Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

Remembering a university lecture

Prof: "What are some other downsides of using polling instead of interrupts?"

Student: "The process has to wait until it gets polled."

Prof: "Exactly. When you click Ctrl+W, you want that tab to be closed immediately. You don't want the system to wait a few seconds for those keys to get polled and risk your mom looking at that tab."

Unpopular opinion: I hate when people start their rants with "unpopular opinion". Most of the time it seems like a pretty standard opinion too! "Unpopular opinion: I hate Wordpress" Yeah so does a lot of people! Just rant for rantings sake! Don't give me your inaccurate market research as a part of the deal!

I have 0 up votes, and I seriously need those stickers. To happy coding to find something to rant about. Love to read other peoples rants though... ;)

Best game ever!

Managed a 97% reduction in bandwidth usage for our internal host monitoring tool by converting the dashboard from using AJAX polling to websocket events.

Completely unnecessary but wanted an excuse to do some development with websockets. (:

Polling time :-

Can FIREFOX QUANTUM beat GOOGLE CHROME ???????..

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

While coding in C, I once forgot to add a semicolon at the end of a while loop polling a register value.
The logic required me to make it zero as soon as it read non-zero and continue the rest of the process. Hence the 'while' that missed the semicolon ended up being a single instruction assignment to the same volatile register that I kept polling. This caused synchronisation issue with the FPGA, and my code got stuck in an uncertain infinite loop.
Took me 2 days and a silly, yet valid question from my teammate to figure out the cause of this stupid bug.

One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.

!rant

@dfox Does devRant have webhooks? I would like to start processing rants and performing analytics on them but I don't want to tax your servers by polling for them.

All I need is a trigger when a new rant is created.

Any chance we can do a polling system?

@dfox

I studied anthropology and ive been in this community for almost 2 years. Have discovered the coding landscape at pretty much the same time and i must say its an interesting bunch of people.

I came on here to learn about the geek way and how to become a better dev. Seeing the rants has been really helpful!

But i think the polling system could lead to interesting understanding. Of the community both for your own app (for marketing bullshit purposes) but also for us.

Id love to know what kind of music people listen to but in a summarized way rather than a unending list of comments which will be harder to extract the information from!

I have a feature suggestion for devrant: some kind of polling system.
This idea came into my mind with the survey a few days ago.
Since almost all of us are devs, aspiring or experienced, we can expect (somewhat) professional opinions, e.g. on how to tackle a specific problem.
Maybe it's even possible to make this a paid service somehow. I thought about this:

Open a poll for all registered users: $0
Add requirements for a user to have to be able to vote on the poll: +0.99$ each:
- has ranted at least X times
- has at least X ++s
- has a StackOverflow account connected
...

This way, the OP can narrow down the target audience to a specific group.

Maybe...? I don't know if something like this already exists somewhere else.

When you're doing a demo and switch to a workspace with a green-on-black terminal with tmux on it, sending requests in a while loop and polling some output every second.

And then people (mostly devs) start posting Matrix memes in the meeting chat

Feels good :)

This always reminds me that what's a casual tool for me, for others it may be an esoteric unicorn-magic-powered super geeky stuff.

So I'm making a music game, and I've been struggling to fend off this large sound latency issue. There is like a ~80ms of latency, which is a total deal-breaker for music games.
So I've been polling everything using a profiler, but nothing came up... Until just now, I realized:
IS IT MY F*<KING KEYBOARD THAT IS LAGGING?

I pulled my iPhone out, opened the Notes app, and recorded the screen as I smacked the keyboard.

Whaddaya know, exactly after 5 frames (in 60fps) of the sound of me punching the keyboard, the letter shows up.

Now I need to take *this* lag into account :facepalm:

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

I work on a team project for a test and maintenance course in University. We agreed as a team to adopt a git infrastructure that would prioritize the stability of the master branch at all cost by only updating commits up to the next stable point and tagging every single release. We have a long polling development branch to prepare our releases and we create feature branches for the tickets we need to resolve. I even wrote documentation to make sure that we don't forget and protected the master branch on gitlab from direct modifications.

Can someone fucking tell me how one of my teammates managed to fuck over all of this and work on an unfinished feature straight on master?

N.b. I know that he probably edited straight from gitlab's online text editor because they have a big where they don't restrict modifications on protected branches.

Dev: Sends weekly update email on Friday, as drudgingly required by management, outlining that stress level is high recently in the past two weeks and constant polling for feedback and updates is stressing him out, needs to slow down the pace

Management: (ON A FUCKING SATURDAY): "Received your email @fullStackChris"

WOW! THANKS FOR THAT INSIGHTFUL UPDATE! I BET YOU DID! I HAVE NO DOUBT GOOGLE'S SMTP SERVERS ARE RUNNING PROPERLY. AND AFTER READING IT, YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO @ ME IN A WHATSAPP MESSAGE. ON A FUCKING SATURDAY. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU, I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY OR ITS TASKS UNTIL MONDAY. PLEASE STOP.

I mean they must be fucking with me at this point, right guys? Maybe I should start writing stuff like "I need more tasks and more messages throughout the day" then I would probably receive less, I mean wtf is actually going on.

Today I have created a server application on Python Tornado which can forward TCP Packets directly to HTTP request queue without any intermediate caching.

Our remote IOT devices (microcontrollers with sensors attached) send sensor reading over TCP Socket to our server and all the connected web applications can show the data instantly using long polling and the above mentioned technique.

We find our hero, fullstackclown🤡, again harrowed by idiotic management.

Our backdrop and set: A Google calendar appointment was booked between the managers and fullstackclown. fullstackclown had created an all-day appointment for today which reads: "fullstackclown on site".

With the scene set, let us begin our tale..........

Manager: Are you going to be on site today?

fullstackclown🤡: Do you see the appointment I booked on our calendar stating that indeed I will be on site today?

Manager: ...

fullstackclown🤡: you are an absolute idiot

Manager: ...

I literally don't know what to do anymore. I mean it's RIGHT THERE IN YOUR CALENDAR. HOW MUCH MORE CLEAR DO YOU WANT IT TO BE?! DO YOU WANT A TWILIO APP THAT SENDS YOU A PRERECORDED VOICE MESSAGE IN MY VOICE, CONFIRMING MY CALENDAR APPOINTMENTS?!

What type of mindset causes this type of behavior of double or triple checking things as simple as a calendar booking? Honestly shows a complete breakdown of normal mental functioning in my opinion.

Fuck you Mobike!! Stop polling your applog.mobike.com server literally every 10 fucking seconds when your app is not even running! And why the fuck did it suddenly start last night, of all things? It's fucking creepy and invasive.

Related question: does anyone know how to permanently shut down a background app service on an unrooted android 7? Even if I kill the background process (not the app itself - that one has not even been opened), it still restarts a minute later

Apparently, mouse polling rate is limited to 130 Hz for Bluetooth mouse.

BUT WHY 🖱️📶🐁

The seller told me they'll have the product available in EU on Nov 5th.

Me: refreshing the ali page every 30 minutes since I got up

Should I perhaps write a script for it....?

Should i make a chat system using polling or websocket?

Been working on a backend-service, sending notifications to our app. Shit didn’t work in backend. I made some adjustments, commited and pushed. Didn’t think it would work and just went home.

Our tester had a app-version connected to my dev-server(Continous Delivery from my last commit). Got an email. ”I see you got the notifications working”. I had a high polling-rate in backend for testing. He got spammed lol

At least my code worked 😂

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

Took the project for school for creating a personal Online judge just because I could make a polling web-app in Django.
Any ideas how to start?
It should start working from January, so any articles/blogs/tutorials are welcome.

MQTT - all I used to know about this is its name, untill few months back a client sent us some requirements which included MQTT. I opened its specification and I was fucking shocked! I am implementing almost similar protocol in most of my applications (which needs subscription based service) for last 3 years. I have developed IoT apps, remote monitoring systems, HMI systems using the same fucking protocol! Even I had implemented the same thing on HTTP using long polling a few years back!!

Now I feel like open sourcing my protocol. But I don't know where to start. Any help please?

>new feature in application uses external API
>external API has unreliable response times, requires polling to get results, no way to set up webhooks or whatever
>tech lead proposes asynchronous system which will queue up user requests for processing and use websockets to warn frontend clients of finished query results
>higher ups say it will take too much time, make tech lead cut back in scale and treat external API like a regular synchronous REST API
>team dutifully implements feature within the constraints of the new smaller scope
>higher ups try out the feature, find the usage experience is extremely shitty, but don't back down, they only let tech lead scale back to original scope in small increments that still allow new problems to show up
>feature takes up same time or longer, but with more damage to the mental health of developers

At least I'm not in that team

mann... either i am dumb or my team is a bunch of excited monkeys.

for last 6 months my senior and this contract dev (both in Android) have been fussing about adding coroutine flows in our codebase: how our codebase "needs" it and how flows will help our codebase become "better"

when i asked them why, they gave me even more shit about hot flows cold flows, state flows, and how ots the latest "solution" from google.

So today, while going through another existential crises in my free time, i decided to understand what these "flows" are.

and from what i understand, it is mainly for cases in which there os actively changing data and we want to get latest updates without any event or trigger, like those streaming datas , chat messages, location etc.

but we are a freaking insurance app! user presses a button and we make an api call! what is the fucking problem here that isn't being solved by good old livedata and coroutines? There isn't any "live" api in app as far as i know and even if there is the code should be modified for 1 such api.

why fuck the whole codebase for a usecase that isn't applicable for 99% of APIs?

also, if a flow is going to auto trigger and call api, how are we supposed to control it? like say there is a offers api(there isn't) which gives us the latest offer products to show user for 5 seconds then refresh. for this i will simply returrn

flow{

while(true){
emit (offer api results)
delay(5000)
}

}

but this is an infinite polling api! how to stop it when say user pressed a cross button or did some other interaction?

it seems useless as fuck.. i can achieve a more controllable polling using the same while loop in different location or some other solution that won't require me adding this wierd api

defineProperty from JavaScript is pretty awesome, without that many reactive frameworks would rely on polling which is expensive.

So our app uses some service to validate users & the validation response is received either by a callback url or by polling. Since their documentation states callbacks are rather unstable and "should not be completely relied upon", we only use polling. Client, however, wants to use the callback url and use polling only "after we are sure that callback has not been received". WTF. When we asked how will we know callback has not been received because it has not been received, we were told to start polling after like 1 hour.
?!?!?!?!?!?!

Would it be possible to use (S)FTP protocol in conjunction with push technology rather than pull? Perhaps websockets since both use TCP?

Say, something like an external server periodically sending my server files and when a new file arrives, I will get a notification. This instead of constantly polling my directory to check if there are files in it.

I think I can see this done with an Angular page that gives me a notification when a new file arrives on my FTP.

I think it might turn into an interesting little hobby project..

because bluetooth isn't designed for ultra-high-gaming-inputs. and you don't need higher polling rates unless you're a very competetive gamer. in which case you're using wired, anyway, because latency.

Actually looking forward to work tomorrow, a colleague spent last week implementing web sockets to our communications server, this week I now start to strip out all of our Ajax polling (in some cases it is polling every 150ms) and replace with web sockets!

After three years of asking and waiting I can finally remove the last annoying bit of code from our software 😄

Following some new nextjs tutorial to learn how to efficiently build a web chat app, the guy built it very solid, but is it efficient?

Im having mixed feelings about this approach. The way he did it is, for example when you click on a user (imagine it as a list of users from your contacts), it actually calls a route, which stores that in database, and once its done Then the route triggers lets say socket.io event to notify the frontend to update the UI.

Not only that but each new message that gets sent it actually calls a route which stores that message in database and once that's successful Then it emits a socket.io event to the frontend to fetch that message.

As you can imagine constantly calling routes like this Does induce small delays. Creating conversations, navigating, opening someones profile and especially sending messages, is NOT instantaneous. When you do it theres a small delay, giving the impression as if the app is SO large that it lags

But it doesnt lag, it just needs a few ms to store that in db so it can return the socket.io bidirectional message event. Which does make sense because what if the internet broke and the user immediately gets sent a message, but the message fails to get stored in database? Or db storage gets fucked or something else fails but socket.io works while db doesnt? The data then may be inconsistent. This approach fulfulls the single source of truth principle

So thats why im having mixed feelings about this approach particularly because of small delays. It is not instantaneous like whatsapp discord telegram signal viber etc the input UI freezes until the message is successfully sent

---

Of course this can be a UI/UX decision and can be handled differently even if the backend works like that.

My concern is is this approach valid?

My question is... I had an idea what if i emit socket.io event to send the message while in the background also call the route to store that message in db? This way not only would it work asynchronously but the message gets sent instantaneously, and if the backend fucks up to store it in db then the UI gets updated with message failed to get delivered, switching the socket.io into polling state. Is this a good (proper, efficient, better) way to do it or not?

luasocket decided to provide blocking network primitives to be used in single threaded lua environments. Sure I can overcome it with socket select polling, promises and coroutines. But WTF. It is 2016! Even node.js does it better.

i still dont get how you retrieve webhook payload thru localtunnel. i just took my way around by polling