Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?

I found it!

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

!rant #happynews

It's a boy :D

1/7/17 - d/m/yy

Fancy dates 😎

For linux lovers

😍 my dear code

My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!

She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.

Best sister in law!

How should I make this fractal more tree like?

Too true too true 😆

That moment when you Google an error and there are zero results.

Fuck you to all the bosses who don't give a Fuck about their employees.

Me whenever I open one of my old projects...

Well that surprised me at first...

My school stores everyone's username and passwords (including admins) in plain text on a Windows 2007 server that they remote desktop into.

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:

- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push

Our "monitoring" today.

😆😆😆

This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.

My wife finally said "no more sleeping".

Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".

I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.

Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox).

Learn you some Javascript

Ducks are just like programmers. They might seem calm on the surface, but they're flailing wildly underneath

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

I don't think I've EVER wanted to hit the insert key.

"You know what would be great?"
"What?"
"If typing erased what you've already done so you can't actually edit anything"
"Sounds pretty great"

I'm such an idiot.

Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.

Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.

Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.

At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.

Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.

Such an idiot.

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

I've been writing more python than English the last month so now I have to go through my essay and replace all the single quotes with double quotes...

When you're a multimillion dollar company that ships software used by oil and gas and you still haven't moved away from VB6 for extensions while in the 21st century... Well, you're certainly missing out on the accelerating telegram industry.

Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!

Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!

Stop the lies!!!

2 days into a new java project and I already miss scala so much.

My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.

It's always the same story.

"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".

...

Another hour goes by.

If only I could keep to my own convictions.

I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.

I forgot return.

While configuring wifi acess for a new joinee who claimed 5 years of experience.

Me: please share your mac id over chat.

Him: 192.168.0.32

Me: @

The plight of a graphical programmer.

Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.

In short, coding changed everything for me.

PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer.

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

Brilliant idea time:

Inspired by @TrojanMorse and his fractal trees

A fractal tree wallpaper that grows throughout the day.

So at 12 a script starts a new fractal and only uses depth 1 (a twig). Then every other hour it branches once more so at 2 am the fractal would have depth 2 and at noon it would have depth 7. That way you get a tree growing throughout the day for your screensaver. Now to make this a thing

After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!

If an orange costs $6 and a grape costs $4, how much does a pineapple cost?

The example on Microsoft's page for styling .NET applications is in comic sans.

Slow time so I can code more AND sleep more!

Go to the office, start the computer, get some coffee, open up Eclipse...

Java.lang.NullPointerException

Fuck this shit.

Make a wish

Gotta love it when you've just hit your pace with a project and then the requirements change...

Three times in a row...

So Microsoft doesn't ship the ODBC drivers for Access on their new distros of office because they run in an isolated environment... THEN WHAT GOOD IS YOUR FUCKING EXPORT TO ODBC OPTION IS. YOU'RE MAKING MY JOB SO MUCH HARDER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE.

Stack Overflow is offline

When you try to clap in a presentation while holding coffee and spill it all over yourself.

When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...

git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'

git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend

Huh?

git log
commit #
mend

Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!

I sing in an acapella group
But not just any acapella group...
An all-male acapella group
Not much nerdier than that, I'd say.

GUIs. They suck. I never want to make one again.

"Can you check what my password is?"

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

A very satisfying number

I love the mix of people’s setups. There are those with actual monitors set up in a nice curved way, and then there are people with like 10 random laptops set up on their desks like they hoard electronics

I want an IDE that has a filter that highlights all recently made changes. Like you can pick the hour/time range and then it'll highlight all the things that were changed. That'd be great

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

Heathrow express having some trouble this morning.

Context: Madre recently got a new laptop to replace her old HP, but since she doesn't know much about computers, I picked it out for her. I went a little overboard on the specs because I new it was a "family laptop" and I would end up using it more than she would.

Mum: *yelps after typing on computer*
Me: "What's wrong"
Mum: "This computer is too fast!"
Me: 😐
Me: ... "What?"
Mum: "It loads things too fast"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Mum: "When I click on the apps they open almost immediately"
Me: "That's a good thing"
Mum: "No it's not, it startled me!"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: ...
*goes back to reading book*

One crucial lesson I learned while diving into programming:

Use various learning resources. Everyone explains things a little different.

You can understand stuff much easier.

By now I'm about a month into my first job, and I've gotta say: working full-time kinda sucks. Even if I'm enjoying what I'm developing, 8 hours is still way too long to try to focus on one project. I could get more done in a productive 4 to 5 hour stretch than I've been getting done in the whole 8 I'm here. I guess that's part of the allure of freelancing though.

What do you call a group of poor young adults?

A college!

Somebody has to say it.

React is a lot more trouble that it's worth and has fewer good ideas than people give it credit for. It's a great tool for any other context that's not the browser, and the only reason its the new cool kid in town is because Facebook made it so, and because x-rays went nowhere.

When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.

I get home today and my wife says:

"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"

Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.

Whenever I'm having a technical discussion with my business partner, he asks me if we can make the project/feature compatible with the Sega Saturn. I keep telling him that I cannot base my business plan on a defunct esoteric console. I think I made the right choice

"Gooey" or "gee-you-eye"?

We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.

I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!

I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.

Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.

Generator functions should be treated like sorting algorithms: Not worth your time if all you have is 4 or less async instructions.
Callback hell is actually kind of nice and warm when you're a just a few levels down. If you're really confused by your obfuscated code, you suck at node.

!rant

Oh that wonderful feeling of finishing a month long project. Updating all the comments, refactoring things, testing everything out, closing the 50 chrome tabs you have open...

Life is good

I was never a big fan of Github to be used within a company. So about 3 years ago where I used to work I implemented all the tools from Atlassian. Like litteraly all of them. And first I was stunned of the possibilities I had with Jira, Confluence, Bamboo and Bitbucket! But while self-hosting all thoose services you always felt, that Atlassian just bought all thoose companies and "threw them together"
BUT with newest features of Gitlab, I think they outperformed everyone! I absolutely love what they offer, even as a free service. They integrate all features in one product where you would otherwise relay on different products.
Whats important to you when it comes to VCS?

When you immediately regret your career decisions.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but I'm working on a WPF app right now and they write some damn good documentation

So, I'm looking into something and end up on Stack Overflow. Someone posted the question:

"Does minified javascript improve performance?"

This question was old as shit, all they way from 07/25/09, and about an Adobe Air application. (Remember that? Me neither...) It had a great, accepted, and still accurate answer, posted the same day the question was asked. Now, fast forward 8 years and on 12/08/17 (A mere 7 months ago...) the following answer was posted. I don't know what they were thinking, but here it is, complete and unabridged, with my comments in square brackets:

"I'd like to post this as a separate answer as it somewhat contrasts the accepted one: [Somewhat contrasts? More like completely contradicts...]

Yes, it does make a performance difference as it reduces parsing time - and that's often the critical thing. For me, it was even just simply linear in the size and I could get it from 12s to 4s parse time by minifying from 3MB to 1MB. [First off, your parse time should NEVER be THE critical thing, but secondly, and more importantly, WHO THE FUCK HAS 1MB OF MINIFIED JS ON A PAGE!!!]

It's not a big app either, it just has a couple of reasonable dependencies. [THERE IS ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOTHING REASONABLE ABOUT ANYTHING HE JUST SAID! What dependancies is he using?! You could use minified and not even gzipped jQuery, AngularJS, Vue, Ember, React, AND Dojo libraries on the SAME PAGE, AND have 118k of application code, AND STILL NOT HAVE HIT 1MB QUITE YET!!!]

So the moral of the story here is: Yes, minifying is important for performance - and not because of bandwidth, but because of parsing. [Javascript should NEVER take longer to parse then to download, even on a low powered device...]"

So, yeah, I'm at a loss for what this guy was thinking, but the thought the people like this exist, and that my browser might one day be subjected to their horrific nightmare of code terrifies me...

I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Because I like to keep life interesting.

Ok Visio. You have a Database Wizard that allows me to associate shapes with database records. Cool! You do not allow me to automate this through VBA? NOT COOL

Things you should not say on your last day of work:

If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious.

Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.

Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.

So, apparently, in 2015 our webhost (ixwebhosting) was purchased by Site5... This week, they finally migrated us to Site5 servers without warning, taking my email down in the process...

Today, after following the instructions in their own KB article (that tells you to click an icon that doesn't exist,) and chatting with support for over an hour, I was told that the new system they migrated us to doesn't support catch-all email accounts... At all... It's simply not possible to receive an email that was sent to your domain, unless the email address exists in the system somewhere... Despite the fact that it's a standard cPanel feature, that the old and new systems both use cPanel, that every other webhost I have ever seen that uses cPanel has this feature available, AND the fact that this is an important feature for a lot of websites, because they pipe all of their emails to a script for processing... It's simply not possible... They won't be providing that feature anymore. Nor for that matter is it possible to be migrated back...

They migrated accounts to a system that has a basic email function intentionally disabled, without warning... And we can't afford to open an account with someone else ATM... So I can't get any email until we get migrated... FML

10 updoots to 1000...

IE university: it’ll only take you 10 years to get your diploma!

Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.

I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!

Things nobody told you when starting to learn a new programming language:

Congratulations! You became a collector. From now on you will collect websites, books and a ton of related software.

Just stumbled upon this question and it says the output is:

TRUE
FALSE

… but why? 😱

Uh... how many?

Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??

Guess what, people get on planes and travel.

Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.

I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!

Oxygen Not Included

Another game worth mentioning.

Already spent half the week on it, the learning curve is interesting, you will eventually fail many times but with every fail the next colony is going to achieve more and more.

It's kind of missing some nuclear reactor. (Hello Factorio :)

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.

So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often...

Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?

Looking for something not too high maintenance.

It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first?

When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.

This is why I'm returning to full stack.

Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!

Thank God for SSDs!

What’re good starter projects for a Raspberry Pi? I would like to get started on hardware and I’m inclined to install recalbox or retropi (cause I love video games), but I’d also like a diy project. Maybe I’ll make a VPN...

So all you salaried programmers/workers in a programming related industry, what would you say are things to expect in a programming job? I'm considering going into the industry (I'm still young) and I'd like to hear about what it's like. Thanks a lot!

Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!

After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation.

¿Algún DevRanter hispanohablante por aquí?

Nacionalidad y profesión.

Mexicano. MEAN / C#

I've been a windows user for a long time now, but I've been thinking of trying out Linux sometime soon. Which distro should I start with? And can I still play steam/origin games? I might also use a VM to see how I like it before I move over.

I'm sure I could google this, but a lot of you seem to use Linux, and this isn't stack overflow so I'm not expecting too many people to shit on me for asking 🙂

!rant #tip

Windows 10 - service host high cpu usage

Stop the superfetch service and it would be down to normal.

You should checkout the description of the superfetch service... Lol ):D

* Finishes requested features and starts polishing
* Gets email that asks for new features
* New features require some change that requires me to rewrite what I just finished

sigh();

Decides to fork an OS repo and make some modifications.

It's written in coffeescript.

First internship ended today, a nice experience and I definitely learned a lot. It’s bittersweet for all the interns to part ways, but watching a movie and having dinner was a nice way to wrap things up. Now it’s back to school...

Howdy yall,
I'm interested in developing a productivity app for windows, but I have no idea where to get started. Do you have any suggestions for frameworks/tutorials to get started with? I'd prefer to use C# instead of C++, but if necessary I'll do either.
Thanks for the suggestions
P.S. It'll also be the first project I actually use version control for. Fun stuff

Somebody screwed up...

I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.

3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note

!dev

When you wake up from a dream OF AN ENTIRE DAY so you start off the day tired...

Any recommendations for moving a blog?

My wife and I just cancelled our account with siteground hosting a WordPress blog. Looking for a cheaper alternative. Willing to get my hands dirty as a web dev, but would like a nice CMS experience for my wife. Also want to keep our existing content. If we can keep our custom domain somehow that would be a win.

Thanks!

Hey Nodevember! Did you hear about the time a C++ conference decided to uninvite Dietz? Me neither. I have heard about the time a Javascript conference uninvited Doug Crockford though.

Do any of you have dependency bloat on node modules at production time?

Thanks devRant team! I drink to make the pain go away

I got a lot of crazy ideas and I am starting a lot of different projects. But I always start at developing the complete backend. Which is my strength. So in my opinion the product is ready to use, technically it works. Wouldn't there be the front-end .. It always ends in a total disaster when i try to create one that is beautiful. I just want to write freaking clean HTML5 code with any nasty CSS Framework. Any advise how i can overcome my anger?

When you are tearing you hair out trying to figure out why the PR you're reviewing isn't working. Then you realize you forgot to pull the latest changes!

Not sure if reading tech blogs in bed while falling half asleep is a sign of brilliance or insanity.

You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.

Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
}

My favorite place to go...

Does anyone know of any good opensource time tracking software with a focus on privacy?
I don't trust the proprietary stuff but it's useful software

laravel websocket server, laravel echo plugins, android app, ionic angular frontend, laravel backend... hopefully the tech stack is stable for an ordering app

Remember back when you could just develop without Webpack failing because of missing loaders.

2017: supporting IE now somewhat less painful.