TLDR; I just screwed a production server and rendered it useless!!!

Long story:

I went to install a product that we built at the customer's site, and was given a Linux running server, to deploy our app.

I work in windows, and barely know the basic Linux commands.

So I look at the files in the home directory, and see that the are a lot of files, so I ask the customer if it is ok that I move all the files to a separate directory.

He agrees, and me thinking that I am smart, proceed to enter the following commands in the terminal:

mkdir old
mv /* old

Of course I got an error that I don't have permission so my next command was:

sudo mv /* old

And that was the end of that computer.

The amazing part of the story is that as soon as it happened, I understood so much about Linux.

The file structure, sudo, the power of the terminal, aliases and so much more...

Company: our team is like a family, everyone is valued and respected

Reality: We have a predefined power structure that will not be challenged no matter what. This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship.

You know you have some power, when your boss asks you for your opinion and advice about how to structure an upcoming project and which technologies and frameworks to use.

Give me that raise already.

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

So, idiot me decided it would be a good idea to never get around to configuring my UPS to gracefully shutdown my server after a powercut lasting more than x duration...

Long story short, we had a powercut that lasted 4 minutes or so longer than the battery in the UPS could keep the server up for...

UPS died, server went pew, and after rebooting itself once the power came back on, my raid array wouldn’t mount anymore...

After Googling around, it seemed like running e2fsck would solve the problem.

Didn’t seem to do the trick... and tired me at 3am decided it would be a good idea to poke around.

Pretty sure I ran a command wrong, or two, because now I can’t even mount the fricken array in read only, and fsck complains with a shit ton errors...

Been researching for hours, and no dice...

Test Disk shows the ext4 partition, but fails to list any files...

I may have destroyed the tables or something... I’m a noob at this point.

I’m able to access files with the RStudio tool, however this doesn’t help with file names and directory structure 😭

Is it all over for my 5 years worth of photos and other bits and pieces that I don’t have any backups of ? 😂😭😭

If any of y’all are pros with data recovery and can help a fellow boi out, I’d be more than happy to pay for ya time !

So, I am currently seeking opportunities at other companies. I randomly got a call on Thursday around 12pm from an unknown number and I was not able to take that call as I was in a meeting. Later on, after looking up that number on Truecaller, I found out that it’s a recruiter from a US-based firm that I had applied to earlier. I immediately tried to call that person again but she was not able to talk as she was in another meeting. I tried texting the recruiter asking for her availability but she didn’t respond. I called again and this time she got annoyed at me, saying that she will call me back if needed. Now, on the weekend I again tried to message her, asking when she is free for a conversation, she is acting high and mighty, saying that she will call me when we (the company) have interviews again (hinting that I have missed the opportunity and it’s my fault). Her passive-aggressive attitude seems to be coming because I didn’t take her earlier call— I did not deliberately avoid her call, I was in another meeting. I was not given any intimation that she is going to call me— let alone on a weekday at 12pm. My current company expects a high-level of professionalism and I intend to show the same level of professionalism in any future companies that I work with. This kind of dehumanization (mainly due to a power imbalance in top-down heirarchical structure) is why big companies have hard time retaining workers these days. And this company was not Google/Apple or anything remotely in the same league. So I seemed to have dodged a bullet there.

Humility... NASA discovered a star that has a strange drop in light level periodically. To the tune of 20%. NASA also determined that this was not due to a planet or naturally occurring body (Not sure how they determine that, but a lot of smart people work at NASA. So I am going with it for this discussion.) They have theorized that this object is evidence of a type 2 civilization mega structure, perhaps a Dyson sphere. The time it takes the light to get to us from this star is ~2000 years. So that civilization "had" a mega structure with the capability to harness the power of a star 2000 years ago. What are they doing now? Humbling, amazing, exciting, I hope we get to talk to them! (Also hoping they don't kill us all.) Really, I just want to see how fast their computers are. Yes, selfish wish.

Seeing the way people write CSS I understand why they think it's badly designed. It's just that they don't use it properly, they don't think about general structure of the system, they just haphazardly pile up declarations, recklessly abusing cascade.

CSS - with great power comes great responsibility.

Me: *tinkering on a webpage that spits out random characters, motivations, themes, and genres for the purpose of short story creation*

Me: Okay, so we have a young girl, with the motivation of The Power of Friendship, the theme of Crime, with the story structure of Dan Harmon, and set in a Fantasy genre.

Coworker: Dan Harmon? Improvise. Wait... A young girl, on a Purge planet who befriends Morty... I mean a young boy from a different universe.

Me: *a minute later* Wait a second, that was an episode of Rick and Morty!!

Coworker: I did that on purpose because you said Dan Harmon.

How is it that in the age of 98%+ reliable contraception incest is more stigmatized than a relationship between an authority figure and their subordinate? sex=children hasn't been the case for decades now.

Never underestimate the power of a misplaced static in your Java to totally fuck you over.

I was busy with my computer science project for the semester where we have to implement a Sudoku solver without backtracking by using graph theory.

So there I was writing my data structure for the grid when for some reason all the cells were initialized with the value 8.

After a whole night of debugging I was about to start over when I realized I had made my array static.

And boom, it works. WTF!!!!!!!