHEN YOU HAVE “Alexa Evangelist” traveling to every DAMN tech convention and having them make USELESS FUCKING SKILLS THAT NOBODY WANTS USING BOILER PLATE CRAP THAT ANYBODY CAN USE.

Oh and Alexa is DUMB AS SHIT.
I asked her "Play the song Starboy by the Weeknd" and she said: "I CAN'T FIND THAT SONG"
Then you go "Play me Starboy" and she goes: "HERE IS A SAMPLE OF STARBOY BY THE WEEKND"

Same with other songs: "YOU DONT HAVE IT IN YOUR PRIME MUSIC LIBRARY".
She doesn't even TRY to go to your fucking Spotify account, you have say: "Play Starboy by The Weeknd on Spotify" AND THEN she still has the FUCKING NERVES to say : "I Can't find that song on Spotify".
BUT YOU JUST FOUND IT ON YOUR OWN DAMN CRAPPY PRIME MUSIC.

"Hey Alexa, how many days till the end of the year?"
GUESS WHAT ,SHE CAN'T TELL YOU. (maybe now but not 2 months ago)

PROBLEM #3.

AUDIBLE.COM and AUDIBLE.CO.UK have DIFFERENT FUCKING DATABASES, THUS, YOU CAN END UP HAVING 2 ACCOUNTS AND HAVING 2 LIBRARIES, and.. THERE IS NO WAY TO FUSE THEM INTO 1 account.
OH MY GOD, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?
I FUCKING HATE that, how can ANYBODY think that is a GOOD IDEA?

PROBLEM #4.

Their website is a TOTAL FUCKING mess, really, who the FUCK designs that piece of SHIT.

Look up a movie, let’s say “SCHOOL OF ROCK”
First result?

“School Of Rock” - “Amazon Video”
So you can click on this and watch the movie.

Then click the second result.

“School of Rock Blu RAY” and next to the price-tag “PRIME”
You click on it, you can buy it, but HEY, LOOK, WHAT DOES IT SAY?

“Unlimited Streaming with Amazon Prime
Start your 30-day free trial to stream thousands of movies & TV shows included with Prime. Start your free trial”

WHAT, WHAT!!!! CAN I WATCH THIS WITH AMAZON PRIME? OR DO I NEED THE AMAZON VIDEO? I DON’T GET IT.

Put me in a room with all those FUCKWIT project managers and their fucked up company culture and I’ll rip them a new one, I can go on for DAYS about the SHIT they are doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

One of those days 😂🚴🏼💥

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Wrote 800-1200 LOC
It went through code review which was apparently my first code being reviewed
Took me 1 month and more to fix most changes (per day more than 10-12 hrs of effort)..
That 1 month was a nightmare. Every day I thought of giving up programming. I shouted to myself every night why did I never considered these myself. How can I be so dumb.
Half of the reviews I didn't even know how to implement. Didn't even know what to Google.
I consider it as one of my toughest phase as a developer till date.
I still get goosebumps remembering those days.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

It's already one of those days and it's only 10am

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...

One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.

I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.

A gets there... Fucking finally.

Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).

*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.

Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...

🤔🤔

We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.

His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)

There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.

A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.

I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.

So last year in highschool, everybody had to make a website project with stores and stuff. Everybody was in groups and you could plan your time on you own, working in class or at home.

So my friend spent hours at home designing his website for his group, and to be honest, it looked amazing.
There was only one problem, all files were located on a server which was accessible by all groups without the teacher even being able to know who had accessed which file.

There was this one group which just spent their time in class playing stupid browser games, 3 people in a group, one of them looking at kpop and puppy's for what seemed like to be hours at a time.

Well to get to the point, about 1-2 days before deadline, they noticed they hadn't done shit.
SO THOSE FUCKING BASTARDS JUST COPIED ALL THE FUCKING CODE MY FRIEND HAD MADE.

AT PRESENTATION TIME THEIR "PROJECT" CAME UP FIRST AND MY FRIEND WAS TO ME LIKE "OH NO THOSE FUCKERS DIDN'T JUST COPY MY WHOLE WEBSITE".
ANYWAYS, THEY CLAIMED MY FRIEND HAD COPIED THEM AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!!! (They got an A on the Project, my friend got a C because the teacher thought he copy pasted the design.)

I spoke to diz dude who copied the code, we knew who it was, because the others in the group probably dont even know what the copy and paste keys were.

He laughed at me and said, "C'mon, it's not a big deal.."

IF YOU ARE TOO INCOMPETENT TO WRITE A SINGLE CODE OF LINE, THEN DONT FUCKING STEAL SHIT FROM OTHERS WHO PUT IN HOURS OF WORK, AND MESS UP THEIR GRADE. TAKE YOUR FUCKING F AND LEAVE THE CLASS!!!

2AM and a birthday party of my BELOVED mother that I have to attend tomorrow in the middle of bumfuck. And I'm not sleeping, oh no.. because "family obligations" require me to get her a present on 2 days notice. I'm making her something very simple, some LED's displaying her new age, powered by a lithium cell and some charge-boost-protection controller. So I need to make a mesh to place the LED's to make those characters.

Measuring the size of the project box, cut it out.. started drawing the numbers on it. Not satisfied and ain't nobody got time for that. Guess I'll just print something out. Drew a little image with some text on my tablet, sent it to the printer. Black apparently doesn't want to print anymore even though it's still fucking full.

HP YOU CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!! How fucking difficult can it be to make a printer and make it into something that doesn't shit on me every fucking time I want to use it?! Why do I have to deal with your shit, on top of my mother's?! WHY?!!!!

Fuck me. Happy birthday to my mother, and silently I wish that it's her last one. The bitch wouldn't - no she didn't - piss on me even when I was on fire!! Where were you "dear family member" when I was homeless, huh?! WHERE WERE YOU, WHEN I STOOD ON TOP OF A BRIDGE, READY TO END MY LIFE AND BEGGED TO YOU TO ALLOW ME TO STAY IN YOUR HOME FOR THE NIGHT?! Mother my fucking ass. A blood bond that I wish I never had! And that I have to work for now, because you fucking bitch can't even possibly think as far into the future as to invite your peers for a birthday party.. I dunno, maybe a week in advance, like a sensible human being would? At least she's improving, my little sister's and brother's birthdays she just invited me for the day before. And I also had to get a present ready for, in the middle of the fucking night. Fucking hell!!!

It's one of those days

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

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

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

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

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

Web team responds to the email..

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

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

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

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

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

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

I'm the sole developer at work.

Literally the entire company, save myself, is sales people. (We have one remote mobile contractor as well, but he only does mobile; I'm responsible for everything else.)

I inherited a gigantic pile of nightmare from the previous "senior-level intern" solitary dev/CTO, and I'm still trying to figure out the bulk of it, meaning everything takes longer.

Anyway, we have a meeting roughly once a week, and during each of these -- and several times throughout each week -- the salespeople say things like "We should address this" or "This should be our top focus" or "We really need ___ so I can sell more merchants" or "___ doesn't work right; we should fix it." All of these "we"'s and "our"'s, of course, mean me.

So, today, I decided I'd make a list of everything I have to do, and their general size. Assuming large projects will take one month, medium projects will take one week, and small projects will take one day... I have four months, two weeks, and four days of work ahead of me. (yet I know one of those large projects will take at least two months...)

Make it stop ;;

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

Here's how my day is going:

> Access::MerchantsController
=> MerchantsController
> Access::MerchantsController
NameError: uninitialized constant Access::MerchantsController

-.-

What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.

What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.

Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.

We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.

I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.

This was my rant.

Story time :
Sometime ago I posted a video on YouTube on how to root a particular phone that was lying around at home. I was trying to demonstrate one of those "one-tap root" apps that were plentiful in the market. It so happened that one specific version of Framaroot and one particular method of exploit works for that device. I even verified this by trying different versions and it didn't work. So in the description it was mentioned to use ONLY this version that worked. Few days later there were atleast 5 dislikes and comments that it didn't work on some other version.
Seriously?
That's how I understood how stupid and dumb people can get.

This one time I aliased a coworkers 'sudo' with 'sl' (sl shows a train running across the screen)

And then I removed him from the sudoers group and sudoers list.

I then magnified his screen 200%

Changed his background to a shitty narwhal.

And then full screened a terminal with the 'sl' train stuck in a while loop.

You can't control c out of the terminal.

He solved the first part really quickly, fixing the full screened terminal and exiting out of it, magnification and the background.

But took him 4 days to find that I had fucked up his sudo. Apparently, he didn't need to use sudo in those 4days. It wasn't until he mentioned it out of the blue.

How did he find out about it? He was running an important script that had sudo in it. When he ran the script a train would pop up and his script would terminate early.

He came to me and cursed me to Satan's anus. He then asked me to fix it, but then changed his mind and said that he'd do it himself. After a while he couldn't figure out what I had done.

I walked him through it. Told him that he had to go to his .bashrc file and remove the alias.

Later he comes back to me and curses me to the 12th circle of hell. He found that he was no longer a sudoer. At this point he gave me access to his computer and told me to reverse everything that I had done.
Added him back into the sudoers group and called it a day.

Lesson to be learned? Don't leave your machine unlocked.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

So this is another true story.

I was commuting back home from work with one of my senior colleagues when he told me this story.

Back in eary 2000's, he joined the IT world as a junior developer. The industry was just emerging and evolving.

As a fresher, who knew very little technical stuff and had almost no market experience, he was sent on client side to Philippines (don't remember the exact place) within few months from joining.

He was not told anything about the task or the project. Infact nobody actually knew. Upon arrival, he went to office where he learnt that it was an implementation project and he knew shit nothing about it.

The client was dangerous and had good government contacts. He got pissed off because of false promises made by the vendor.

Guess what? My friend was house arrested for six months.

He had to live in office, eat and shit there. Six fucking months within four fucking walls.

Back those days there was no internet access like we have today. No resources available online and no community support at all.

His manager back home, withdraw all support. He was fortunately given few books to read, understand and implement the project.

He used to cry, but he did the task successfully.

On his farewell party, he was made to eat dog meat by client without even being informed about it.

Finally he was back home safely. He is a brutal guy. He is my friend.

Fuck such people who behave this way with others.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

Today was one of those days where I really didn't feel like fussing about work, so I:

- Didn't shave,
- Didn't groom my hair as good as I should have
- Traipsed in the office over an hour late with a newspaper in one hand, a fried pastry in the other and not wearing my ID badge (strict security rules regarding that last bit).

I waltzed into the lobby thinking "I don't even care I'm this late. I'm sure that department meeting hasn't even started yet. Today they have to deal with me on my terms!" I took a greedy chomp of my greasy breakfast.

Just as I bent the corner in lobby, with my lips and fingers greasy and mouth full, I come face to face with none other than the two top executives at our company.

I thought I didn't care; that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach determined that was a lie.

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

My second year of high-school, we started having class in computer science. I was really looking forward to it cause I always wanted to learn programming.

On first sight it appeared that the professor which taught the class knew something, he looked like a genuine geek with those dorky glasses, briefcase and pants like Steve Urkel, but after couple of his lessons you could see he had no real dev experience and just basic understanding of programming in theory. He was more reading stuff from the book than he was trying to explain them to students and give some real world examples.

So it was just one these days, everybody got back from vacation, it's hot outside, the guy is just reading sentences from his book, half of students talk with each other and other half doesn't give a fuck about him or his class. Pretty sure I was the only one trying to listen to him and learn something from his recitals.

All of a sudden he notices the atmosphere in the classroom, slams the book shut, gives out couple of F-s to the loudest students and yells out loud "NONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM WILL EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, BARE ALONE IN PROGRAMMING"

At first I felt like shit, but soon after that I started thinking "who the hell are you to tell me what I could or will accomplish in my life". Couple weeks later I've bought myself a first book in programming and started learning C++ late at night since I understood that I won't learn anything about programming in that school. Two years later I was correcting this same professor with his claims on a whiteboard in front of a whole class.

Today, seven years after his words I'm a developer living in foreign country with what I could say somewhat a solid experience and understanding of how both software and web are build, while that same professor still recites to his pupils difference between assembly and object code, while praying nobody asks him where and how these are used. For maybe a quarter of my paycheck. So much about his psychic powers..

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!

Coding is an art. It's beautiful. When you have finally finished a big project and you look at those hundreds or thousands lines of code stacking up on each other, the millions of characters one next to the other, it's even more pretty than the compiled version of the ocean of code we took hours and days to make. We make code to support more code to then make human-readable information for the world. I love programming. It's my passion.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Just one of those days...

Just got a new TV, 4K... it’s one of those smart ones, by Samsung.

Anyone want to explain what the fuck “McAfee Security for TV” is, and why the fuck it is necessary!?

What kind, of absolute waster madman goes “I know what I’ma do today, write a virus for a tv”!?

Take that shit elsewhere McAfee.

Now accepting any links to known Smart TV 0-days and attacks...

And I had to sign in to 5 different fucking accounts to get to the fucking tv.

The world is broke as fuck. Roll on the apocalypse.

Dad handed over this beast to me
Casio PB-100
RAM: 1KB
ROM: 10KB
CPU: 455KHz
Display: 12 characters Monochrome

It's hard to believe that someone used this to code back in those days. Suppose to have been one of the first personal handheld computers. And people here complain about having 32gb RAM with 8 cores shame on you all

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

~RANT
I started two months ago a new role in a new company.
Together with 3 colleagues I manage a HUGE OpenStack platform (I’m talking about more than 300 customers, many petabytes of data, dozens of compute nodes 😍).

On Friday night a well-known multinational had the GREAT idea to update the software of one of the core components of the platform (Neutron).
Obviously it all went wrong and customers started to call and open tickets, so even if it was already past midnight we’ve been all called to arms.
As a workaround we had to rebuild ALL the networks, detach all the ports and reattach them to the VMs, with all the errors that came with this kind of operations, such as failing to get an internal/external IP, fail to boot etcetera.

What amuses me is the fact that the above-mentioned multinational just asked for logs with no solution (except for the above workaround) until Monday morning.

It has been a good weekend, i talked with professionals from all over the world, in various languages, and worked multi-tasking with two different computers, with a third that was used just to share my screen and VPN for the management network.

During this weekend I virtually met all the possible colleagues that I will meet in this new role, and it was pretty funny to see how they handle stress. (Badly if you ask)

I’ve been woken up at 7:30 after falling asleep at 6:45, I’ve slept 17 hours in 5 days, haven’t taken a shower in 5 days (I know, it happens, I worked from home) but it was worth it.
Not only and merely for the money (overtime work), but mainly for the job itself.
I love to handle this HUGE infrastructures for now, even if I think they have many limitations and many components could have been written better.

The best thing about this weekend was to meet a group of people from all over the country and the world that worked non-stop from Friday night until Wednesday night to solve the situation.

All of them understood me when I asked them questions, and didn’t treat me like the [insert random]science nerd that I am.

I felt like in the movies, in front of three monitors, working from the comfort of my chair, in my underwear, eating as fast as I could because I was constantly in call with someone.

Apart from that, WHAT THE FUCK WENT THROUGH YOUR HEAD TO DEPLOY AN UPDATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF adorable man???

WHY COULDN’T YOU WAIT UNTIL MONDAY??? NOBODY USES THOSE SERVICES AT NIGHT APART FROM THE SCHEDULED JOBS!!!!!

I HOPE YOU’LL HAVE A LONG AND PROSPER LIFE, FULL OF JOY AND HAPPINESS

!rant

So I am building a website and already finished it and ready to be deployed.
Got server access and found that there are many other websites files and folder.

Note : multiple copies of website that I am working on.

So I raise my concern with client about which folder is actually handling the website. She contact the old dev guy and got the webroot for that website. She told me to delete everything and clean it up and make tge current websites available.

I realize that there are many other websites may rely on those files and folder and inform about the consequences. And finally told her I will not touch any files except for the website I am working on.

So, I deployed the website and works good as expected. After 3 weeks clients comes back with an issue that one of her websites is notworking and trying to blame me for it.

Fyi : before my deploymemt she says that she will talk to hosting providers to clean their webspace. I am not sure on that yet.

So I tried to do auditing and found that after 2 days frm my deployment some has already wiped everything from those other websites.
I showed my audits and its someone did it.
You should contact your hosting provider or the other dev who she contacted for wiping.

From the begining I am telling that lady to take backups. She said no need.

The reason I didnt took it because I am not working on those website and obviously client isnt going to pay me for those back.

There is still more to go waiting for her resonses.

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

So today, I managed to make one of my colleagues feel like an idiot. In this contract, I work mostly for ui integration, while he build the pages with angular before I add all the html structure and fancy css.

We are building the front-end/ui for an industrial device with a touch screen. For that last 2 days he was blocked on a bug that when you click the confirm button on a delete popup, it would somehow select an input in the page before it was deleted and would lock the ui when showing the virtual keyboard (the poor thing didn't know what to do and wouldn't close).

During those two days, he asked all the other devs for help, trying to find a pattern or anything that could help, while I was focused on writing my css and stuff since it was my priority and I was hired specifically for that (I was aware of the bug and gave my input but I never saw it being reproduced)

So today, he start his new routine of raging at his desk and he decides to show me on my device for some reason. I immediately notice a pattern. It would always select one of the two fields behind the popup, in the click area of the button (it's a big button). Then, I noticed that I could press a random spot on the screen, drag my finger on the button and let go and nothing would happen.

It's at this moment I knew I had found the bug. The button was set to emit an event on mousedown while the inputs behind it were set to emit an event on mouseup (like it should be everywhere). So the popup closed when you placed your finger on the screen and the input was selected immediately after when you removed your finger (which was usually faster than the page code which was not yet optimized)

After that, it was just an easy fix to change the listener and I had a free beer.

So my company had a client who was a doctor. He wanted to build an iOS app and will come everyday in the office to scope the project. The company's boss was a greedy guy who always tried to keep his hands in client's pocket. And on some occasions he even went on to scold my colleagues working on the client's project in front of the client. The client was too volatile to freeze the scope which was resulting in us not getting anywhere. One day the boss came onto me in front of the client and showed like he is doing me a favor by giving me salary. The salary day was after 2 days. But I raged out. Next day I departed from home for office but felt so raged that I mailed my resignation to the boss. I wandered in the city aimlessly the whole day, and the boss gave me 5 calls to make up for it and come back. Then he went on to go legal, and I told him to do whatever he could. In the end it was all bluff.
I worked freelance for next few months, those were the best. Got paid quite nice and learned Angular 5 with Node.js. Best decision in my career..

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

I hate when someone throws at me some task all of sudden with a tight deadline.

Wednesday was one of those days.

manager: we want to remove all the offices because of our tight budget this year (multimillionaire company, lol), everyone will use office 365;

me: ahn... ok, but everything was already tested? Some macros, routines, old documents can be a big problem, as far I know (I don't use M$ at home, servers are Linux, so I really don't know about that). I can do some tests, only will need some real documents to make sure everything will do fine;

manager: yeah, yeah, everything will be fine, the high management already decided, don't worry, just remove the offices in the company, ok?;

me: alright...

*me deploys the remotion script in every f*cking machine*

48 hours later...

manager: well... everyone is complaining about the office 365, random complains, can you attend all the calls and reinstall if you can't solve the problem?

WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!

[RAGES INTERNALLY]

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

This used to be a stress toy...

2018 was a dumpster fuck for me. I was looking for 2019.

Oh boy, I was wrong.

I had a flight booked for 3rd Jan. I was supposed to go to Delhi, back to my job.

On 2nd Jan evening, I got a high fever. 103 F and my heartbeat were around 140. My brother took me to Hospital and after the doctor checked me.

There were no other symptoms. Only high fever. The doctor told me to do some blood test and give me a dose of Antibiotic.

Next day all the result came back negative. Doctor give me 3 days of antibiotic course and told eat light.

After 3 days of getting the 4g antibiotic in my body, Nothing changed. The fever was there and no symptoms.

on the 3rd day, the doctor increases the course to 2 days and told me to get more blood test. I also had to get 4D sonography and Heart ECG and its sonography.

on the 5th day, nothing changed. I still had a high fever. All the blood test were negative.

On the 6th day, I was admitted to the hospital and my medicine was changed to high does of broad-spectrum antibiotics and lots of new blood test.

There were taking blood from one hand and giving antibiotics to another.

After the broad-spectrum antibiotics, my fever went down to normal but all the 17 blood test I did came completely negative.

On the 8th day, we went to an infection specialist. He checked all the report and ask us to do a very details sonography. After all those things he said it most likely staphylococcus infection.

So here I am, making a chart of my temperature every 2 hours and taking two tablets every day.

This last 10 was very hard. There was a point where I was thinking "this is it. I am gonna die".

I am still waiting for a very detailed blood report which takes 5 days to create. I will get it after 2 days.

So after lots of medicine and over 15+ reports, Here I am working from home.

What a wonderful start of 2019.

Doing linguistic research where I need to parse 2000 files of a total of 36 GB. Since we are using python the first thing I thought was to implement multi threading. Now I changed the total runtime from three days to like one day and a half. But then when I checked the activity monitor I saw only 20 percent of the CPU usage. After a searching process I started to understand how multi threading and multi processing works. Moral of the story: if you want to ping a website till they block you or do easy tasks that will not use up all power of one core, do multi thrading. If you need to do something complicated that can easily consume all the powers of a single CPU core, split up the work and do multi processing. In my case, when I tried to grab information from a website, I did multi thrading since the work is easy and I really wanted to pin the website 16 times simultaneously but only have 4 cores. But when it come to text processing which a single file will take 80 percent of cpu, split it up and do multi processing.

This is just a post for those who are confused with when to use which.

Had mine for a few days, didn't think to post it.
Mine is a bit deep... As many of you don't know, I'm a aspireing writer. "Cyanite" is a character of my creation. She's basically a witch who plays god (a least in one of my stories). She's consitered to be a God of Mischief; Helping or hindering those she meets on a whim, purely for her own entertainment. Because of this, she is both prased and feared.

This saying essentially means that "A bad person can also do good, while still being bad." (Rather; you can't judge a person, and people are unprediactable.)

Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:

"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.

"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.

A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.

When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.

When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.

People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...

When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.

Long rant...

*Designer Posted image of newly designed layout for our app on trello.

Dev 1 (me, being the junior, on ios) : so... What's the size for x, Y, z, a, B, C?

She: it's 9 for the small text, 10 for sub title, 12 for main title.

*shows her the design on app
Dev 1: seems too small

She: just make it to look not small.

Dafug?

*finishes the app layout for that screen.
*working on next screen

Dev 1: your new design is for the screen of 1920x1080. But our supported screen size starts from 320 width. So there'll be text overlapping each other and ui might screw up.

She: uh.. Just... Put those that will overlap to the next line.

*shrugs
Dev 1: ok
=======
2 days later
Dev 2 (senior, working on Android)
Dev 2: so... What's the colour for x, Y, z

*Dev 1 laughs on the inside because of the struggles we have with her.

Dev 1 to Dev 2: is it common for her not to follow the design guidelines?

Dev 2: yeah man.. We just have to adapt her design into our app guidelines.

*sigh

Dev 2: there's a new icon here on this screen, so you wanna change the icon? Can I have the icon file?

She: oh.. No.. Use back the old one, because I just copy and paste.

Dev 1: so... This progress bar of yours, doesn't show its background colour, because you filled it already. So what's the background colour if the bar isn't filled?

She : hmm.... Oh.. Well.. Maybe try x.. ? *doesn't look nice* how about Y? *doesn't look nice* how about...

Me : why not you try in your computer first instead of me changing it here by code, it's much faster this way.

*seriously, wth?

Dev 1 and 2: there's additional text in your new design, what is it for?

She : oh.. No no. I copied extra due to copy and paste. Just ignore it.

Dev 1 and 2: what's the spacing gap between x and Y? And how about the size of the box?

She : oh.. I just estimate it, and for the box, not sure either, you can follow old design, because I'm just putting a box there for illustration purpose.

Mother fickle, what fuck man.

Dev 1 and 2: *flips table.
*we didn't, but.. It's freaking annoying.

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

... its been one of those days

Did "Quick Look" on a loading gif at work today... And sat for around 30 seconds waiting. Then realised I was looking at the actual gif rather than Quick Look reading the file.

Laughed quite hard when I raised I was waiting for sod all! 😂

Yeah, today was one of those days. 😒

When you know that tomorrow is going to be one of those days wherein you will be working for 12-14 hours straight, but you still end up staying awake all night, thinking about why your previous rant didn't get the expected number of ++'s

Yes, I am that immature.

God, I don't know whether I believe in you or not, but please kill all those people who play loud music in public.

So, I was travelling by a train two days ago. Halfway down the 15 hr journey, the guy next to me took out his laptop and started watching a movie, on speakers, in full volume. It naturally irritated me a lot, and I requested him to use head/earphones, to which he replied that he forgot his one back home. I told him to keep the volume down to which he got personal and put the volume down (maybe to 95%). Since I hate human interaction, I had to plug in my own earphones to keep his bitchy noise away.

The same thing happened today on the bus, the only two differences being:
• mobile phone instead of laptop
• said he doesn't own headphones
• claimed he could do whatever he wanted as it was not illegal

Now, I wished he fell of the bus and died, but the world ain't fair, so he still lives.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

So, got yet another one of those, "Ha! Sending this from your own e-mail address is proof I've infected your machine and recorded video of you synced to your browsing history! Send me bitcoin!" e-mails today. Just with a fun twist:

He claims to have infected my computer on November 8th, 2018 (for later readers: 4 days after the e-mail was sent).

Was about to give them points on creativity the other day; got a Japanese translation of it that was actually pretty spot-on all things considered, and then a Korean copy of it again the next day (just in case I couldn't read English or Japanese, I guess?).

But seriously, you're trying to pull this kind of scam, and can't even tell your bot to successfully pick a date *in the past*?

"But...it works locally", said the tired dev who hasn't had his morning coffee yet. It's going to be one of those days.

First day out of 10 exam days today! Have to use windows which I'm obviously not a fan of but oh well I'll manage.
But really, at first it didn't recognize my headphones (regular headphones input). Fair enough, after the admin fiddled around for half an hour we got it working.

*lets install Firefox and chrome*
The installers wouldn't launch at all, bit of fiddling around aaand it works.

*lets use Ms word again then*
Every time I try to save a file it gives shit tons of errors.
Found out that it does save but only with those errors.

*alright let's open up some pdf files*
"Error: no permission to use this application*

Oh come the fuck on just work I've got important stuff to do with a lot of time pressure!

I DON'T MIND USING IT ONCE IF I HAVE TO BUT COULD THAT COCK SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST FUCKING WORK?!

The worst part, I wasn't the only one with trouble, multiple people still don't have the jackplug thing working :/

Having one of those days where the code works on the development VM but not on the production box.... FML

FUCK ALL THOSE MONKEYS THAT WROTE ALL THE SHITTY CODE WHICH I'VE SPENT THE MAJORITY OF MY DAYS HAVING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE SHIT IT DOES AND WHY I CAN'T JUST BURN IT....

AND WHY THE FUCK DO BUSINESS USERS SEEM TO THINK THAT DEVELOPERS CAN UNDERSTAND ALL THEIR BUSINESS TALK...

IF I UNDERSTAND ALL OF WHAT YOU DO, YOU WILL BE OUT OF A JOB....

P.S. APPARENTLY ONE OF MY MEDS SIDE EFFECTS ARE INCREASED IRRATIBILTY. THE SLIGHTEST ANNOYANCES NOW PISS ME OFF...

SO APPARENTLY THAT MEANS I HAVE A FREE LICENSE TO BLOW UP N RANT ON THE JOB RIGHT?

... 🖕

When you're a Linux/c++/vi guy and then one day your boss asks you to do something in visual studio Windows and c# for a couple days and then those couple of days become months. Kill me now, pls.

You thought that make or gcc was a waste of time? Enter dd!!!

screen -dmS sdb dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb status=progress
screen -dmS sdc dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc status=progress

The fucking things.. despite having USB 3.0 hard drives attached.. go at a speed of a mere 6.7MB/s on my Supermicro whose 2 (only, because why on earth would you support more than a mouse and a keyboard in a rack design) USB connections work at only 6.7MB/s a piece. Definitely not gonna put those drives on USB with those terrible speeds. I ejaculate faster ffs!!! Those miserable speeds.. to hell with them!!!

So 2 motherfucking days worth of reimaging those drives and making them ready for their next deployment. All the while one of them was mounted in a SATA-USB caddy and could've very well been mounted in a SATA-600 mount on that Supermicro to be able to reach at least 70MB/s. Yes, I'm a fucking idiot :')

Protip: This can happen even if the socket is locked, apparently.

One of those days...

Working with a client on his "superior idea" and suddenly this happens: (longer rant)

tl;dr;
Client wanted me to move a div by 3 millimetres to the left and blamed me for not being capable of doing so while giving him a nonsense about different resolutions and screen sizes. (Use a ruler, DUH)

Me: Here's the updated design layout as our designer specified.
Him: Looks good but it needs to be moved 3 millimetres to the left
Me: *Confused as hell* - Wait, did you just said 3 millimetres?
Him: Yes, is that a problem for you?
Me: *Amazed* Well, yes, you see, we don't measure in millimetres. We use pixels.
Him: Ahh, can't you do anything right!? Why do I have to deal with your nonsense of telling me that this is not impossible? Just take your god damn ruler and put it on your screen, then move it 3 millimetres to the left.
Me: You do realise that every person has a different size/resolution monitor so it won't work?
Him: I don't care. Just do your god damn job or i'll find someone else to do it.
*
Story continued in such manner - we spent an hour on skype moving the stupid <div> around until it hit his 3 millimetres mark.
*
His: See, you could do it.
Me: *Sends him screenshot of my own screen (his was 1024x768, mine 1920x1080) where page is broken and not aligned*
Him: Oh come on, you break every god damn thing. You are the worst. I'm going to find a better one. *hangs skype call*
Him: *3 days later* Hi, so, umm, I've talked to other developers and they said it's impossible to measure in millimetres. Can you revert those changes we did?

After all this I've fully realised that this person is sits at computer very rarely and does not how it even works...

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

It's going to be one of those days. I already know.

Ok thats enaugh.
Some people are still so fucking stupid to ask the same question on XDA and on my thread 15 fucking times.
When you will release it ??
Just wait.
2 days later.
When will you release it ??
Waiiiitttt.
And so on.
Until i got to this point.
I fucking swear if i see some stupid question on my fucking thread that has been answered and the user just cant search then he will get very rude response.
This needs to be done since my thread isnt the only one with those idiotic questions: when will it be done, how to root it (Literally in the main post is the answer).
Lot of devs on XDA agree.
I understand that they are new to it but for ffs search !!!!!!

Set up a mail server for our office using one of those all-in-one mail server installations. It would keep denying connections every few days, so me, being the inexperienced shit I was, setup a cron job to restart the server at midnight everyday. It worked and still, to this day, it still works.

I can you about one really annoying coworker: Me.

The first thing I did as a sysadmim was to break my colleague's rc helicopter. After that I decided to learn Python, pestering him with questions once every two minutes. I developed, using the word loosely, some scripts that I wrote directly on the production servers, with predictable results.

After a while, I broke less things than I fixed. I learned a lot those years. Today I'm still amazed by the patience and knowledge of this guy; I owe most of my career to him.

These days I have a brilliant job stopping morons such as myself from breaking to many things. I try to be as patient and I hope to be as knowledgeable.

Fuck that shit once again. Spent an entire day releasing micro-patches because nobody listened to me, because "I am a developer but I don't do that full time".
Because you might think that I didn't fuck my ass with a giant bottle-shaped dildo studying development to get this fucking place maybe?
And what, I was right, once again. Because maybe I know the fucking project I work in, linked to the fucking product I'm certified for, you dumb cumfilled assface.

For those that doesn't know it, i do manage, maintain, develop stuff on our ECM infrastructure for our clients. I do basically everything as we have few clients and are a small company we can do this that way.

Anyway, had to release "urgently" 3 fucking features to a custom module to export stuff from the ECM to a client's ERP system. Tests? No time for this, don't lose time on this. I smell the "why didn't you test?" in two days. I fucking smell it.

Plus, the client is a fucking retarded mess. The kind of guy that is unable to check his previous e-mails and asks again the same thing, four times. Should I do a fucking tutorial on how to fucking use a fucking search bar? And you want to be informed on the technical details about the features? Come on, I have to explain you how to do your fucking CFO job.

And if it wasn't enough, My boss replied to the client while I was on holiday to explicitely tell the client that I'm the only one that can take care of that. That gives us a very professional image, doesn't it? And when I asked to train someone to at least do the administration job when I'm away, it's always a "we'll check that, we need that" but then nothing.

Anyway fuck it. if I resign I will laugh. 2 months to train someone else and get them on the export modules (which are commented and documented) in a company where in the office I'm possibly the only developer (we have one in the second office but he's a web developer).

Hopefully I'm at a bar drinking a fucking beer while continuing my golang "getting started" project. That's the only thing that makes me happy of coming back from holiday

p.s.: I want the fucking raven, make me dream.

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

My girl friend broke up with me few days ago without any solid reason. Today i stopped her and ask her why she broke up with me and she started giving stupid reasons whereas she was the one who was actually guilty of those accusations.

I think I just blew my own mind here.

Look at this:

Class SomeClass
{
_call($functionName, $arguments)
{
return call_user_func(array('SomeClass','uselessMethod'), 'method');
}

method($foo)
{
return new Adapter($foo)->execute($this);
}

uselessMethod()
{
return $this->method(__FUNCTION__);

}

}
so __FUNCTION__ resolves to
Caller:

You can run that code, whether you comment out uselessMethod, or not.

Adapter is a function that looks for what class to call depending on a database value
and execute the call.

So api basically uses a chain call to do stuff like this in controllers, here's how
I call the above:

$someObject = (new Class($object))->uselessMethod()->doSomething()->doSomethingElse();

But like, eventually my code matured to where all those methods in the chain call have the same one line return that calls my adapter to find the logic to run.

So, basically, I can now have a class with headless function calls that calls a directory of other classes, that are all defined in a contract somewhere. So as long as those classes
all adhere to the contract, it will never return an error.

I can't think of any reason to do this, other than my setup, and I have a sneaky feeling,
as dirty as this trick is, that there's a bad reason my code has come to being able to do this.

Maybe wrong strategy pattern from the beginning?

I'm sure it'll come to me like 3 days from now..

A few days ago someone posted a pic of an ESP8266 microcontroller, so it reminded me that I have one of those lying around with a board with a screen I built during summer, so I thought, why not making a devrant reader, and so here it is:

For now it can only read rants, posting is coming soon, the software keyboard is already implemented

We call it the thing (Accrocchio in italian)

I just want to share my very first companion. Haha... This is btw my laptop way back 2011, used it to store highschool memories and silly stuff, if you know what I mean. This is the laptop that I first used the labrynth of directories such as A folder contains A to z Folder and again inside one of those contains A to z again lowered and upper. This is also my partner in coding C++ back in the days, I usually write code in paper and when back to school I used our lab's computer. Ohh and I also have my anime addiction started on this too! One time I discovered the side VGA and connected it to our big LCD screen but by the time I plugged it in, it produce explosive sounds, and my grandpa said that that lcd tv is only for 110v not for 220v. I learned the importance of voltages that day. I just went back and open it to backup my highschool memories and stuff to my external hdd. Ahhhhh memories.

The single most annoying thing about working with Microsoft is how they, at one point, decided to wipe 99% of their articles and downloads on their site. But instead of updating it in their OWN FUCKING OS, they just leave links to the broken pages in their help system. The second problem then arises when you realise that instead of giving you an error page, it automatically redirects you to the default page.
But on top of wiping their site, not updating windows to reflect those changes, and having a terrible site design, they have also decided that it would be best to keep the pages that once we're, online. This means that they will still show up in search engines, without any content being there.

Add to that the fact that their support team is incompetent to an insane degree, and often doesn't know what they're talking about. This has caused me so much frustration over the last few days.

Dear Microsoft, please get your act together and fix your shitty website.
Greetings,
A pissed of customer who paid money for your shitty services

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

Y'all, are internships in your area paid, unpaid or u need to pay to get one?

Our uni made internships mandatory! being from one of the country which produces largest number of engineers per year. Every godamn student from our uni is running around to get an internship! And there arises these dick heads with so called made up startups which has never done a godamn single project, just legally registered before the dawn and puts up advertisements for internship trainings!! All our uni needs is a fucking certificate from a technical company which is legally registered. And these assholes provide internship to those who pay them hella amount, and attend there couple of days just to get the certificate!! No developers! Just some random guy talking about html and css! Now thats Internship!

Fucking shit! Making money by looting students in their hard times! Students get the certificate that satisfies the uni, but for fucks sake at least bring an expert to guide them! No!! Need to stand up against this shit!

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

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

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

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

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

Girlfriend wants to start a fight almost ending the relationship while I have to finish an app in 2 days and the Volley library is starting to get too complicated (should've learned Retrofit instead).

I'm doing the project alone because half of my group literally quit the course to study Advertising and Marketing in the middle of the project.

This is going to be one of those weeks...

one of those days

Don't you feel sometimes like you may not be as good dev as you think you are? Like all you do is search for chunks of code in stackoverflow so you can assamble a semi functional project.

I'm having one of those days, and it just feels like shit.

Don't you just love it when backend/website team does changes and no one notifies anyone about it :)

Google rejected two updates claiming app is has the ability to play youtube videos in the background, but the app is more of a dashboard just to let admins view their data O_O

After digging around, it turned out those dudes changed a webpage we were viewing in the app, and included a youtube button, now when you play that video it stays running in the background.

Took me four days to find out that, and only after Google sent us what exactly was violating their policies.

FML :)

As a final year student it makes me feel proud about things I do now, back in 2014 I was newbie to programming and after the years of study ( I skip collages in order to study by my self at home since my syllabus is too old for me to keep up with new technologies. ) I still feel like shit against brilliant programmers on the internet.

My journey untill now was frustrating and side by side it was fun too, I have spent several days to figure out very minor problems in my programme which made me forced to learn even more in order to avoid silly mistakes in future.
Those four lines of output were really true worth of that forty lines of code.

Every one of us, in their entire life at least once had thought about which programming languages to learn first and yes I was one of those guy who used to search on Google, watched YouTube videos and asked seniors for the same advice but soon I realized it's never enough to completely learn even one language. Each and every programming language is based on similar logical structure. No matter how different it's syntax is it won't make much of a difference.

I am thankful to internet and all of those guys who make video tutorials, help on q&a forum (stack overflow) , publish posts on website and all of IT community guys. I made it this far it's all thanks to you and I know it's just beginning of spectacular journey ahead.

It's just one of those 'need 3 coffees before I even consider starting anything' kinda days today...

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

Just one of those days...

A few days ago I had a party with a big part of my good ol' highschool classmates who I almost never spoke to. Let the stories begin:

- Guy who made fun me in when I said I wanted to do computer science: "Man, I wish I had done the same study. It looks fun."

- Guy who has a startup for like 1 year: "Sooo what are you good at, ios/android development? webdevelopment? contact me if you want to work with us.(for free)"

- One of the friendly guys: "Do you have any sites where I can learn some basic programming or something?"

What I thought: WTF HAPPEND IN THOSE 3 YEARS, WHY THE SUDDEN INTEREST IN PROGRAMMING AND STUFF?! ESPECIALLY YOU FIRST GUY!

This happened 3 years ago in my previous company. It was a small start up company and we worked on PHP stack. One of the its ex-founders had written Windows Mobile App which now had to be upgraded with new features. So we hired this new dot net guy. I always thought dot net guys were ELITE coders and was excited to see how they work.
While I played Xbox and had fun, our dot net guy stuck to his workstation furiously working. My boss who was casually strolling out of his office for a stretch saw dot net guy working hard and suggested we all developers should take him as an example.
20 days went by and each day the dot net guy did the same. He came, he silently worked on his workstation, he left in the evening. In those 20 days my boss asked twice to the dot net guy if he has finished features he was assigned but he said he did not. After a month when he said the same negative answer and had nothing to show for the work he has done he was fired.
I was so curious to see what code that ELITE coder had written for a month but could not deliver a feature(Maybe some error he could not fix?). So I open the code repo on which he worked and I see 30 commits from that guy to it. He had made a single commit each day(Fair enough he wants to commit everday before leaving). It was time to check his commit diffs to see his ELITE code. What do I find? In every fucking commit he either added a blank line to the DocBlock or removed the same. Nothing less nothing more! So much for the hyped not-so-ELITE dot net guy...

Today was one of those days where where I wasted hours on a typo and posted a perfect algorithm asking for help concerning a bug.

FeelsDeveloper.jpg

Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :

1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .

2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.

3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)

4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"

( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )

5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)

And there were many other short stories like that.

Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)

But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.

Bloody Office politics :|

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

Worst:

Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.

Best:

After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job.

one of those days where the boss has his weekly amnesia and completely forgot an agreed feature discussion.. sigh..

I know its been quite a while since ive posted last but it is safe to say that i am back! And boy do i have some stuff to bitch about.

This semester, Im taking mobile app development as a class. I chose to take this class over the introductory c# class, so that i wouldn't need to work with Windows or really do anything else to touch Windows. Well the joke is on me. Here i was thinking that we would be using a bit of Java from time to time while only really learning best practices and concepts.
Never did i think that this class's curriculum would be entirely based off of Xamarin.
Seeing as I need either this class or the two c# classes to graduate, I had to bite the bullet and just accept that my semester would be full of irritation during this class.
Its been about seven weeks in, and i have turned in 8 assignments.
All 8 of those assignments have been Windows Form Applications doing simple shit like dividing two numbers.
We have not made anything for multiple devices. We have not made anything for even one mobile device. We have not even discussed how to do this in the class.
This wouldnt bother me so much since these are typically easy programs that take about 30 minutes to make and test and submit for grading. It does insanely bother me, however, that it takes Windows so FUCKING LONG to boot, or when it freezes every 2 minutes because i clicked into another program, or it just HANGS ON THE UPDATING SCREEN AT 36% FOR THREE DAYS, or when it took 4 different reinstallations of Visual Studio 2017 before i could actually open without an error code.

College, Ive learned, tests my patience way more than it has ever tested my knowledge.

So I was helping my friend debug her code.
A portion of text was not being displayed. We put log statements everywhere. Cross checked every line of code. We had almost started to lose it.
And then we found out that she had accidentally set the text color to white in the XML layout.
Just another one of those days.

At one of my previous gigs, the IT director was just some guy that dated the bosses daughter. When she inherited the company he went from entry level data analyst to his new director position. IF he decided to show up to work at all it would be at just in time for lunch, and then he'd head out shortly after.
This guy would ask for an estimate on development and then start the timer when marketing started working on the project. This would often lead to us estimating something like 4 months on a project, and then waiting on marketing for 3 of those months, leaving us with 30 days left.

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

when you have one of those days where your mind constantly blanks out and your ability to focus is null...

Alright, server got hacked a week ago. Bad enough on its own but okay, perfect time to change the server infrastucture completely instead of doing it later this year. Since Saturday we are working on setting everything up (game server, apache, etc.pp.) while making sure to configure everything correctly to be safer this time.

We are finally at the point where we could go back online. And what happens? One team member _now_ (6 days after the hack) suggests that it might be a good idea to format the hacked server and configure just what we need to patch the clients with it.

Great fucking idea, why didn't you have that idea 5 days earlier?! There was more than enough time already to format the old server and configure it. Another day delay, yay. X_X

Aaah, ranting really helps in those situations. Oh and Hi, I'm new here. Nice place, I like it. ^_^

I'm having one of those days where I just feel completely useless at programming

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

It's one of those days where I just need to let it it out. I'M A FUCKING IMPOSTER.

but I'm going to keep learning anyway. 👺

Alrighty, saturday morning rant time!

I just recieved a mail from one of my not-so-much-loved colleagues.

Now Background first: I work in IT-Support. We provide services for other companies. One of those services is monitoring servers and clients for various things. I recently took over the project (was assigned to do it) and restructured everything, wrote new scripts to test more stuff, successfully tested it internally and rolled it out over the last 2 weeks.

Now one of these scripts hooks into the Windows Update API and looks at the update history. It filters for known Windows Update Agent strings (UpdateOrchestrator, AutomaticUpdates and AutomaticUpdatesWuApp in case you also want to do something like this) and then looks for installation errors over the last 24 hours and wherever there have even been any successful updates over the last one and a half months.

Back to that mail.

My colleague sent me this lovely mail about a ticket i opened about his customers servers beeing all out-of-date on updates.

"This is all wrong, everything's fine. I disabled the checks."

...

It's on bitch.

So i logged on to my work PC via TeamViewer, opened my script, connected to the customer and was ready to debug the shit out of my script, knowing i probably won't even need to.

I looked at the update history via Windows Update itself and behold: 1st April. That's almost 50 days in the past.

So the script works, go figure.

Great, so search for new Updates then.
>None found.

Hm. What could it be? Did my super special colleague forget to care about his very special totally-needs-WSUS-customer WSUS again?

Yup.

Online-Search finds a ton of new Updates.

Screenshot, write pissed mail to colleague, re-enable checks, breakfast.

every new smartphone these days seems to be like one of those scify movie aliens with weird eyes (dual camera lenses) .
I mean, pixel phones clearly shows that having a top-notch software for single camera is already at par with dual cam setups .

And yet huawei is slaying them all .
New huawei flagship phone : awesome specs , ai beautify , blah blah lens , blah blah block chain 16 mp AND "2MP " dual camera setup .

they are like yeah surely we give them dual cameras, but why bother because no one will read after the word "DUAL"

xD

What to do when you're 8 hours away from home at work and all you want to do is netflix and snuggle in bed 😞

Just had one of those days.... totally learned A LOT about how to properly profile a Linux box using Brendan Gregg's( Netflix ) USE method. Only problem is... I didn't make any actual progress on my application project itself. 😩😩😩😭😭😭

I just had to quit a part time programming job because I couldn't do it. I'm not really sure how I feel, there were alot of factors.

I took an internship about a year back to do some embedded C. I kicked ass and developed a system that really solved alot of problems for the company and so people started giving me "the hard back shelf problems". Like those problems that are really valuable if someone can get it working but not so important that it blocks anything day to day. Totally fair work for an intern, that is both complex and interesting.

When school started I took a part time remote role working on one of these problems. Fast forward to now (few months of remote work at school); i can't handle the stress. If I devote more time to work I fail a test. If I ace a test my work duties go neglected. On top of that my boss misses scheduled calls with me left and right, I even reminded him everyday 3 days before hand once!!!

Naturally I started feeling like I should quit. I was no longer interested in the work from a pure academic view, and emotionally hated doing it. However, since I was a good performer this place offered to interview my little brother!! Fuck, so do I choose my happiness or my brothers. It feels evil to choose myself over my brother. My brother, he's just a freshman so I know his odds are very low of getting an internship this year are low. And the place I worked at had some weight in the name so I could seriously jump start my little bros career. I do know however that if I don't quit that I will fail school, and do it while being miserable.

And so I quite my first remote job, from my first internship. I feel happy about, but also like I let someone down (them?, Me?, BROTHER?).

3 months project:
- deadline changed to 2 months
- specs delayed by 1 month

Now a 1 month project...
Started one month earlier so I could achieve something...

Now, 23 days to deadline: here, take this 20 page PDF with 200 questions ( witch can be drastically reduced) to make the new form section (2nd section out of 6).

Me: OK, but it could be nice to have everything at once so I could design it accordingly , I can see questions here that are repetitive , it would spare me a lot of work if I could see the big picture.

she: Just put those (200 f#cking questions) on and show me so I can see if its good and deliver the rest based on it.

OK, fuck it I'm just let hibernate create all the fucking tables and I figured out where to get all the questions she wants anyway... there are 7 categories with repeated questions...(about 150)...

Just wonder what's so hard to do her job... she had 3 months to do it and I only have 1...

Why do bosses have to be such absolute bellends?

I have depression and ptsd after my time in the Army, which I was open with my boss about when I started.

It is more or less under control, but over the last month or so I’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, and had a telling off at work about being late and using my phone too much. I’ve been doing everything that has been asked of me, but I hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t be using my phone (I have trouble concentrating at the moment so have a tendency to switch between things a lot like Work, emails, phone, emails, work etc. While at home I’ll have the tv on my computer and my phone switching. Between the 3)

So after my telling off and I’d calmed down a bit I sent my boss an email apology, saying I was going through a rough patch but that it isn’t an excuse and I will try harder to stop it from affecting my work etc.

She comes back with an email about she’s done this for me and that for me but she needs to see some output and wants to own some issues and see them to completion.

Now, I admit my output has been down a bit but I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some custom software that’s full of spaghetti code so it also requires time for me to get my head around it to understand what’s going on, and the guy who wrote it and is the one who knows exactly what it is that needs to be done only works 3 days a week and is only in the office for two of those, so makes it a bit difficult.

Anyway, I assume that she for got I am the person running the project (I use running in its loosest possible terms) to migrate us from SourceSafe to GitLab and if she’d bothered to look she would have seen every single piece of work that I’d committed over the last 2/3 weeks.

Luckily for me I know have to re-write all of the work I did in the last 2/3 weeks in one night.

Also because I, quite correctly, got told off I know feel like an absolute cunt, I’m getting marri d in 3 weeks and now I seriously feel like saying fuck it all and leaving everything and moving away