Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

A guy on another team who is regarded by non-programmers as a genius wrote a python script that goes out to thousands of our appliances, collects information, compiles it, and presents it in a kinda sorta readable, but completely non-transferable format. It takes about 25 minutes to run, and he runs it himself every morning. He comes in early to run it before his team's standup.

I wanted to use that data for apps I wrote, but his impossible format made that impractical, so I took apart his code, rewrote it in perl, replaced all the outrageous hard-coded root passwords with public keys, and added concurrency features. My script dumps the data into a memory-resident backend, and my filterable, sortable, taggable web "frontend"(very generous nomenclature) presents the data in html, csv, and json. Compared to the genius's 25 minute script that he runs himself in the morning, mine runs in about 45 seconds, and runs automatically in cron every two hours.

Optimized!

!rant

Fathers day today, my 6 year old passes me some presents.

First 3 opened.

Devrant cap
Devrant stressball
Devrant stickers

Yes son! (Well obviously, technically it was my wife) I assume she must have seen me on the app :)

!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

Hope this isn't a repost

No presents for the EU this year

Told my mother about rubber duck debugging. This was included in my presents this year

Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

People who say something isn't working and ask us to investigate.

Alright, it's not on our side, go ask support at {differentcompany}.

*presents actual proof*

Client replies: oh but I asked the other side and they send over this proof *shows proof saying that its not on our side but very technical so the client doesn't understand* so it's definitely on your side!!!!!!

This annoys the living fucking hell out of me, FUCKING FUCK.

😡

Today's my birthday!

YAAYYYYYY

ME: Presents?
Parents: You didn't requested one.
ME: But you always bought me SOMETHING.....
Parents: What do you want?
ME: Dunno.........

(sobs)

Wow, my girlfriend has been really efficient wrapping and organising the presents under the tree... You could say she’s a Swift Package Manager!!

My employer gives me a mission to complete in our project using plain js.
*Uses 30 hours of working time completing the mission using custom js elements*
*Presents the results proudly to the employer*
*Realizes Microsoft edge doesn't support custom elements*

It's christmas you fuckers, turn off your damn computers.

Love you all, have a good one.❤🎄

Why are people already posting christmas presents? Its not even december yet! BTW heres mine:

I'm fucking tired of this so called lead developer, lead developer my ass:

- He takes two days to complete a simple task and he dares to ask me why I extended the deadline of this freaking complex feature I need to build.

- He does a half-assed job when completes a task, no validation of data, no well informative message when exceptions are th thrown ...

- He assigns me his tasks although I already have tons and we need to release soon.

- I take care of developing and maintaining 60% of the APIs and I implemented the most complex of features and he dares to always say that my code can be optimized in a vague way, never mentioning what exactly is he talking about, and never telling me beforehand, he always does it during team meetings where another thing is being discussed.

- He presents the app to the whole company and at the end doesn't give credit where it's due, no " thank you for being part of this or helping build this" even if I built most of that shit, instead he says he's disappointed in me ... WTF! What did you fucking do to build this to be disappointed in me? I'm the fucking disappointed one here !!

- He fucking keeps preaching practices that he doesn't follow or he finds workarounds to skip them while the rest of the team follows them.

- He's like "I'm only taking care of this task to help you out?!" .... wtf! I have nothing to do with that fucking task, how are you helping me! You just keep fucking lazing around when we need to be finishing features asap.

Thank God I don't expect anything from you, I get enough credit from my boss who expresses how impressed he's with my job.

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

Two weeks ago, our lead presents jenkins to our apprentice.

Apprentice : why some projects have a cloud icon and other a sun ?
Lead : because there were cloud outside when build finished.

Today we still laugh about it.

🎉🎄🎅🎄🎉🎄🎅🎄🎉
Merry Christmas
Everyone
🎉🎄🎅🎄🎉🎄🎅🎄🎉

Or happy holidays for the people who hate Christmas for what ever reason.

Graduation day:

A guy presents a modified pathfinding algorithm based on a*, in Java.
Jumping to the conclusions, he says he tested the algorithm on a 128x128 graph based maze, but not larger because the program saturates his 4 GB ram pc.

One teacher (algorithms and data structures) literally jumps from the chair "you saturate 4gb of ram with a* on 128x128 graph?!"

Best graduation day ever lol

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

*Presents finished product to client
Client: We won't pay until you add this new feature that was never in the original specs.
*One week later after adding new feature
Client: Uhh, actually there's something else we want, do that then you get paid.

😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

News station:
"This country is in need of IT specialists"
*Presents some guy from some company*
"We offer schooling for people who want to learn IT"

Also news station:
*Shows footage of the same guy typing some help command into cmd*
*Same guy opens minified js in notepad++*

Way to fucking cringe everybody with slight knowledge out of the continent!

When your best friend is also a lady dev, you get pretty awesome Christmas presents

This run up to Christmas is the shit. Everything is suddenly urgent. No time to do a proper job. If that isn't bad enough, you are also tasked with thinking up some ideas for family Christmas presents, as if i give a flying fuck. I dont mind the break for the holidays but i fucking hate Christmas but have to put a brave face on and celebrate (what exactly am i celebrating). And no scrooge comments please.

Not a rant, just a gag I do from time to time. Today a new colleague arrived. He presents himself and after sometime he asks me:
- so how long are you working here?
I look at my watch and say
- oh just about six years now.
They always look so confused 😂

I now understand why we have multi-core processors. So that a process that dun shit the bed doesn't hog the whole fucking CPU! Of course at the expense of "yeah our shitty software can hog the CPU no problem, there's now several cores anyway". Hardware solving the crap that software presents, yet again.

Just checking... I'm not the only one that has no presents for christmas yet, am I?

Probably a little different shitty teacher!

Had a course in basic computer architecture and the teacher was way to over qualified to have that course. This is a guy who presents his research to Nvidia and Intel but is forced to teach a intro level course...

The result? He was completely unmotivated and unprepared for the lectures and was of no help on the assignments. Fortunately we had a awesome teaching assistant who saved the entire course for me and my friends. Seriously, kudos to that guy!

Actual image of me finding out my colleagues know about rubber duck debugging while I'm looking for birthday presents

I hate buying christmas presents.

Sprint planning:
PO: I have a great idea for a new game changing feature
Team: cool, let’s talk requirements, etc
PO: nah, I trust you can come up with the best implementation possible
Sprint demo:
Team: presents the feature
PO: Why are you guys always doing it your way, instead of following my vision?!

Every single sprint...

God damnit Quora!

I stumbled upon some article or post or whatever they are called on quora.
And I really wanted to read the comments on it. It wouldn’t let me unless I log in.

I normally don’t do that but I thought I’ll make an exception because I really wanted to read the comments.

So I clicked on that comments button and logged in (via google). First it presented me some modal dialog to pick 5 things that interest me. And it was mandatory. Fine… I picked those 5 things.

Finally it presents me the list of articles or whatever. But not the same list that I have seen before I was logged in. Scrolling, the article of my interest is not there. God damnit! Just show me my comments for fucks sake.

I go back to that tab where I was not logged in to somehow copy the link of that article or the link to the comments section. But it doesn’t let me. Some bullshit pseudo smart layer of crap is preventing me from doing anything.

Then I abuse the fucking share link to visit it in my logged in tab to finally see the comments that I came for.

And the comments weren’t even worth it. God! What a waste of time! And how can one fuck up a fucking forum so much?

It will be a lesson for me not to visit Quora ever again.

I wasn't planning on giving Christmas presents to the people I hate until I heard about those exploding Samsung Galaxy phones 😈

@cozyplanes birthday is coming.....
And my dad is asking if I want some presents....
But I can't think of one.
I already have decent headphones and earphones, speaker, keyboard, mouse, laptop, monitor, phone, and tablet...
I personally don't need anything now, but I want to get something.

Can anyone recommend hardware stuff for me? (not software) Mostly tech related, but if you can think of music stuff or leisure stuff (like boosted board, even tho I don't have the time to ride it), that's great too!

Will waiting for you guys/gals suggestions.

P.S. Ofc I want to get my own A320 or A350, but I am pretty sure my dad can't afford it. If any of you guys/gals have the money, please contact me.

!dev

Already forgot how frustrating wrapping christmas presents is. >:(

Client: "Please make carrots with these tomato seeds."
Me: "But that's not possible."
Client: "These are strict requirements. Or we have to find someone who can."

** takes said tomatoes and makes them physically look carrots. Presents said carrots excited that I may pull this off **

Client: "These carrots are not blue like all known carrots. We've decided to go with someone else."

Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu

That moment when you make a suggestion. But client ignores you, and you end up building what they want.

Then an asshole comes along and presents the thing that you suggested, and has the balls to say they made it. When you can clearly see that it's the prototype you made!

At least it's Friday...

I want honest opinions. Do you think the following is a good or not so good interview question. Why or why not? Defend your argument.

Define a function where the input is a list of integers. It should find and return all the unique sets of three within the list that sum to x.

For example, given the list [1, 3, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15] and with x = 16, the function would return [(10,5,1), (13,2,1)]

If the candidate presents the trivial solution with time complexity of o(n^3), ask if can be done in o(n^2) or better.

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

Just the fact that you wrote your simple single page "contact us" website in React shows that you have no idea what you're doing, nor do you have any idea what the actual benefits of React are and in what situations it actually shines. You're just jumping on the React bandwagon for the sake of saying "I wrote it in React," and your decision to use React for that simple website is going to effectively increase It's development time without adding any additional benefits.

Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages. It's worth it to pay attention to these advantages/disadvantage, and choose the best framework to fit your needs. Don't just use a particular framework because it's the hot new craze. Use a framework because it's the right choice from a technical standpoint, and presents you with advantages that fit your application needs.

I saw this movie today where an antisocial guy just wanted to be left alone. When this didn't work he produced a scheme to change his environment to his liking using many cool inventions.
He seemed like your average developer but about one hour into the movie I saw something that only happens in movies.
He actually met the deadline of stealing all presents by dec 25 morning, I mean... No deadline extensions!

package main

import (
"log"
"strings"
)

type Present struct {
from string
to string
}

type Santa struct {
presents []Present
}

type Person struct {
Name string
Nice bool
Presents []Present
}

func (santa *Santa) givePresents(person Person) []Present {
result := []Present{}

if person.Nice != true {
return result
}

for _, present := range santa.presents {
if strings.Compare(present.to, person.Name) == 0 {
result = append(result, present)
}
}

return result
}

func main() {
santa := Santa{
[]Present{
{"devRant", "Alex"},
{"Johanna", "Alex"},
{"Alex", "devRant"},
{"Alex", "Johanna"},
},
}

persons := []Person{
{"Alex", true, []Present{}},
{"Johanna", true, []Present{}},
{"devRant", false, []Present{}},
}

for idx, person := range persons {
persons[idx].Presents = santa.givePresents(person)
}

log.Println(persons)
}

Signed up on Freelancer as a soft engg. graduate with quite a lot of projects in Android and web services. A guy inboxes me regarding an applied bid and once everything's clear and mutually agreed upon with, he presents me with this one God damn question - "how many years of experience have you got?"
With truth said, all I get in response is, "looking for people with more exp. thanks for your time".
Yeah I'm sure he was born with 5+ y experience right off the bat. 😠

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

Soooooo, why is it that so often 'security' just means bloody mindedly getting in your way for no reason?

Coz I fail to see how whitelisting a subnet of private IPs that are already only accessible through company VPN presents any kind of security risk, especially since the blocking software is literally only on our company laptops and can be easily bypassed by being on the VPN on *any other device*. But nooooooo, we have to go to the this other company our umbrella company owns (who by the way are making every dev at our company redundant in six months) and beg them to change each individual IP address every time we create a service.

Really does feel like security often means either 'our parent company doesn't understand security so we just need to go through the motions and *look* like we are doing things properly' or 'we just want to get in your way enough that we win in the who gets made redundant fight because you can't actually get any work done and we can'.

Bonus points: on the website for the blocking software they use, it literally recommends using Internet Explorer for everything. I'm surprised they haven't tried to enforce that on us as well.

According to the report of Reuters: The United States Navy banned the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the popular video app represented a "cybersecurity threat." A bulletin issued by the Navy on a Facebook page saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.

The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to "address existing and emerging threats...." The U.S. government has opened a national security review of the app's owner ByteDance.

Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?

---

Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?

Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.

Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?

Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine

Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.

Dev2:
Where is that logic called?

Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000

This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.

Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.

Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.

Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change

Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.

Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:

Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine

Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.

Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.

Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.

Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.

Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.

Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.

Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.

Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.

Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:

Presents: Udemy Unity & Blender courses

Holiday Reading: A Book Of Lenses

Status: Reenergised, pumped to program once again

CSS is magic.
CSS is a katana blade.
CSS is a tiny bristle scratching Gorilla Glass Victus. It shouldn't exist, yet it does.
CSS is a plastic-based sticker that you peel off, and it leaves no residue behind.
CSS is a summer breeze of 2004 that you felt while riding longboards with your girlfriend.
CSS is plugging a '86 Les Paul into a Marshall JCM800 and switching to a dirty channel.
CSS is diving into a freshly made bed after an evening shower.
CSS is getting your winter coat and finding a hundred dollar bill in the pocket.
CSS is the front right burner.
CSS is stomping onto a Big Muff pedal before you do solo.
CSS is David Gilmour inviting you for lunch.
CSS is cracking open a cold bottle of Perrier.
CSS is falling asleep in the attic hugging your loved one and watching the stars.
CSS is a glass of just below the room temperature cold pressed orange juice after you run 5k.
CSS is stepping on a scale and seeing yet another pound of body weight gone.
CSS is a supportive, beautiful person saying they love you just after you escaped an abusive relationship.
CSS is putting on your cold white gold Rolex in the Friday afternoon before meeting with friends at the bar.
CSS is discovering your old Sansa Clip+ and booting RockBox.
CSS is giving cunnilingus to Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
CSS is finally feeling empathy to another person after two years of therapy and realizing you're alive.
CSS saying "unleaded" after you pull up to the gas station in your vintage 911.
CSS is your ex-boss apologizing to you after they hit the rock bottom.
CSS is smelling her hair in the back seat of a Maybach taxi.
CSS is giving presents to your grandparents.
CSS is hitting bong while watching Home Alone with your friends after New Year's Eve.
CSS is getting a new job that pays 3x your old one and removing your old job's Jira bookmark from a bookmarks bar.

Them: You have 6 days to build this frontend page for our wordpress site.
Me: Ok...
*proceeds to spend 4 days trying to arse my way towards a semi reasonable bootstrapped website based on the existing website's styling.*
Me: *Presents website*, so... uh... yeah, I don't usually do frontend stuff, I'm more of a backend dev, but here's what I could do.
Them: This looks like absolute horseshit.
Me: So what do you not like about it?
Them: All of it. It doesn't look anything like the wireframe that I gave you.
Me: Ok... So let me get this straight, you want it to look exactly like how you designed it in your wireframe? *wireframe looks like a child drew it*
Them: Yes! Is that so hard?
Me: I mean, it's a little hard. I'm not exactly a front end developer. Aside from that, I think this design is not very user-friendly.
Them: we don't care about your opinions, OP. Get back in there and make it look exactly like the wireframe.
Me: Ok.
*proceeds to go to fiverr, and contract someone else to do it for me while I get to do fun stuff in the back end.* 😂

----

We'll see what they think of the project when it gets back to me. Wish me luck guys.

When you want to code but your brain is in Xmas Mode already...

An idea for a website:
A page where you paste a github url and it clones the repository on the server and presents it to you with a IDE interface, lets you apply little changes and build it.
A "development environment as a service", in few words. Seriously, browsing github files is a pain and I can't obviously clone all the interesting projects I want to explore!

The 'farewell great manager Jim' party on Monday.

The [insert name of a department] Christmas party on Wednesday, which you shouldn't miss because they want the company to be more integrated.

The [insert name of your department] Christmas party on Friday, which is separate from the other party because they want the company to be more inte... wait.

The hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, because coding all night for free to create buzz around the company's name is always fun.

The team meeting where the product manager presents all the shinny new things they're thinking about presenting to the client while our deadline is still a couple of weeks away. "And the engineering team knows exactly what to do, right?" Yeah, sure, if you say so.

TL;DR: Read it.

Tag: oswars

Please don't redistribute without permission. *PUT OPEN SOURCE LICENSE HERE*

devRant presents:
OS
WARS

Story:
Many users in devRant use Windows but then the "Arch Linux Alliance" short ALA came together to invade devRant. After some weeks, the small group FedB ("Fedora Bureau") also joined the OS Wars. When the release of Ubuntu 16.10 was near the UBO ("UbuntuBestOS Alliance") joined and was near to victory, because dpkg was faster than ever before. But then the macOS Defenders woke up. They finally finished the upgrade to Sierra and tried to fight the other OSes. They wanted to attack with their package manager, but that attack failed. After days of war Windows crashed while updating, which made it unoperational. They called it Blue Screen. After windows gave up, the other groups realized, that they are all built with the same base. They called it Unix. They grouped up (except macOS, because they just want to make money) and discovered the remains of Windows. They found a software named "Ubuntu bash for Windows". Everyone in the group was angry, because UBO teamed up with Windows. They destroyed UBO and continued.

To be continued.
Should it continue? Comments...

So I snapped during pointing session and told the BA that I didn’t have time to explain software engineering to the team….then they proceeded to make up new requirements that the client didn’t ask for which resulted in more complex error handling that presents the user with a list of generic message; I try really hard to keep implementation details out of those meetings, because all it does is bog down the team and waste time, but I suppose I fell into that trap.

So I recently finished my Abi (final school exams thing in germany) and got relatively good grades. My IT grades were good, I was best of the class. So two local companies gave me some neat gifts (the best of the class always reveive some presents). One of the companies I was thinking about applying to even gifted me a Bluetooth speaker (thanks for that!).
Now comes the bad part: I looked up the speaker on amazon and now it thinks I want to buy it. I get ads from that exact speaker EVERYWHERE although I already own it. And no, amazon doesn't even think about showing me ads of other articles I've been looking at way more often and way longer.

Wtf.

Working from home presents some big decisions...

We have this guy at the company who always presents good ideas and always suggests new projects. One day he suggested a great project, our boss really liked the idea and gave me the green light to start creating it.
The guy, seeing the opportunity to promote himself, and without consulting me about the deadline, set up a meeting to present the application to the directors, and only then informed me about the deadline. At that moment I did my part, told him that it would not be possible to meet the deadline with all the requirements, something had to be withdrawn, and that's what he did, took a lot of things from the project and we went on like this.
While I was implementing the application, he was always pushing, asking me to do it faster, asking my boss to put me exclusively in his project, and things like that, the boss was always saying that there were not enough people on the team to devote someone exclusively to the project. The guy of course did not agree with that.
At the end the application, without a lot of the initial requirements, was a really mess but ready, he presented to the directors, who in turn liked a lot, and consequently asked to do all the initial requirements and some more. But now those initial requirements had to be made on top of a mess because of all the rush and adaptations.
A few months later, with the change of the board, the guy turned up being my boss, and I've prepared myself to go back to his project with exclusive dedication.
Then came the surprise, when the guy, in the boss position, realized the limitations of the team, instead of putting me to do everything he wanted in that project, he canceled the project entirely and for all the reasons that had already been said to him by the former boss.
Please, don't be like that guy!

Schedule an impromptu meeting with my friend Jack Daniels.

Joking.

Best thing I do is write down the issue on a piece of paper, read what I'm stuck on and realise I have been focusing on the wrong aspect of the issue and a different solution presents itself.

Take a step back, clear your mind and start again.

If not, then remember Jack is available after work.

Boss explaining a bug found in my senior developer's (yes, that one) application...

Boss: "This shouldn't happen, this presents a security issue since these records should not be visible at this point."
"Senior" Developer: "You're right. Hmm, what should I do about that?"

Me: *face palm*

I bonded a lot with a co-worker over the last several months as I had to mentor him in iOS and how to maintain our apps. We mostly bonded over how much we hate Objective-C and the management of the project. Now we are buying Christmas presents for eachother. Bad code brings people together

When the client starts asking you for features like a kid asking santa for presents.

"It would be nice to have this... Oh! And that..."
Two weeks later, "I forgot to menthion, I also want this this and this"

He thinks He's in a buffet?!

I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...

Python is my wife, Elixir is my sexy girlfriend. While I love my life, the gf presents me what my wife cant. ReactJs/Rxjs is a lovely classic porn. The question is: what the fuck devRant is here???

At 4am there was some random youtuber in my head that reads reddit posts and he presents me one but it's blurry and he says hi there how you there are stupid but how stupid you are, humming hammers,
MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI he's insecure go back then hayeens HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS and he never stops
It literally feels like a broken neural network output, meaningless. But it's in my head, I never asked for this but it's there generating itself

The importance of not using static salt / IVs.

I've been working on a project that encrypts files using a user-provided password as key. This is done on the local machine which presents some challenges which aren't present on a hosted environment. I can't generate random salt / IVs and store them securely in my database. There's no secure way to store them - they would always end up on the client machine in plain text.

A naive approach would be to use static data as salt and IV. This is horrendously harmful to your security for the reason of rainbow tables.

If your encryption system is deterministic in the sense that encrypting / hashing the same string results in the same output each time, you can just compile a massive data set of input -> output and search it in no time flat, making it trivial to reverse engineer whatever password the user input so long as it's in the table.

For this reason, the IVs and salt are paramount. Because even if you generate and store the IVs and salt on the user's computer in plaintext, it doesn't reveal your key, but *does* make sure that your hashing / encryption isn't able to be looked up in a table

Pardon the rant; some of it can probably attributed to me, but please indulge me of you could.

I'm tasked with creating a report that pulls data from some sql tables in c#and presents it using javascript. My manager was nice enough to lend me his old sql query, so I run with that using sql connections. Now I find out AFTER I get my sql query string working and retrieving data properly that my manager wanted it done using linq and entity framework, so now I have to start over, a process made only more "fun" by the confusing and unintuitive column names of our sql tables.

Moral of the story: don't take the easy way out.

After I spend some time fixing that up, I have to print out the data using javascript and html, which my manager was kind enough to lend me. Cue me shutting off my brain and thinking that I should have the program open and display this stuff itself. Let me tell you that converting a console application to a Windows form application is not a fun experience, especially when entity framework makes classes named "application" and "form" from your database tables. After finally getting the WebBrowser form to work, I'm hit with a javascript error from the library my manager referenced (he is a programmer himself). I tell him about the error and he just tells me to write the html code to a .html on disk like he did, but never explicitly said he did until just now.

Fixed moral of the story: don't take the easy way out, unless you should.

I should clarify I was given the whole raw sql query and html with some embedded javascript and a reference to chart.js.

“Lazy mom lazy wow” presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.

Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Also, the movie Gummo and the game Life is Strange, part one.

The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.

It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.

Elementary OS provided a really nice getting started guide for indie app developers. Something which lacked in Linux world. Only thing I don't like that they presents GTK+ and Vala as their own technology.

My friends and family complain I'm hard to buy birthday presents for, so I gave them a list of topics and pointed them towards Funko Pop. I was not disappointed

The human brain (also animal brains, even ants) are incredibly complex. Each neuron is now supposedly its own processor. So a human brain is a complex network of billions of processors, not just threshold variables. This means to simulate an organic brain sufficiently it will take a huge computer system with billions of parallel processors. Now, I don't know if the sophistication of a computer processor is represented in each cell. So this may not be equivalent to billions of pentium cores for instance. However, it still presents a huge challenge for AI, as it exists now, to replicate. My thoughts are that AI that is silicon based will take a different approach that leverages how computers work. My guess is that current neural net models are not a good match for this unknown AI. Will it inherently exhibit pattern matching like an organic brain? Or will it be a different kind of consciousness altogether? Will we even realize it is self aware? Will my roomba plan to kill my pet for my attention? What are some other models being employed in AI research?

"Good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear. " - Paul Rand

So the more I scroll here the more I feel at home. I think this is the first place that I've ever been able to go that is in a social media format that I actually feel welcomed. It's like if I tell a joke people will get it. if I ask a question I can assume someone has come up with the same problem and will know how to help. or if they don't they've seen something on stackOverflow for me :p it's a good feeling to have found this website and the small comunity it presents.

as usual... someone presents something in the biweekly developers meeting, it gets highly critizised by most devs, and yet the day after everyones trying it out. Sometimes is hard to understand how devs think =/

What does it tell you about the organization when a senior PM presents quarterly results using white text on gray background?

hm.....

I just came across this strategy for the rate us section to avoid the lower ratings on the store.

When you click on rate us. It initially presents you with a 5 star with none filled up.
If you click on stars 1 to 3 then a feedback box pops up asking why I'm giving them less stars. Still letting to change them to 5 stars.
If I click on 4 or 5 stars then the app directly takes you to the play store listing where I need to press the 5 star again.

What do you think about this strategy?. Is it worth implementing??

At 4am there was some random youtuber in my head that reads reddit posts and he presents me one but it’s blurry and he says hi there how you there are stupid but how stupid you are, humming hammers, MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI he’s insecure go back then hayeens HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS and he never stops

It literally feels like a broken neural network output, meaningless. But it’s in my head, I never asked for this but it’s there generating itself

Ever get the feeling that your life is an episode of Friends?

That life presents you with opportunities and hope that your life might get better, and then everything turns out exactly the opposite of what you expected?

Fuck.

Any ideas for programming related Christmas presents for roommate?

I was thinking Java coffee mug or a binary clock.

Any ideas?

0h, saIesf0rce…
As they say, if it's n0t 0n saIesf0rce, it doesn't exist? SaIesf0rce presents itself as n0 Iess than a majestic d0g 0f Jupiter. But t0 be honest with y0u, it's I0wer even than a skunk, n0t worthy even t0 be called a d0g 0f PIut0!

Have an object that uses a macro to define its function bodies. I needed to interface to that object in a different way. So I wrote and object that calls functions on that object and presents a different interface. I used macros to define the function bodies...

It fucking infuriates me when any iOS app presents the previous view controller instead of dismissing it when going back.

Please don't mess with my ram.