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

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

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

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.

@Devintrix , congrats and happy lifes with your wife. this joke is for you :)

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began running unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity. Applications such as PokerNight 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5 and Monday Night football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run some of my other favorite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but un-install does not work on this program.

Can you help me please?

Thanks,

Joe

——————————————————–
Dear Joe:

This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a “UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT” program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and designed by its creator to run everything.

It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained.

It is impossible to un-install, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this. Some have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system.

I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and just deal with the situation. Having Wife 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for faults and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 2.1, Jewelry 2.2, and Chocolates 5.0.

Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support

In my college days i was designing a bootloader for avr microcontroller , i had the idea to flash code wirelessly to avr over bluetooth and also cross compile the compiler for android device so that you can code on android, every thing went well just one thing didn't, i saw that code of certain size is executing properly , greater than that size gives me wired outputs so i have to dump hex from the avr (that is flashed the by bootloader) and compaire it with the original hex of code it got messy as you can see, most fun part of this bug is that error can be anywhere cross compiler may be fucked up , the bootloader may be fucked up , or it may be my bluetooth module , after 14 hours of staring at the hex code i figured out the mess in bootloader instruction that was changing the page address for flashing .

when it worked it was 3am in night i literally burst into tears of joy next day bought myself a cake to celebrate

Okay so about a year ago these FUKKING IDIOTS decides, against my recommendation, to do this quick-ugly-hack and ninja it into production.
I tell them its a FUCKING BAD idea that will blow up in a year or so...
But no, just go go go!!!!!!!

Now a year later, shit blew up badly. A total FUCKING derail. These new idiots asks me to "fix the problem", the same fucking problem I predicted and warned them about a year ago. So now i have to clean up their ducking mess because "Nobody else knows how to fix it".
What the FUCKING HELL do we pay them fuckkkers to do?!!

New idiots you ask? Yep, because 3 out of the 4 original fucktards already left the place in order to go and make some other new collegues lives fucking miserable.

FUCK YOU FUCKING MOOTHERFUUUKKKEEERRRRRSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

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.

Client: I want you to build me something, I'm not sure jet what is is exactly but it is supposed to be round and be able to fit on a car.

Me: you mean a wheel ?

Client: noooo, this is completely different and original idea like none has ever had.

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

The original idea is not mine, but I can't tell you how much fun I've had with this

!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

Root has a deadline

I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.

Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.

Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.

I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.

The best part:

Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.

For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?

I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?

No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡

I hate the fact I can't have any original idea. Everything I want to develop is already present on play store.

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

I had plugged in my Android phone to the PC, browsed files from internal storage, Ctrl + X'ed some files from there, Ctrl + V'ed them to the desktop. Nothing special.

Bang. Files travelled to another dimension, absolutely gone from the original location, with no trace or them or any notification.

Who thought it would be a good idea to delete stuff before making sure it's been successfully transfered first?

Fuck you Windows.

Also, hello, its my first rant but I've been lurking devRant for a while now. Loving it here.

Fuck Apple sideways! (Wait for it, the original part begins)

HOW can a company that keeps on boasting about UX, to the point that last WDC they took more time speaking about a fucking kaleidoscope animation for their watch then about the whole changes to their MacBook's hardware, even consider putting that turd of a remote on market.

If you have an Apple Store in reach, I invite you to get up, flush, and go there. Try that atrocity that is the AppleTV, and laugh at how incredibly bad it is. Then do your best to refrain from burning the place down in your inevitable rage, that might cause you legal issues.

The previous AppleTV was fine, it was practically useless, but usable. But for some reason they decided a touchpad with low precision and no gestures was a good idea to put on a remote to a thing that will, due to its target audience, most likely be plugged into a fancy TV that has a 300ms lag due to fancy image processing. That thing gives no feedback, appart from visual, has so little precision that in a movie, the smallest step I've achieved was 5 fucking minutes, while being really fucking careful not to spoil the movie.

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

A certain, reasonably sized company had a large in house payment system to handle all their client purchases that was developed many, many years ago. All the devs that developed it had left, and as it "just worked" they hadn't seen fit to get anyone to update or maintain it since.

That was all fine until it suddenly (and completely) stopped working one sunny afternoon.

After paying a small fortune for one of the original devs to come back and look at it, turns out the payment API it was based on had been retired. Warnings of deprecation had been sent out 18 months prior, but they had just been ignored, as the secretary receiving them after the devs left had no idea what it meant.

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

Me : so here is your quote for the app

Client : oh yer and it needs to work in both android and iOS, that's not a big deal right?

Me : of course not, however I am going to have to add a little something to your quote!

I don't get how when I ask a client if I got everything right so I can draft up a quote, they don't think to mention stuff like other features they had an idea for or cross platforms they wanted but didn't say in the original proposal -_-

Most pissed off? Must have been the time I created a $10,000 hole in a marketing team's budget after trying to build a Tetris-style Facebook app game (back when FB apps were all the rage). It turned out that Tetris, which was up to that point commonly considered as public domain, had been scooped up by a patent troll who had made a convincing case that he had found and gotten agreement from the originator of the idea (a Russian dude who may or may not have been its original source). I had to scrap the whole project and explain what I did to an old-school manager who didn't even know how to operate a computer. That resulted in my losing credibility as a team member for the next 6 years. I never lived it down. I was pissed mostly at myself for following my assumption and not doing any patent research.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

Got a few Jira tickets reassigned to me because the dev who was supposed to work on them got stuck on another project. It's fine, that happens.

I open the tickets. No descriptions for all of them. No screenshots for those reported as bugs, nor any replication steps. No attached test cases or, well, ANY useful information.

I talk to our BA, he says that all information I need are in OTHER tickets on ANOTHER BOARD that business manages but I DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO. Honestly, these shitfucks could've just done simple copy/paste. But nooooo...

So I reassign all the tickets back to their original reporters (business testers) with comments requesting more information.

It's been a week. Now I have no idea what to put in my time sheet.

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

"not sure if we can meet those salary requirements, but I'll get back to you"

JK they just send me the code challenge, no idea of what salary to expect. scratch that one off the list.

meanwhile in another prospect i have had not just multiple interviews, but then add on two additional 'prep' and 'post' interviews for each of the ORIGINAL interviews i have to do with the recruiting company REEEEEEEEEEEEE

honestly it's not a good reflection of what is really valued at these companies - paper pushing over getting to work... ok

WEVE ALREADY TALKED FOR HOURS JUST MAKE A DESICION: GIVE ME AND OFFER, OR DON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

it's decided, i'm creating a programming language specifically to trigger SJW (like the idea of C+=) which starting to corrupt this industries.

perhaps it's not gonna be huge, so i will blend this with my original idea; a simple language to fix python syntax that a lot of people didn't like who come from C like syntax which transpiled to python code.

maybe it's silly, but this need to be done. at least for my self.

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

So after the original idea getting scraped during a hackathon this week, we created a slack bot to fetch most relevant answers from StackOverflow using user's input. All the user had to do was input few words and the bot handled all typos, links etc and returned the link as well as the most upvoted or the accepted amswer after scraping it from the website.
The average time to find an answer was around 2 seconds, and we also told that we're planning to use flask to deploy a web application for the same.
After the presentation, one of the judge-guys called me and told me that "It isn't good enough, will not be used widely" and "Its similar to Quora".
Never ever have I wanted to punch a son of a bitch in the balls ever.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

I'm halfway in on a six-month disaster contract where I'm converting a massive site written over 7~8 years to a new system. Manager has had us restart about 4 times and there are other departments who want to take over. The deadline is so tight that I've stuck with the original plan and kept my code flexible to be changed if the manager wants to go with the other teams' ideas. ("Okay, manager: here's a clone, tell the other team to prove that works") The lead dev, to my horror, didn't write any code and was let go in November.

Manager hired a new dev part-time whose commitment is on something entirely separate that is required in order for the deadline to be pushed to Summer. (new thing for old thing)

New dev has an attitude, basically wants to start over, and is already acting like I'm his subordinate, very patronizing, very dodgy when asked to explain a strong opinion (THIS IS A SECURITY PROBLEM!!!1). I really have no idea what my manager promised to him. Also found out that manager hired an agency to create a roadmap of the project (WHY?!!! WHY NOW?!). I've been burned once already with the previous lead, and I'm not wild about working with yet another person who wants to burn the whole thing to the ground and start completely over, especially not someone who wants to engage in a dick-measuring contest.

Do you guys have any advice? I mean, other than quitting? I'm going to see this through, but I'm burned out.

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

Craziest prep for an interview?

Way back when I interviewed devs, I prepped a bank of Simpsons and Star Trek trivia questions if the candidate answered one of the softball questions ("What are your hobbies?", etc ) that related to either subject. On rare occasion a candidate claimed to be a big trekkie so I asked..

<Deep Space Nine was in it's 5th season>
Me: "What was the name of Captain Sisko's ship?"
C: "Sisko? Was he from the original series?"
Me: "No, Deep Space Nine"
<awkward silence>
C: "Is that the new series?"
Me: "Not really, but lets do an original series question. What does the middle initial 'T' stand for in James T Kirk?"
<awkward silence>
C: "I have no idea. I don't think it stands for anything."

He didn't make the cut.

My boss at the time said I should not document any of those questions/answers just in case we are sued for discrimination.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

...sincerely?
FUCK YOUR PASSWORDS

FUCK YOUR PASSWORD REQUIREMENTS.

FUCK YOU thinking you are the most important site in the universe so of course everyone will remember their password mangled beyond the original intention/recognition by your idiotic requirements!

I want to have an insecure password? MY PROBLEM.
I want to have the same password everywhere so I don't have to go through the idiotic "forgot my password" dance each time I try to login into your page? MY PROBLEM!

You're not the most important site in the universe.
I'm getting seriously fed up with this idea in general.
WHAT THE FUCK. Why did nobody come up with nothing better yet?
And the password storages and autocompletions don't count, that's a plaster on top of idiotic paradigm, nothing else.

...how is there nothing more sensible, still, after 18+ years?

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

Dev Diary Entry #56
Dear diary, the part of the website that allows users to post their own articles - based on an robust rights system - through a rich text editor, is done! It has a revision system and everything. Now to work on a secure way for them to upload images and use these in their articles, as I don't allow links to external images on the site.

Dev Diary Entry #57
Dear diary, today I finally finished the image uploading feature for my website, and I have secured it as well as I can.

First, I check filesize and filetype client-side (for user convenience), then I check the same things serverside, and only allow images in certain formats to be uploaded.

Next, I completely disregard the original filename (and extension) of the image and generate UUIDs for them instead, and use fileinfo/mimetype to determine extension. I then recreate the image serverside, either in original dimensions or downsized if too large, and store the new image (and its thumbnail) in a non-shared, private folder outside the webpage root, inaccessible to other users, and add an image entry in my database that contains the file path, user who uploaded it, all that jazz.

I then serve the image to the users through a server-side script instead of allowing them direct access to the image. Great success. What could possibly go horribly wrong?

Dev Diary Entry #58
Dear diary, I am contemplating scrapping the idea of allowing users to upload images, text, comments or any other contents to the website, since I do not have the capacity to implement the copyright-filter that will probably soon become a requirement in the EU... :(

Wat to do, wat to do...

"Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats. " - Howard Aiken

How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:

Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.

Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.

But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.

Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.

I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.

To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.

Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

Ever pivoted so hard that you forgot what the original idea was in the first place?

debugging a performance issue. basically the original dev had no idea what a database was for. system was generating millions of buffered reads, and paging horribly.

to see if an id existed they had done the following:
fetch all 1 million rows into an array.
iterate the array looking for a match.
if found, set found=true
continue to iterate the rest of the array.
return found.
repeat at every login.

replaced with
return person.get(id)

set world record for most i/o avoided with one liner.

Background:
I graduated high school from a technical school. And my teacher asked me to come in a few times a week and assist (which I LOVE doing)

So they’re working with circuits and raspberry pi’s and when I can in they pointed out that there was a project they couldn’t get to work. So I had to look at it. Now I was not given the original it was one a student tried to copy in (like they were supposed to) but it was awful. All the indentation was even more off than the original and on top of that. The original and what I was given wouldn’t give an error code.. and so I had no idea what was happening so I just decided to try to fix the indentation and take out stuff that didn’t look right (what else was I supposed to do when I didn’t know where to start?) and while I was doing it another student started to try to fix it and it legit barely took 5 minutes and now my spirit and confidence is broken. I wasn’t petty I observed the result and congratulated him cause he deserved it. After I took the code and put it on my laptop and figured out it was an “inconsistent use of tabs and spaces” error which is fucking stupid and I’ve never seen that in python before so after I debugged that there wasn’t really anything left to debug. So I guess I somewhat redeemed myself but I still feel like shit

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

If you could choose between:
• Waiting for an original idea to do something innovative (and maybe never get it).
• Spending an enormous amount of time to recreate one of the first projects you've worked on (and loved) as a beginner, using new technologies and the knowledge gained over the years, knowing that it could be a good product but will probably not get the interest of public and will not sell well on the app stores.
• Working on a project that could work (or not) and become popular, but that doesn't really interest you.

What would you do?
Personal satisfaction or profit?

Of course I don't want to focus on profit, but I'm still a student and my free time is very short, and sometimes I work very hard (I tend to put social life, exams, health, etc. on the second place) on projects that nobody uses. My family and friends think I'm crazy, and sometimes me too.
It's something bad, isn't it?

A colleague of mine had a 'great idea' and started a crowdfunding project on kickstarter;
A microblogging application to host on your own server. The max amount of characters per message was 140.
The prototype was even built on bootstrap!
Such a original idea!!

1. Put idea on roadmap
2. Work out simple implementation
3. Productowner-san, please notice me.
4. Other devs pile on cool but complex ideas
5. A 4 hour meeting later, original simple idea is rejected because it's "out of scope" and there is "no consensus about implementation"
6. I already built it during the meeting
7. I sip my coffee while I enjoy the annoyed gasps as coworkers receive PR notifications.
8. FUCKING DARE TO REJECT IT COCK SUCKING SCRUMBAGS.

The coolest project I ever worked on wasn't programming per second, though it involved a bit of scripting. The company I worked for had an FTP over TLS backup solution and it was put together with glue and paperclips by a guy that hadn't the slightest idea what he was doing. In order to conform with the insurance, data had to be encrypted. I setup a raid-ed server with full disk encryption on the raid volume that fetched the key over the network at boot from another secure server. I wrote a series of scripts for provisioning users and so on. The backup connections was sftp using a ssh tunnel, the users were chrooted to their own home directories, and were unable to open shells. The system was 100x more robust and secure than the original. I set it up on short notice and received absolutely no recognition for saving the company's ass, but it was definitely a fun project.

I was one of the original developers behind the AuroraUX project. I left fairly early on as it was clear it would be a mismanaged disaster (we changed SCM three times before I had even finished initial planning).

About a decade later and, despite my initial work, no one did ever get GNAT and GIGI yanked off GCC, let alone put onto LLVM.

For the record, I think this is a bad idea now. GNAT and GIGI are awful and need to be replaced. GCC does a good job at executable code generation, and is generally competitive with LLVM. LLVM seems to have some better stuff for front-end designers that cause me to still favor it, but that's a different matter.

Started porting one application written in php to:
Golang(and some libraries to make certain sht simpler like GORM and Gorilla amongst a couple of others, most shit is STD shit already built in)

Java Spring(I know it well, but wanted to try this particular app in it, lots of boilerplate although the coded is solid AF)

.NET Core API, which I separated in a series of modules for the domain interface, the persistence logic, the actual api etc, I really dig it. It has a basic React frontend in Typescript whereas the other 2 versions are using the standard Go html/template package and the Twig interface for Spring.

My favorite thus far is Golang. I find it extremely easy to extend, the language reads good enough for a retard like myself to make sense of it fairly easy, really easy to test and experiment with it, any idea I get for something to add(say users and stuff) took me less than 30 mins to figure out while reading the actual documentation, as in the base documentation or just the source code.

I know the language is retard proof, and I am highly enjoying this. Not to say that the other two are bad, not at all, been using C# and Java for years now, but I highly appreciate being able to concentrate on functionality rather than all the fucking architectural boilerplate needed to run basic shit in the other two frameworks. Thus far Golang has been a breath of fresh air the likes Clojure gives me, while not even being a profound or mind blowing language in terms of features(since other than the interface{} and goroutines i can't think of shit) and have not reached a scenario in which I am stuck or dying to have generics one bit for the overall business logic.

The app is growing like crazy in terms of code since the original php application was huge to begin with, but dear me this shit is as simple as it can get without being too technical. Might move it to production once all usability tests pass and force the rest of the staff to learn it. I have one lead dev that damn near refuses to touch anything other than php, and a very eager to try shit out content administrator that comes from a Java and C# background.

all I want to say is how much I love go haha

aagh fuck college subjects. over my last 4 years and 7 sems in college, i must have said this many times : fuck college subjects. But Later i realize that if not anything, they are useful in government/private exams and interviews.

But Human computer Interaction? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SUBJECT???
This has a human in it, a comp in it, and interaction in it: sounds like a cool subject to gain some robotics/ai designing info. But its syllabus, and the info available on the net , is worse than that weird alienoid hentai porn you watched one night( I know you did).

Like, here is a para from the research paper am reading, try to figure out even if its english is correct or not:
============================
Looking back over the history of HCI publications, we can see how our community has broadened intellectually from its original roots in engineering research and, later, cognitive science. The official title of
the central conference in HCI is “Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems” even though we usually call it “CHI”. Human factors for interaction originated in the desire to evaluate whether pilots
could make error-free use of the increasingly complex control systems of their planes under normal conditions and under conditions of stress. It was, in origin, a-theoretic and entirely pragmatic. The conference and field still reflects these roots not only in its name but also in the occasional use of simple performance metrics.

However, as Grudin (2005) documents, CHI is more dominated by a second wave brought by the cognitive revolution. HCI adopted its own amalgam of cognitive science ideas centrally captured in Card, Moran & Newell (1983), oriented around the idea that human information processing is deeply analogous to computational signal processing, and that the primary computer-human interaction task is enabling communication between the machine and the person. This cognitive-revolution-influenced approach to humans and technology is what we usually think of when we refer to the HCI field, and particularly that represented at the CHI conference. As we will argue below, this central idea has deeply informed the ways our field conceives of design and evaluation.

The value of the space opened up by these two paradigms is undeniable. Yet one consequence of the dominance of these two paradigms is the difficulty of addressing the phenomena that these paradigms mark as marginal.

=============================

Bought a nice widescreen monitor from Samsung through B&H Photo. 2 weeks later it wouldn't turn on. Shipped it in thrice for repairs and on the third time Samsung exchanged it for a new one. 7 days later the new one won't turn on. Same symptoms. The seller's money-back guarantee has expired, of course. No idea if Samsung will just give me the original value in cash so I can find another one from another manufacturer who knows how to make monitors. I'll probably just get ripped off. Time to die?

I am using Manjaro as the main OS on my computer. But I have an original Windows 10 license, as well as an Office 2013.

I want/need to have them installed on PC, as I need to use it sometimes.

But if I install my Windows 10, it will certainly destroy my grub and I know I will have a hard time to make it work again.

Would it be a good idea to install them on a virtual PC? I know it would not be good with games, but the only game I have is GTA IV (that I am not even sure if it still works on Windows 10).

Thanks!

So my friend had an idea for a game and asked me if I could help him develop it. Now, he understands how the code works and can even write quite a bit himself. On several occasions (including today) this happened:

*writes code*
*tests code*
Me: Hmm... this isn't working like it's supposed to
Friend: It looks pretty good, maybe check to see if everything is in the right order
*checks code*
*tries alternative solution*
*checks again*
Me and friend: Well this is even worse than before
*presses ctrl+z a lot to go back to the original*
*opens new project*
*writes new code for same purpose*
*checks code*
Both of us: IT WORKS!!!
*checks again just to be sure*
Both of us: IT STILL WORKS!!!
*compares new code to original code*
Me: It's the exact same code with different variable names!!! Why did this not work before?
Friend: No idea
*puts new code into main program*
*it still doesn't work*

Reasons Java makes me cry sometimes

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.

From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.

It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product.

Most illogical thing I had to do today.

Today i received an email from bank to fill an attached form to receive payment from a foreign country.

Face palm no 1: The form they sent was in doc format. The layout of the form was all fucked up.

So I downloaded a proper PDF version of the same form from the bank's website.

I filled the form on my computer and signed it using my pen tablet and emailed it back.

Few hours later somone from bank calls me.

Facepalm no 2: He sounded frantic. He asked me to physically mail the "orginal" of the form!

He was thinking I took the printout of the form, filled it by hand and send the scanned copy.

I told him I filled everything digitally so there is no "original" form in physical sense.

Also since I emailed him the form, it doesn't make any sense at all, for me to take the printout of the digital version and mail it to him when he could just open his email and take a print out.

He didn't seem to grasp that idea at all.

Finally, I agreed to go to a branch nearby me and got him speak to an employee there over my phone and they said they will courier the printout to him.

I don't know if the people there are dumb or I am too smart.

Fuuuuuuuck!!
CR estimates:
Part 1: 2h including testing
Part 2: 2h-2days-maybe never (small changes on horrifically fucked up project noone understands with tons of tech debt)

Managed to pull off the part two in one day.. //yay me?!

Additional day to unfuckup git fuckups (including but not limited to master head not compiling because a smartass included *.cs in .gitignore file which he also pushed..don't ask, I have no clue why..) which was a huuuge deal for me as I usually use only local repo and had no idea how to tackle this.. coworker helped out.. seems I was on the right way, but git push branchy was acting up & said I had to login & ofc I had no clue what the pass was set to (first setup was more than 2yrs ago)..so new key, new pass.. all good.. yay!

Back to the original story/rant: Now I'm stuck with writing jira explanation why it was done this way & not the way customer suggested. They offered only vague description anyways which would require me to do a hacky messy thing, ew.. + it most probably would require major data modifications after deployment to even make it work..

Anyhow, this expanation is also easy peasy in english..
BUT...
I must write it in my native tongue.. o.O FML! Spent almost 40mins on one paragraph..

Sooo.. if anyone will petition to ban non english in IT, I'm all for it!!

Drupal 8 fractured the community, dead ended projects that had years of being built up and supported, started a downward trend in overall number of websites using Drupal when it was still increasing market share, homogenized Drupal with other less successful frameworks that had already attempted it and failed by using composer to replace drush, twig to replace PHPtemplate, and Symfony to butcher Drupal and hang parts of it on.

The mission statement was to "bring Drupal to the modern era" and "be more enterprise friendly". All I've seen them do is make it worse. I have stopped using Drupal now, I still maintain some Drupal 7 sites but now that they killed the Drupal 7 community it's basically dead. Some small attempt was made to salvage it with Backdrop but it will likely never be as big as Drupal was and is mostly dead itself, for one thing it's not directly compatible with the huge library of modules either.

Another thing I loved killed by those without vision and giving into the "industry standards" that make one question the intellect of everyone who subscribes to them being a good idea. But hey that evil procedural programming that worked so long for so many was finally defeated. It's surely better now right... right?

At least this movement was supported by people that can't even tell the difference between the use cases in real projects between Drupal and Wordpress. Software Development is in such a good place and has no hypocrisy. One would never suggest it has lost sight of its original purpose of solving real world problems with computing and become self absorbed with its own navel gazing.

If still in doubt check attached image, it tells a very clear story about how to ruin the life of a CMS. It honestly feels like a hitjob attempted to sabotage it rather than an earnest attempt to improve something that has been doing well since 2001.

The original idea of the starter lines goes to someone here like over a year ago or something. Found this piece while cleaning my desk and thought you would appreciate it.

Rubber duck
What the fuck
Why didn't you tell
This god awful smell
Of this spaghetti code

I guess you reap
What you sow
Rubber duck
What the fuck
I'm out of luck

New feature request that could be unecessary by client just sticking to one of 4 different very similar input formats instead of many off the cuff formats, that conflict and i cant guess let alone a computer. But i present an outline idea of the solution with his specs

I didnt complain just told him what needs to change and what our constraints will be how the info is interpretted etc

Client says "dont spend time on code for that feature.. stick to other original work for now" ! omg hes getting it! Sweet. I only wasted an hour this time, and if he does want the feature, we have an agreed spec for it. We can get back to handling the customer level shit and maybe he can make some more money finally.

Scope creep plus 0, me plus one. Scope creep still in thr lead by a lot. Oh well. Still, this guy is getting more tolerable

Wierdest bugfix?

Mine is commenting out a console.log("Finished doing something);
(Yup. Just the string. And the log function was original. No fuckin idea why that fixed it)

How come big tech companies get away with stealing and modifying other people’s great ideas and incorporating them into their existing giant platforms thereby stifling the start-up with the original idea?

Why do we clap when this happen?

I’ve abandoned the classic for loop from my tool belt for quite a long time now. The vast majority of the code is functional.

But today I’ve encountered a problem where I’m considering to use the imperative for loop again because I can’t come up with a good functional approach.

Maybe you guys have an idea.

I have a list of items and I want to make a new list which is like the original list, but it has extra items in between of some other items.

The tricky part is that there is a condition that needs to be checked for each pair of items to determine if the new item should be inserted in between. Otherwise nothing should be inserted.

I’m working on a new app I’m pretty excited about.

I’m taking a slightly novel (maybe 🥲) approach to an offline password manager. I’m not saying that online password managers are unreliable, I’m just saying the idea of giving a corporation all of my passwords gives me goosebumps.

Originally, I was going to make a simple “file encrypted via password” sort of thing just to get the job done. But I’ve decided to put some elbow grease into it, actually.

The elephant in the room is what happens if you forget your password? If you use the password as the encryption key, you’re boned. Nothing you can do except set up a brute-forcer and hope your CPU is stronger than your password was.

Not to mention, if you want to change your password, the entire data file will need to be re-encrypted. Not a bad thing in reality, but definitely kinda annoying.

So actually, I came up with a design that allows you to use security questions in addition to a password.

But as I was trying to come up with “good” security questions, I realized there is virtually no such thing. 99% of security question answers are one or two words long and come from data sets that have relatively small pools of answers. The name of your first crush? That’s easy, just try every common name in your country. Same thing with pet names. Ice cream flavors. Favorite fruits. Childhood cartoons. These all have data sets in the thousands at most. An old XP machine could run through all the permutations over lunch.

So instead I’ve come up with these ideas. In order from least good to most good:

1) [thinking to remove this] You can remove the question from the security question. It’s your responsibility to remember it and it displays only as “Question #1”. Maybe you can write it down or something.

2) there are 5 questions and you need to get 4 of them right. This does increase the possible permutations, but still does little against questions with simple answers. Plus, it could almost be easier to remember your password at this point.

All this made me think “why try to fix a broken system when you can improve a working system”

So instead,

3) I’ve branded my passwords as “passphrases” instead. This is because instead of a single, short, complex word, my program encourages entire sentences. Since the ability to brute force a password decreases exponentially as length increases, and it is easier to remember a phrase rather than a complicated amalgamation or letters number and symbols, a passphrase should be preferred. Sprinkling in the occasional symbol to prevent dictionary attacks will make them totally uncrackable.

In addition? You can have an unlimited number of passphrases. Forgot one? No biggie. Use your backup passphrases, then remind yourself what your original passphrase was after you log in.

All this accomplished on a system that runs entirely locally is, in my opinion, interesting. Probably it has been done before, and almost certainly it has been done better than what I will be able to make, but I’m happy I was able to think up a design I am proud of.

So I have an idea for a game. While I'm still learning the code required to make it run I'm also fleshing out ideas in my dome box. Keep in mind this is a basic rundown of said game. Not an all inclusive list of features or mechanics.

A Text RPG MUD loosely based on Stargate. Make a world creator for it and let people connect thier own worlds to the network. Original idea came from games like Neverwinter Nights where people could run thier own privately hosted modded servers.

Base game is effectively a tutorial leading up to powering on the gate.
At which point you will have one or two randomly generated worlds that can be explored by other players and role played in.

I'm a long way off of being able to make this but what do you all think?

About to go on crunch to release a feature that is late. I have my own blame to put on it, as I wasted a lot of time, but goddamn.

Every time I said we'd need to take time to test for corner cases and check for errors here and there, my boss told me I need not worry about it, it's just an MVP. Then the marketing people see the feature half-ready and start suggesting their own changes. Then the idea of the project is refined and changed, a new subfeature is added, new backend business logic is added, right as I'm about to finish the original core features. They have the full product in their heads and are already selling it to people while I'm still catching up with quite a significant number of tasks. Now I have to crunch to launch tomorrow morning.

I do mainly the backend parts, but while a frontend guy who knows his CSS does components and pages, I'm the one to figure out pretty much all logic, and how to stitch said components and pages together and how to make the frontend interact with the backend. I'm supposed to do this whole thing and also deploy it all. Hell yeah.

Optimizely/Episerver is such a fucking piece of shit I want to fucking kill everyone who made this god forsaken mound of rotting garbage. I don’t even know what the history of it is because the documentation is convoluted as shit and poorly written. Whenever I Google something about it, the top answers are fucking 10+ years old and have not a god damn thing to do with the original problem. But guess what, they still use the same fucking useless error messages as they did 10+ years ago. Fucking idiots. The community for it doesn’t help at all. It’s fucking impossible to learn anything about it. Even the experts in this don’t have any idea what they are doing. Fuck this shit. ANYTHING that’s related in any way to Microsoft, or even mentions Microsoft, can suck my cock. FUCKKKKKKKKK.

I can't post a collab from the web client and I don't have a decent phone atm, anyways, this is an idea, tell me if you have any improvements or if you know of an implementation or would be interested in creating one.

A social network comment system that connects people across fields of interest and aids keeping relevant posts alive for a long time.

The basic principle is this: Every post may identify itself as a child to any number of other posts, or sections in other posts, which then act much like a bidirectional hyperlink between parent and child.
This leads to two unusual results:
1. that comments aren’t only added to posts, but specific paragraphs, sentences or even words.
2. that any comment may receive comments in much the same way the original post did, making comments identical to posts. (they could have their own pages and all).
This is in many ways like Reddit's infinite comment chains. The main difference is that here comments aren’t organized in trees but graphs, which makes it possible to connect related conversations from entirely different groups and times, resulting in a much more open yet concise discourse style with an increased persistence of topics.

Great practice/skill sharpening idea for my fellow mad dogs that like to get down in multiple languages/syntaxes:

Pick something simple that won't cause too much stress, but will make you sweat a little bit and put up a good fight, ha!!!

For example, I picked the classic "Caesars Cipher" and picked 5 languages to create it in! I picked Dart, Java, Python, CPP, and C. Each version does the same thing:
1. Asks for a message
2. Runs the logic
3. Prints the message cipher.
4. To decrypt, you just run the same program again and enter the cipher text at the message input prompt. The message gets deciphered using the same logic an shows up as the original text.

The kicker:
Only dox/books allowed for reference. Otherwise it wouldn't push you to get better!!!

Python, C, and CPP were EASY, even with me never having used C before. I am great at using Dart, and that one really challenged me for some reason, but I finally got it. The previous 3 langs took less than 40 lines of code each (with Python being only 18 I believe). Dart actually took somewhere around 50, and Java took about 371784784. (Much love to Java though for real!)

Kinda boring as shit, but I gotta tell you it felt fuckin GREAT to look at all 5 of those programs after completing them, no matter how barbaric... especially when you complete 1 or 2 in a language you've never used or maybe felt really challenged by. Simple exercises that hold a lot of important, relatable logic no matter the subject is our lifeblood!!!

Rant/Site idea
This is just a idea, but sometimes rants can create new rant's what need a place of there own, maybe adding a option that lets you Re-Rant or something like this what will take someones reply as the leading rant and you comment as the first reply to that rant, Letting the original rant to say true to its topic

Okay Android dev intern here.
This has been an awfully weird experience for me as an Android dev and this is not the first time. I am seeing a pattern here and i don't know if its just bad luck or its the reality

I have always learned Android by searching on the web , on stack overflow, medium articles, youtube , books , etc.

Sometimes i had a vision to create some unique nd innovative app, nd sometimes i just wanted to learn a particular tech, framework, library, or a feature.

The former case sometimes required the knowledge of unexplored areas, so in order to make the possible product, the original idea would reduce to a smaller, more possible one if i thought it isn't possible or "need more resources on that" after several hours of searching.

But as an intern i found this approach not working out. Here the company gave me an app idea by a designer who thinks its possible, the senior Android dev also thinks its possible and i also believed it to be possible.

The thing is we all know its possible but the person working on it, i.e me, doesn't know have all the knowledge for it.

Fine . I will apply my usual time taking approach of searching and debugging to tackle my issues when they arrive.

But at one stage i too would get exhausted. To me , the code in my front is the correct code for this approach and i have checked all the possible cases, debugged it and yet can't find the issue.

Now the only thing i want is for my senior to look into it, tell me if its an architecture issue or is there any possible case that i missed.

But that's not what company wants. The senior says that he's involved in a lot of projects and my problem is too simple to be solved by solely myself. Now i am sitting here, with my code, exhausted and no longer willing to work here . (And that's maybe why it's my 4th internship and not first)

Am i the asshole fresher?is this always going to be the case? Am i the one running away from the problem and deserve all the lashing that i am getting for not completing the product and getting stuck?

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

i can see a very thin line between me remaining the same good natured person as i am right now, and me turning into completely chaotic no remorse psychopath , in upcoming future.

the universe follows the rules. planets revolve in a pre defined manner, day and night comes as expected. however being a human for last 24 years, i have come to experience 2 different phenomenons : being rule bounded and being random.

randomness is fun. randomness is guilt free, randomness is a wonderful feeling for someone . but at the same time its worse for everyone else. try slapping a random kid in park or eating food at a restaurant amd running away, assuming there will be no consequences against you whatsoever. such a nice evil feeling

at the same time, rules are boring , unrewarding, guilt filled words of hope.
- "do not eat pizzas or you will get fat" :boring + guilt
- "go to gym, you will become appealing and get a good sex " : boring + hope
- "if you perform well, you will get appraisal and you will earn enough to afford your family a home" : hope + guilt

see how these rules are full of hope/guilt/boredom for you while being good+rewarding for others? that's how you are categorised as being civil , as being part of a society of semi evolved apes.

and as if those rules weren't enough , there came this unnecessary concept of faith, religion and spirituality.l, with its own set of rules and hopes.

and it seems like such a great capitalist idea , since the hopes provided via these are not even realistic : keep on doing good stuff, following the rules and you will get a better afterlive/next birth!

i have tried being a good person for my whole life. my parents are religious and i try to be one, I don't drink , smoke, eat other animals, or randomly start slapping kids in the park. i have been a boring personality, i studied , ran in various races od educational life, failed most of them, landed in a decent paying job , and now trying to even gain back a decent body to look respectful and worthy of a future family. feels like i did so much for so many hopes and am still doing it. we all do , no?

but i have seen companies laying off people and leaving them in turmoil, marriages getting ruined, and some person never getting the love, respect and rewards they deserve for all these shitty rules they kept up with

my life book is somewhat even-steven. i did get a few rewards and respect for some of my hard work, but my overall portfolio is negetive : a lot of investment on just the hopes of a better return

let's see if i can keep up with my sanity for next 50-60 years before i am dust again.

=====
ps : try playing bitlife : life simulator mobile game ( download the cracked version from the web though, original one is full of ads) . it just have a single big button and shows text about how an imaginary child(you) os growing every year on click. so far i tried to play the life of kid like a criminal, a heavily educated person, a politician and a job worker. almost all of them recieved "miserable" and "unsuccessful" as the final result. very fun game to play without being evil

I'm stuck in a really difficult spot in my office and I'm not sure if I should start looking elsewhere. Tldr; there's no defined hierarchy or career path in the web department leaving no position to be promoted to.

We've got 2 offices with now 150+ employees and for the last 2 years I've basically inherited the responsibilities of an IT manager. Planning and deploying our networks, firewall config, VPN setup, keeping users' systems functional, track equipment, order/setup systems for new employees. All of this in addition to my original job description of web developer, which has basically turned into maintaining client WordPress sites while the other developer builds sites.

I've spoken to our CTO (my supervisor) about how much time the IT stuff actually takes and some of my suggestions for the future to make sure we protect ourselves and future proof our systems the best we can and one of my suggestions was that we needed to create the IT manager position because he is usually in meetings or building out API integrations. He's behind the idea, or at least says so to me, but leadership doesn't believe it's needed because we "manage just fine as it is" (this does require 60 hours a week of work along with much automation that I wrote/built). But we're trying to open a 3rd office which means another 50+ employees and systems to manage as well as more websites as we sign more clients.

My pay has never been satisfactory where I am and based on the maximum raise each year it would take me another 10 years to make what I would like (that's calculating without cost of living increase) but they claim this is because I lack a formal degree (self taught). I love most of the people I work with, don't really have an issue with any of them (outside that they're stupid but that I can let that slide if they're trying), and they work with me and my health issues which cause me to miss significantly more office time than I would like. I've been here for 4 years and I've learned a lot but I don't feel like there's any upward mobility here. The only position I see in my department above me is the CTO (or possibly the new PM but that's not a position I want) and he's not going anywhere, and I firmly believe we need someone who can full-time stay on top of our infrastructure before we expand further.

I fantasize occasionally about leaving and finding something else, and there are plenty of opportunities online that I appear qualified for which pay more, but I worry that I'd be trading in something that really isn't all that bad for something that sucks and the only real perk is more money. I'd hate to go somewhere else and start back at the bottom again and have to prove myself yet again.

In Alpro soy milk range, the original one is often overlooked. There are ridiculously tasty soy vanilla, soy almond and professional coconut. But being THAT sensitive I can always distinguish like yea, here’s the soy and here’s the coconut purée. This always prevented me from focusing on just soy and how complex it really is.

So I tried the original soy milk and yes, the purest form was hidden in plain sight all this time. It’s just soy, pure soy, like a pokimane subreddit meetup. I love it.

It’s a moment of a purist finding a pure thing. This is the IDEA of soy milk, like Prolog is the idea of a declarative language.

It's so frustrating to explain rxjs pitfalls to the manager.

To avoid the diamond problems and glitches caused by combineLatest and debounceTime(0), I decided to use single stream with nested reactivity.

Then the manager asked me to use withLatestFrom instead of combineLatest.

Sure withLatestFrom makes sense to the original author, when the original author is able to remember the reactive graph and put proper dependencies to combineLasted/withLatestFrom accordingly, but anyone else who touches the component later needs to retrace the reactive graph to avoid the glitch. Sometimes it's just impossible when many dependencies are derived from combineLatest+debounceTime(0). When no one is trained to code reactively, I don't expect people to know where to put a dependency. After many trials and errors, the only way to avoid the diamond problem is to use nested reactivity where child streams are created within root stream each time root stream emits.

The mentioned manager put all sorts of side effects in observable chains. The manager keeps saying the stream is too large when their subscription functions (sometimes nested) are way worse with litered mutations everywhere. Anything in observable can be traced by go to definition but tracing side effects usually requires global searches.

Recently, he put startWith to the end of a synced stream to fix a bug where button would collapse when there is no content (initial null emission). Rather than fixing the default height, he thinks using startWith(defaultLabel) is a good idea. Of course, he doesn't know that a synced stream should only emit 1 value on new subscription and that extra emitted value will cause rxjs glich down the pipe.

I hate corporate jobs

I asked a team member about a simple update for a customer's country/state code and he started saying we should build an event handler and publish and event and I'm like "woah woah... this is before they're engaged."

Thankfully he said, in that case, my original idea of just handling the update is correct. Phew ... that could have been way more complicated than it needed to be.