Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

Fixed this assholes phone for her... she proceeds to take the phone and say “thanks for fixing it, it was kind of you to do it for free!”

Uhm, ex-fucking-cuse me?! I run a business, not a god damned charity.

She got me my fucking money.

Fixing family / friends technical problems, episode 2.

Problem: "I lost my iPhone, I know there's a thing that lets you find it. Can you help?"

Debugging:

Me: sure, it's called "find my iPhone"

Friend: ah yes that's it. How do I use it?

Me: I'll show you, just login here and ... oh you didn't set it up?

Friend: Probably not, I don't know much about this computer stuff.

Me: ... when you setup your phone for the first time, it's a full screen thing that says "do you want us to locate your phone if it's lost. Yes / No". It's hardly writing an encryption algorithm now is it?

Friend: no it's not, but still I just didn't know. I probably clicked no for everything.

Me: ... says here you clicked yes for iCould ... and yes for photo sync ... so you read the one about your pictures but not about lost or stolen property ... nice.

Friend: ... so you can't find it then.

Me: No, natural selection took it away from you.

Friend: oh **** off.

This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.

After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.

The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.

This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.

Many, many years ago, Apple had this software you could install which allowed you to take full control of someone else's machine. Well, my mate who was a designer worked in a different office downstairs. I was often in their fixing stupid shit problems. While he was out on lunch, i installed and configured the software on his mac. After lunch I went back upstairs and watched his every move on my mac. He was in adobe inDesign creating some design for a brochure. He was in a text box changing the heading, i seized the opportunity and took control typing in the text box "i am a useless cunt", pissing myself, I then selected the text and increased the size and made it bold... then the phone rang.

That's a new one on me fixing a website on my phone whilst on a train , internet dropping in an out

I did it 😎

Sometimes we say the customers they have to clear their browser cache but actually we are fixing the bugs they just found while talking with them on the phone.

I recently had the problem with my Galaxy S8 that my camera won't focus. Searched for solution. Found one which said: "Just hit the side of your phone when the camera is on."
Problem fixed, camera focuses again.
I like this kind of problem fixing.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

Beware, this is gonna be a long one.

Today, in university, our professor wanted us to do an algorithm where a number was given in input, and we had to see if that number was, as she put it, "triangular".
For example:
3 is triangular because it's 1+2.
6 is triangular because it's 1+2+3.
10 is triangular because it's 1+2+3+4.
And so on.

While she was explaining this, I was programming it on my phone (because I didn't bring a PC there).
In about 10 minutes I completed it.

This student who was beside me, which I didn't know until today (I'm still in my first year here), saw me programming it, and when I finished it, he looked at it and said: "It takes too much time, like this."
So he spent another like 5-10 minutes """fixing""" it, and then showed it to me: "Here, now it's better."
Do you want to know what he did?
The only thing he did was putting a for cycle instead of my while cycle.
And he didn't even do it properly!
He put an else statement inside the brackets of an if, and some variables weren't correct.
You call that making a program more efficient? Deficient is more like it.

Also, like 5-10 minutes after I did it on my phone, on my own, I looked at the prof's desk: a guy (who apparently is "the best") wrote his algorithm on the blackboard, and the whole fucking class applauded.

Later, I saw on our Whatsapp group that someone sent a photo of him writing on the blackboard, with the caption "The student surpasses the teacher." Others agreed.
I replied with: "For the record, I did this algorithm in 10 minutes."
An asshole replied: "You'll never be superior to the master"

Fuck off. -.-"
...I'll show them.

I didn't scream.. just told him to jump off of terrace..
What ticked me?! He was a support guy..slowest mofo ever..
I was in the middle of fixing major fuckup on prod, when our VPN to client disconnected. I rushed over to support to ask if it is 'just' an expired session (which he was in charge of renewing but constantly fucked up) or if there is some other problem, so I know how to proceed..do I need to contact our sysadmins, client's support guys etc..
He
started
to
slooooooooowly
explain
I
am
not
the
only
one
with
VPN
problems
...
Was that what I asked you?! // he had an annoying habit of slooooowly talking and explaining unrelated things & personal stuff that bothered him & most of the times he chose the most time sensitive period to drone off..
So I cut him of saying, that others were probably not 'tinkering' with production and that I need this back ASAP, so if he could tell me when the session will be renewed or if there is something else problematic..
He said he will check..I didn't move.. he looked at me insurprise, you want me to check *NOW*?! Yeah, it's urgent.. He proceeded very very veeeery slooooowly, taking the support phone../* he was even eating sandwich during that, so only one hand free, typing one letter at a min */
I was finaly notified that the session expired and that he will fix it soon (meaning in 15-20mins o.O which should not take him more than 5).. and was like 'can I do sth else for you'?! Yeah, do the backflip.. you know the rest..

You know it's the holidays when you go to your parents house for dinner and fix the router, your mom's phone, your dad's iPhone, the smart tv, your brothers email account reset, your grandmas prehistoric phone and then you go to your wife's family for dinner and you find yourself fixing her mom's iPhone, her dad's laptop her uncle's tablet, her cousin's ps4 and every freaking thing that connects to the Wi-Fi. Well, it's the holidays, at least there was food and drinks all around...Happy New Year everyone 🍷

today I experienced real-time bug fixing and deployment..

The phone was attached to the debugger, the client is using the app, me catching the logs.
Client: oh here is wrong behavior.
Me: *tapping on keyboard, then* ok try now please..

😅

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

That moment when you realise you just pushed a major bug whilst fixing another to the production website that launched earlier today.

Rolled back to working version, all within 30 seconds.

10 seconds later, client on phone... I just tried to load a page, why is my website broken?

They had to be loading it in that 30 seconds didn't they...?

My day.

07.25 early ringing of phone.

I'm usually dead asleep till 9 o clock.

Went to bed at 01 o clock.

Something crushed at work, needed to be fixed ASAP.

No coffee. Tired. Stinking peace of garbage

08.45 o clock - super market delivery came earlier than expected, while la me was still trying to communicate necessary steps to resolve the issue.

Forgot to pre pay online.

Still had no coffee, still a piece of stinking shit, still tired.

Took me nearly 20 mins to get my PIN right.

Poor delivery guy had unpleasant call from chef, I needed to deescalate.

Back to work, people angry for me being 20 mins away in midst of chaos.

Me back to fixing stuff.

Done at 09.30.

One of these days where everything you touch becomes a large pile of poop and no matter what you do it's wrong.

Yep. The rest of the day went pretty much as bonkers as it started.

At least no work on weekend.

Yay.

Slowly fixing up my home page for meh phone

Fuck you BT, charge me £80 for phone and internet, then only give me 50% of your advertised speeds that cuts out at random points then when I complain tell me you'll look into it but if you find any issues within my property I have to pay for the fixing of all issues with my line inside and outside the property not to mention the over £100 call out fucking cost!!! Plus you were fucking charging me £6.99 a month for BT fucking Sport that I don't watch and that I was told on 3 occasions was fucking free for the last 3 years!!! Again I will reiterate FUCK YOU BRITISH TELECOMS

Get a call from a customer asking if I can come check out her “printer”. Okay...
Get there and it’s not just a printer but an embroidery machine - never worked on them in my life and I’m not embarrassed to admit that.
I express that to her but tell her that I’ll definitely check it out and I get the reply - “you own a repair shop and have never worked on one of these, I don’t feel comfortable with you working on it.” - even though she had tried “fixing it” and completely fucked up the application and printer moreso than when it had originally stopped working.

Alright, bitch... I’m sorry that I haven’t worked on every fucking embroidery machine that’s ever been made. I apologize that I’m not familiar with your fucking machine, but if you would give me some time I assure you I can resolve your fucking problem; I imagine it’s (l)user error anyway. But no, you go ahead and send it off to the company that made it with a minimal charge of XXX$ and let them resolve your problem.

Yes, I run a computer/printer/phone repair shop, but that doesn’t automatically mean that I specialize in your FUCKING problem, but I can assure you I’d handle it.

Her - “You’re going to charge me when you didn’t even work on it?!”

Me - “I’m sorry, but I drove out here expecting to work, you declined the work; but there’s still a charge for having me come out here. Yes, you will be getting a bill. If you’d like me to work on it and help you resolve the problem, I’d be more than happy to.”

Her - *rolls eyes*

FUCK YOU!!!!

Ndjehwizoofjdnahsicofjrbwbajncncjsjwnbsb

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

I just made a quick throwaway business card to give with my resume during a job fair Friday at my college. Hopefully it helps me stand out a little bit more.

Sorry for the blurry photo. Took it on phone. I’m fixing spacing before I export and print

Short: Still supported after 10 years

First Chromebook sent to testers.

Long: Lost my voice recently so need to use text to speech on my phone but to many typos so slow...

If only I had a keyboard... Wait a laptop... Hm... Chromebook...

Looks for cheapest on Amazon

But go.... Wait I already have one.... That I installed Ubuntu on and then somehow corrupted.

And never got around to fixing it because didn't really need it... Or have a 8gb USB stick around at the time.

Well now I saved $100 assuming the battery still works too

A customer brought in an older, beat-up machine and told us it wasn't booting. We noticed that his power supply was damaged, but checked it in for other diagnostics.

I found out he had a corrupted operating system, but with everything else on the computer, I didn't recommend fixing the computer.

Now, for reference, this is a Windows 7 computer with 10GB of RAM. But it also has a bent side-panel, the front-panel is hanging on by a thread, and it would also need the new power supply -- all of which would be over $200 USD.

When I finally relayed this info to him over the phone, we started talking about the system.

Him: So what do you think?

Me: I mean, this computer has some good specs, but with the damage, I wouldn't recommend repairing the computer. Now, this is your computer and you are more than welcome to tell me to shove it, but I'd recommend replacing it. We're at the breaking point of doing whatever you want to do, and it's your money that you're spending, but in my professional opinion, I don't think it's worth saving.

Him: Well, okay. I'll come in later and see what options I have

Guys, what the fuck.

Today i was doing some consistancy checks accross the board after update made for one of our core systems that manages money. Yeah, real, live money.

I have hidden from public payment processor with simple API etc. So one of my checks, gate has same balances as gate's internal account on core blinked red. Okay well, fuck, thats really really shitty situation to be in. I guess my gate is fucked up some way.

Okay, debug mode on, maintainence mode on, quick look at DB, oh shit, client payed 4 times 15k eur without any txn on core system... SHIT! postman... Fuck, postman ofc wont start, quick google, fixing postman, tention in me grows, becouse its really rough and tough fuckup on my side, and got call. That moment when you know someone already knows is for me apogeum of stress that just skyrocketed from calm morning to mad morning.. Okay, i pick up phone, and I hear that one client payed (using core system app) and got strange message, YES I KNOW, im working on it.. Wait, you say that core system gave them odd message??? I will check it out. Finally fixed postman, 3 requests and I know its bug on core system.

Why, why in the motherfucking blody world anyone would push critically bugged update to system that just sends api callbacks "yes, he payed" when someone didnt pay...

Fuck im stressed and pissed, but at same time reliefed its not my personal fuckup (yeah, I solo wrote that gate, but externally audited code and all they had to say that some cosmetic linting should be done)

Thank God it's Friday and my brain is toasted from this specific email to IT department which I had to call to get more details. Here are the parties involved.
1) Original sender (OS), 2) Sender to IT (SIT), 3) IT (Me)

SIT: Can someone from IT print this for OS? She's having issue printing.

Me: It's just an image file in the email. What issues is she having when trying to print?

SIT: Idk. She said she's having issues printing.

Me: Yeah, but what issue? She can't connect to printer, the file won't open or what? Can you ask her what the issue is?

SIT: *hold on...comes back... She just said that again..issue printing..

Me: Well, we need to know what issues it is so we can fix it. In that case she can print and not keep sending documents or files to someone else to print. Btw, did you try printing the image file?

SIT:Since she said she's having issue printing I figured to send to IT to fix the issue and print. I didn't print it.

Me: 😕😂🤔🤨😒..what? First of I still don't know whatever issue she is having. Second, you should try printing it and if you also have issues, let me know.

SIT: Ok how?

Me: *shows her how to get

SIT: Thanks it printed. Now I'm also wondering what issue she was having because this was easy to print..

Me: Can you transfer me to her phone?

Now pay attention here. She is SIT's boss.

Me: Hi OS, what issue are you having when trying to print the image file in your email? I'd like to fix it so you don't encounter that issue from now on..

OS: No issues. I was too busy to do it so I asked my secretary to do it.

Me: So you can print image files with no issues, correct?

OS: Yes.. actually I just printed my a picture my daughter sent me.

Me: Ok, have a nice..

*I call SIT back

Me: She's all set

SIT: Thank you so much fo fixing her issue.

Me: She didn't have any issue. She can print fine..

SIT: WTF!?!

Me: Have a good day, SIT..

😂😂😂😂 I was WOWED!!!

Replaced camera in my phone, it arrived when I was heading to the pub so after 3 beers I came back and everything works now.

Looks like it’s better to fix things when not sober.

Today I solved issues I didn't cause and took International phone calls while on the toilet to help corporate.
Bug fixing can be a shit job, at least I was in the right place for it.

Monday morning client meetings are usually a pain. If they're not delayed once, they're delayed twice, and they go on for hours, taking up the entire morning for everyone on the project.

To make today even better, it was about an hour of our client ripping into us developers on the project, and the application we're making, to shreds, saying that we have a lack of attention to detail and are working well.
(not bearing in mind, we're building a hybrid application, so it's a glorified web page and we can't test on every android phone, or iOS device and any combination of keyboards for those in between, and every problem comes with its own quirks when you're forcing things with html, js and angularjs).

I feel back for the pm, she had literally 5 more hours of salty, salty calls with our other poc about the issues raised and how we could go about fixing all these minor issues, since they know the solution to them, despite having little to zero technical knowledge.

Just another day in the office I guess.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

When my boss told me this:
Boss: I have some bad news that I didn't want to tell you on the phone.
Me: So I'm fired?
Boss: No, the roof of the server room collapsed and most of the computers are really damaged.
Me: Then tell the technicians to start fixing, why are you telling me?
Boss: Now it is your job ...

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

!dev

DISCLAIMER: don’t read before going to sleep!

~23.15 power cut, street wide. Solved by switching back plong.

23.48 : I heard multiple times a loud sound, like if someone is trying to break a window or so. So, get out of room, go to hall, light is on there. Continue, ready with phone to call 112. Reaches living, kitchen. Finds grandfather that’s fixing something.

EDIT: 00:19 The water installation started one again I felt scared....

Awesome start of the vacation lol

Maybe I should just go to sleep.

To be honest, I was really scared after that power cut that this was a real thing. Fortunately it wasn’t... That once again proves the developer life, working at night, can be hard.

So a while back I had found a hole in a website's security, one that I has used pretty frequently. I was able to change my cookies and become any user I wanted. The only caveat was that I had to log in as a user in order to get things started. But once I was in I could basically be anyone I wanted to be just by changing a few numbers in the user ID of the cookie. They also did all of their user processing on the client side. Even password checks.

A couple weeks back I decided to go back in to see if anything had changed since then. It did! But not in the way I had thought.

So these guys decided that instead of fixing their security hole, they would have users just contact their people directly in order to get a new account.

Wow that's so much fucking overhead for basically being a lazy shit and not fixing the security holes. I mean how bad is your architecture if you can't go in and fix this?

Not only that I found that they actually stripped all of the users of their original subscriptions. So now if you want to get back on your subscription you'll have to fork over another $399. So that means going to their shitty form filling out your name, your number, email, and just hope that someone contacts you via phone call.

I'm glad I dropped this service. They clearly can't get their shit together.

Ok so I switched from iPhone SE (1st gen) to iPhone 12 mini.

And no crashes in devRant so far...
With the old phone, it was crashing sporadically when I was opening a rant.

Makes me wonder if that info could help fixing the crashes.

Mom: Start by fixing my phone

Experience with Plasma Mobile:

After an hour of confusion and bash file trolling (as in scrolling through a bash file, not trolling someone with a script), I ended up needing to reinstall Lineage OS on my phone.

While it's a new and seemingly exciting expanse for modern Linux and Android phones, it's very obviously not ready yet.

Even after fixing some bugs within the bash file, my phone seemed to have a mind of its own; prematurely attempting to boot into the OS during a critical part of the setup. Even after finishing the setup correctly, my phone never actually boots into the system.

While I like the concept behind Plasma Mobile, it does still have a ways to go. But I have some hopes that the project will start getting bigger and better as the time goes on.

At a bar while everyone had fun on my phone fixing a bug I thought about for a while and suddenly had an idea on how to solve it.

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.