And just when you like Linux a little too much, it bites you in the ass to remind you why the year of the Linux desktop never happened.

Wifi printer is installed, CUPS test page works, even scanning works. But printing anything else results in the printer spitting out raw postscript with a few random lines per page.

Great. Looks like I'll have to print to PDF, then go to a copy shop and print because printing under Linux is still an unsolved issue.

And yes, that would have worked even with Windows 10. Fuck.

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

A few weeks ago, I was kept up until the wee hours of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell the Monty Hall problem works. After finally getting it (I'm slow, okay?), I decided to write a program to run simulations of it.

First incarnation of program took user input. User enters what door they choose (1, 2, or 3), then is told what door Monty opens, then given the decision of staying with the door they originally chose or switching, then informed how that worked out for them.

Second incarnation of program ran on a loop. At the start of each loop, a random door is picked for the user guess. Then the door Monty opens is calculated from the remaining doors (excludes user guess and prize door). Then user switches doors (choosing the door that was not their original door or the door Monty opened). At the end of each loop, if the door they switched to was the prize door, it would increment a win counter, else increment a loss counter. After running the loop 1000000000 times, it printed to console `You always switched doors, resulting in ${wins} wins and ${losses} losses`.

THEN I decided to write a variation to run a while loop on the outside of the loop to increase the number of total doors until the point where the decision to switch doors hurt more often than it helped. At this point, I decided to incorporate file I/O and write to a file rather than a console. And that was neat!

And then I decided it would be cool to go back to the three door variation, printing on each loop the original door, the door Monty opened, the door that was switched too, the result of the switch (win or lose) and what the prize door was.

But for the life of me, I couldn't seem to get the file to write properly. It would, like, always crash my terminal. I tried open + append, I tried append. I tried createWriteStream. Still just failure.

And then I changed it to an appendFileSync and happened to look at one of the files that I was writing to. "Huh, over a gig seems a lot."

"Well, how much are you writing each loop? Did you forget to keep in mind how many bytes that would be?"

TLDR: If you're going to write a program that's going to write data to a file on a loop, you might want to figure out how much it's going to end up writing .... before trying to run it. And running a loop 1000000000 times may be a little excessive.

*face palm*

At my previous job I was working with cliets as a support for our application. One client had problem printing invoice so they caled. Was web application so invoice was first converted to PDF then you would print it.
I ask client if they have Abobe Reader installed. Her response was some thing like that: " I don't know what are you saying. Its is like you are talking chines."
I asked for remote access, fix problem.

Still don't know how they managed to use application.

3d printer
I only assembled it from prusa parts but still it was lots of fun, learned a lot about how 3d printers work.

Then it was printing trex using 3d printer and it was funny to because it took me about a month to do so just because of amount of parts and the problem with parts that were broken and needed to be fixed.

From software projects, once I build a browser plugin in 2-3 hours cause I was pissed off with those shitty popups all around. I published it on browser store, made code opensource and forgot about it.

Recently I got some survey from a german university about it and I was like wtf ?
I looked at a statistics and my plugin had about 500 daily users and I was amused because the ui is shitty as fuck and the ux is even more shitty.

I plan to update this plugin but since I am focused on a bigger personal project for almost half a year now I have no time to do it.

I'm at college and I was learning Java. While we were practicing in class, one of my friends was having a problem with his code, it was printing that he needed to use java.lang.String.
Because he only told us after class, we didn't have the teacher to help us, so we tried debug it. After a long time, we realized that he was trying to create the class String...
We still talk about it.