Darn it, I was having such a good day. Just sitting over here in sysadmin land watching the Java devs tear their hair out over the Log4j vulnerability, when someone just had to ask me about the Jenkins servers my team maintains.

Jenkins doesn't use Log4j! What a relief!

Jenkins does, however, have third-party plugins, some of which use Log4j. And thus my relief was short-lived and now I'm also tearing out my hair trying to patch this shit.

Dear Atlassian Support,

In my life I had a lot of experiences...

But your software manages to replace all these experiences with a unique feeling of depression, hatred, anger... Only negative emotions.

Not once have I said anything good about your software - not once in > 5 years.

Whenever your chum bucket of mismanagement and misanthropy stops working, it's never the fault of the end user, the administrator or someone else.

It's entirely your fault.

Fucked up upgrades, lack of documentation, catastrophic handling of logging, lack of support of current database systems, lack of proper migration and clean up of plugins, ....

I could go on. But it's really just and endless tirade.

I wish I could stop management for even giving you money for the pile of poo you call software, but sadly they don't listen.

But there's hope on the horizon.

Thanks for making people go cloud only.

No one wants that.

It would mean entrusting that pile of poo to the craptastic hands of your irresponsible people.

No one really wants that.

Not even management who blindly paid the license fees all the times.

Thank you for your cloud only movement.

Maybe we can finally find an alternative and I can finally start a therapy for the PTSD I have thx to your software.

Is obsidian a fucking joke?

Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.

There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).

How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.

I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.

What the fuck is wrong with web designers these days?

Every fucking web page is white with black text. It's 2022, let's stop this paper bullshit and change everything to use colors that make sense on screens.

For fuck sakes, even monokai.pro is black on white. You know monokai, that dark colorful color scheme that most editors support. With a black background and white text.

I'm nursing the worst migraine in the world right now and all I want to do is smash people's faces into these shitty white screens.

It wouldn't be so bad if these fuckers would have a dark mode, but 80% of the documentation that I have to read doesn't support dark mode. Yeah I know about the browser plugins that do it for you, but I honestly don't trust any of them since most of them have been found to be spyware.

Java. AGAIN. 😡

so, I am trying to get a csv opened and read, and then search through it based on values. Easy peasy lemon squeezy in python, right?

Well, damned be java. You need a buffered reader to read the file. Then you have to "while(has next)" the whole damn thing, then you have to do something with the data that you read one by one, right? Well, not to be disappointed, they do have json libraries, but you **have to install** the plugins for it. Aka you have to manually add the libraries or use some backwards manager like maven.

Gotta admit, jdbc is neat if you're anal about your sql statements, but bring the same jazz to csv, and all the hell will break loose.

Now, if you just read your json data into multiple objects and throw them in an array... Kiss shorthand search's ass goodbye, because this mofo can't search through lists without licking the arse of every object. And now, you have to find another way because this way, you can't group shit you just read from csv. (or, I haven't found a way after 5 hours of dealing with the godforsaken shitshow that java libraries are.)

Like, I'm devastated. If this rant doesn't make much sense to you, blame some java library for it.
Shouldn't be too hard.

What else can i add to this site,?
Help me know how to add Plugins🙏
before i could upload online

Okay, here's a rant for you: neo fucking vim and their fucking wrapper plugins for wrapper plugins for wrapper plugins for plugins "tHat'S wRitTen in LOWAA". The fuck is wrong with you, you fucking dumpshits?! Bram was right to not get involved in this bullshit!!

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Every year, the worst dev experience comes right at the holidays, when website owners with big egos want to launch right on (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve/Day because they think they’re that popular and important. It never occurs to them that this is the WORST time because any third party support you need for hosting, APIs, plugins, etc. is either backlogged or out of office. And because NOBODY is eagerly awaiting the redesign of ANY website on those particular dates since they are stuffing their faces and getting s&&&faced at bars and parties. Nobody will even notice that your website has changed until January 15th at the earliest.

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

When your plugins list in your newly "coded" WordPress site could use an infinity loader, that means you are probably​ one of those fucking two weeks fucking coding bootcamps miracles. Fuck, that's not how the website is done...

The Javascript build/bundling eco system is killing me every time I try to get into it.

Me: oh vite, a nice and fast bundle that supports hmr
Me: works like a charm

Well until I discovered that exporting a self contained bundle with Inlined dependencies is not a thing and you have to pray that your framework provides such plugins

The world of js/jsx/tsx bundling, building, tree shaking, transpiling, Inlining, transforming is such a wild west and that on top of an already very unstable layer of different frameworks that work so fundamentally different that you cannot apply a single principle to even 2 of then (from a building/ssr/bundling perspective)

Standards signing off when it comes to building node apps

I am so tired of Windows.

Latest story. I am doing homework for uni. I write it in LaTeX.

My LaTeX editor is vscode. Because there are great LaTeX plugins which can use a docker container for LaTeX. Also vscode has a vim plugin.

I wanted to synchronize my progress, so I installed GDrive Sync and pointed it to my homework directory.

And suddenly compiling regularly crashes. And it's Windows fault.

This is how the plugin uses LaTeX: "First creating some auxiliary files. Then create the pdf. Then delete the auxiliary files.

But sometimes it happens that GDrive finds the auxiliary files. Then it will open the file in readmode. And upload the contents. And here's the problem. When it's opened, it cannot be deleted. This crashes the pluging. Could have been programmed better, but hey, in Linux, it could be deleted.

Files in Linux are garbage collected. Well, not really, but same effect. When a file is deleted, it disappears immediately, but is actually only deleted when no more process has it opened. Meaning, you could delete something that is being uploaded. It would be continued to be uploaded until GDrive is done, at which point the file is deleted. GDrive would see the change and delete the auxiliary file remotely.

So, it is inherently better at throwing multiple applications together without them conflicting with each other.

Yesterday, I was finally fed up with all of that and installed regolith on my system. But I am worried. I don't know what my uni will throw at me. Stuff like zoom breakout session. There is no guarantee that not someone needs something done that's only possible in Windows (or only possible with reasonable effort in Windows). And if it's just turning in an assignment as a power point presentation.

Plus I want to game. And I have more than just steam games.

Well, anyway. Today is the day where my KVM-switch and second graphics card arrives. Think I have that covered.

Also gives me the opportunity to spin up a separate windows for applications I don't trust.

So, I guess my setup just made a huge leap to a better state.

All day emails are flying with executives, managers and leads jerking each other off after a "successful" migration from old, weird ass in-house custom java build tool that took hours to build anything and required the dependencies to be downloaded manually, to mainstream tool that also takes hours to build anything aka. Gradle.

What the code monkeys responsible for this migration actually did, was write Gradle plugins that still call that old weird ass tool in the background.

Rust's DX is incredible. I previously published a couple packages to NPM and every step of the way i had to fight with NPM, Webpack, Rollup, Typescript and the mass of third party plugins for all of these that wired them together. Here it's literally just

cargo publish

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "Yes! I can't WAIT for tomorrow to begin! I'm gonna make SO much progress on that personal project that I just KNOW is gonna change the world and make me a billionaire! My time is now!"

Next day, 9am, first call of the day: "Ugh, waking up SUUUUUCKS! But, fine, just gotta get through the workday, then it's beast mode time!"

5pm: "Ugh, that day SUCKED... meeting after meeting, constant interruptions for the few minutes I got to hack code, SO many emails, and hey, good day, only five new things pushed down from corporate to bang my head against! Feelings pretty mentally exhausted, but it's all good, I fortunately love this programming stuff, so first dinner, then a little exercise, spend some time with the family, and then it's time to COOOODE!"

10pm: "Ok, house is FINALLY quiet (fucking dog), just a little noise from my daughter staying up way too late again... kinda spent, but this project still excites me, and I may not get as much done as I was hoping, but fine, I can still make some tangible progress and that's what matters. Maybe just one last quick check of email, Reddit, make sure there's no new Hot Ones or Honest Trailers I gotta watch, update IDEA plugins and see what's new, then it's work time! Nothing can stop me now!"

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "SHIT! I GOT FUCK ALL DONE AGAIN! GO DAAAAAAAMN IIIIIT!!!!"

Lessions I learned so far from my first big node/npm project with tons of users:
1) If you didn't build something for a while, expect 3 hours of resolving version conflicts for every two weeks since the last build.
2) Even if the tests pass, run the containers on your own machine and make sure that the app doesn't randomly crash before deploying
3) Even if the app seemed to work on your own machine, run the tests again in an environment mimicking prod at most 15 minutes before replacing the running containers.
4) Even if all else indicates that the app will work, only ever deploy if you expect to be available within the 4 hours following a deployment.
5) Don't use shrinkwrap for anything other than locking every version down completely. A partial shrinkwrap will produce bugs that are dependent on the exact hour you built the app _and_ the shrinkwrap file, and therefore no one will ever have seen them other than you.
6) Avoid gyp, and generally try not to interface too much with anything that doesn't run on node. If parts of your solution use very different toolchains, your problems will be approximately proportional to the amount of code. And you'd be surprised just how much code you're running. (otherwise it's more logarithmic because the more code the less likely a new assumption is unique)
7) Do not update webpack or its plugins or anything they might call unless you absolutely need to
8) Containers are cool but the alpine ones are pretty much useless if you have even just one gyp module.
9) There's always another cache. To save yourself a lot of pain, include the build time in every file or its name that the browser can download, and compare these to a fresh build while debugging to assert that the bug is still present in the code you're reading
+1) Although it may look like it, SQLite is far from a simple solution because the code and the bindings aren't maintained. In fact, it'll probably be more time consuming than using a proper database.

Cordova is the perfect example of the importance of managing a state.
You have 100 plugins in your config and one of them fails? Well, now you are in an inconsistent state. You can't delete the plugin because it doesn't exist but you can't add it because it already exists. If you search any question about cordova on StackOverflow literally ANY answer is like "delete the platform and install it again".
In average I find myself in an inconsistent state more than once a day. No error is handled so I find myself debugging their code and it's horrible, looks like written by someone that had no idea of what he was doing. I know it's legacy and capacitor should be preferred, but what the hell? Really?

Have we all been brainwashed to use VS Code? Is there anyone who doesn’t like it? Everywhere I go it’s “you should use VS Code because ‘plugins’ and you don’t have to switch windows when using Terminal. And, we’re moving our toolchain to work with it.”

Well, it sounds to me like you’re trying to hack a Visual Studio IDE on a non-Windows platform, but I digress…

I was going to return to Atom the other day when I discovered that project died near 6 months ago. I’m sad.

gradle is infuriating.

firstly there are so limited resources to understand how it's building a java/android code. everything happens by magic and hit+trial

secondly the plugins and the tasks works in mysterious ways. sometime they work when applied in the project root's gradle file, other times they work when applied in module's gradle file, nd other times they need configuration at both levels.

then there are gradle tasks like build ,test, assemble , clean etc. these are less of an action and more of an alias to run a bundle of actions.

then we have 3rd party plugins which attach themselves to these "fat-actions" and run before/after them

and finally we have the fuckup from the java world where the only available code coverage plugin is jacoco and IT FUCKING SUCKS!!! it is a test environment plugin, it should impact test tasks , but somehow it's fucking with the assemble taskin such a manner, that the jars ans aar files generated via plugin are giving runtime errrors. yes , runtime! as if we are back in the messed up js world of "everything is good unless running live"

even if it was a compile time eeror, i would have considered. but runtime?!! fucking runtime error?! i barely understand this shit, there is absolutely no info available as to which classes are being used to create a build and how, and i am supposed to fix this? wtf?!

How to Fix Sidebar Below Content Error in WordPress?

Fixing The Sidebar Below The Content Error in WordPress
Undo recent changes to your WordPress theme.
Rule out WordPress plugins.
Find the HTML breaking the layout.
Find the CSS moving the sidebar below the content.
Clear WordPress cache.

WooCommerce sucks, Block editor sucks, Elementor is no better, but if you want a real mess, just add more plugins. Bonus: if you use any "third party WordPress plugin", WooCommerce support can always say, oh yeah, I see that you are using a third party plugin, so we cannot support you, sorry.

Fuck, that's not the kind of front-end development that I was hoping to do in 2023.

I need suggestions

I’m thinking about making a blog called but how do I, this will include tutorials that covers things not taught in school, but you wished you knew how to do.

So right now I have ideas like:

How to write zsh plugins
How to scrape the web(scrape html or sending request)
How to write chrome plugins
How to center a div in different ways
How to write backend codes in js
How to setup an interactive website on a server with domain

But I need more, I need suggestions.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Anybody else getting annoyed with VSCode lately? I’m constantly getting updates to the editor and various plugins that add near-forced autocomplete suggestions, cursor hijacking, codelens and inlay hints (messes up spacing and layout), etc. It’s starting to drive me crazy! Just let me write my code! I love the syntax highlighting and autocomplete, but developer tools need to be optional, not have their off button buried behind some 5-layer JSON object that’s not documented anywhere!

I just want to write code, and I want my editor to be a tool, not an annoying little bee swarming my face all the time trying to get me to do things I don’t want to do! Microsoft and plugin devs need to stop enabling these obtrusive features by default and put them behind a “New Features” wizard or something!

There is so much potential of funding a startup at my work atm. We develop an open source software which will be used on several public institiutions in several countries soon. At least in one country they will be forced by law to do so. One could earn so much money by offering help desk Support, data protection legal stuff, hosting etc. for said software because we do not even have a concept nor a single position for such things. Or develop plugins and stuff for special needs. So much money. But funding a startup, actually get those fundings etc. is much work also. I am too lazy.

Why doesn't WordPress add membership system by default. It is frustrating to keep adding plugin after plugin to achieve something in WordPress. In the early days of WordPress plugins used to be free. Then developer started to charge for it per install, then they made it monthly fee which is just rip off.

I started using WordPress in the 1990's - building all kinds of sites that looked OK until all the plugins and new themes came along. As the years have gone by I've become bored with all the tedious little errors and bugs. To the point that I abandoned my print website 10 years ago.
Just tried to edit it today and FUCK NO get me out of here. It's like painting a Rembrandt with a fucking elastic band.

VSCode offers to install the official MSSQL plugin as "recommended plugins for MySQL" without informing the user that they're getting fucked over. I tolerate very few deliberate minor inconveniences designed to influence my product choice, so what are my options for a reasonably scriptable, yet stable open source IDE with a good set of plugins?

Editor [neovim](I know, I'm a degenerate) suddenly stopped responding to all mapped keys and after a while of closing and opening it, commenting out plugins,... it started working again. No idea what happened there!