Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

Day in a life of a JS developer.

2 weeks ago I was writing an `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` oneliner as a joke - as an answer to a question "I have access to my competitor's server; what should I do?". I was crafting it so that it'd do as much damage to the business (not the server) as it could.

And I accidentally executed it on my work laptop. In the background (with an `&`).

It ran for a good 5-7 seconds on an i7-11850H with an SSD, until I issued a `kill %%`

Good thing it ran as a non-root user. Bad thing - I have no idea what it may have deleted nor whether it touched my /home.

I'm afraid to restart my laptop now :)

whoopsie :)

Ideas for a strong password:

- a regex matching my laptop's LAN IP address
- a sed command to enable X11 forwarding in sshd_config
- a shell oneliner extracting all the IP addresses from ifconfig / ip a sh
- an awk command to print processes in D state
-

Chip in!

a shell oneliner periodically checking devrant's availability and sending me a notification when it starts working.

Dockers JSON output is garbage.

First, you'll get no JSON per se.

You get a JSON string per image, Like this:

{...} LF
{...} LF
{...} LF

Then I tried to parse the labels.

It looked easy: <Key>=<Value> , delimited by comma.

Lil oneliner... Boom.

Turns out that Docker allows comma in the value line and doesn't escape it.

Great.

One liner turns into char by char parser to properly tokenize the Labels based on the last known delimiter.

I thought that this was a 5 min task.

Guess what, Docker sucks and this has turned into try and error...

For fucks sake, I hated Docker before, but this makes me more angry than anything else. Properly returning an parseable API isn't that hard :@

Hexdump oneliner

php -r 'for(;$r=fread(STDIN,16);)printf("%08x %s $r\n",$i++*16,join(unpack("h*",$r)));'

I once made an oopsie in an API for a logistics provider (one of the biggest in Germany...).

To understand the oopsie...

Based on input data a string must be created containing several hex / string / formatted values.

Think of ...

$return .= sprintf("%02X", ...)

I think there were around 15 to 20 lines, although more complicated.

The bug happened because I had a brainfart.

What was previously one line with... Many many many many variables, I had to split into multiple lines since internal stuff changed and it was impossible to change this oneliner of hell with >50 formatting codes.

Of course we didn't test everything.
XD

What we didn't test was - funnily enough - wether the casting was correct in all cases.

I misplaced a formatting code.

And we had a major brainfart because we tested integer, but not double / float values....

We sent for a long time packages much cheaper than allowed (took thw logistics provider nearly 3-4 months to realize this :) ).

Spot the difference:

@highlight
print sprintf("%01.2s", $money).PHP_EOL;

print sprintf("%01.2f", $money).PHP_EOL;

How it started:

Need to replace in a lot of SQL files certain stuff...

find . -type f -iname '*.sql' -exec sed -i 's|new|old|g' {} \;

12 hours later that find executed a shell script containing roughly 120 lines of text pipelining.

The jolly of inconsistent workflows.

Different SQL format stylings... Makes fun when single line string replace needs to be extended to multiline RegEx handling. Or matching SQL comment configuration..

Different line endings. MacOS, Windows, Unix, Bukkake.

Different charsets / collations. Anyone wants latin1_swedish_ci... utf8... utf16... :/

Realizing some people even left sensitive data inside the SQL files (e.g. API Tokens..... Yayyyyyyy).

...

Ugh. It's never a one liner. It's never easy. -.-

I hate cleaning up messy shit.

Aber method that was supposed to Check If a payment for a (back then) unimplemented payment methode that returns true as a default value...

A Javascript oneliner to skip the payment... Used to be in produktion for years, before I reported it

My biggest influence on coding style is working with other people's code. I know the temptation to write "clever" code and I've been (and probably still occasionally am) guilty of it myself, but it's not until you have to debug someones oneliner iterator which has !(i-j) as the stop condition that you start to appreciate dumb, boring, obvious code.

If having a series of if checks in a long list makes it readable, keep it that way. If it makes it more readable to rewrite it into a nested switchcase with a couple of ternary bits, go ahead. Just don't spend half a day wrapping it up into two layers of abstraction that will require an onboarding process for the rest of the team.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, why is beauty known for face and not soul?

Thuth can only be found in one place: the code

Do you know some good tech RSS,Atom,... Feeds?
Anything about programming, operating systems, hacking, Hardware would be welcome.

But please not something trash like nixcraft, where every article amounts to "How to do this very basic thing that is literally a oneliner but we felt its so complicated, it justifies writing an article about it."