Freefilesyncs installer made my day.

"Siri, is any beer left in the fridge?"

"I don't care, ask your new bit** Alexa! "

> be me, 1AM, in bed
> get rando text, 5 digit number: "are you still awake?"
> "who is this?"
> *hears car roll out of driveway*

mmhmm yep absolutely not shitting my pants rn no

I wish I could type into my brain:"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1337"

To delete everything of my ex gf memories...

She just wrote a message, again...

Ah the classic meeting terrorist....

Us: "These emails are working."

Rando customer on conf call: "No they aren't, I haven't seen any of these emails."

Us: "Is your email on the list?"

Rando customer on conf call: "No."

Yeah fuck you.

The rest of us are paying attention here, can you please shut the fuck up on the meeting.

Another project with legacy code got just dusted off at work. Shits fucked beyond recognition! We got:
- Rando variable names that mean nothing
- Timers running with a cycle time of 2.5ms if you start them with the multiplier 1.
- An Interrupt routine thats 300 lines long.
- Another interrupt thats starting an ADC conversion and waiting for it to complete before returning.
- For loops that start with one and subtract one from the iterator in the loop
- Every value that would normally be expressed as a regular number is written down in Hex. Eg: if(val==0x05)
- State machine built without writing down which state is which. Its just a number. (In hex obviously!)
- All running on a Microcontroller you cant debug on.
- Using a compiler no one has ever heard of before.
- Weird ass Port manipulations
- 15 different .hex and .elf files with no clue whats in them.
- No version control
- We tried explaining the code to a monkey and it hanged itself.

Today I finish a 6-month course called "Webdeveloper". It was meant to be a further education but it felt kinda basic.

HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP, Typo3 with some Typoscript

I still don't feel prepared for job market :/

Today:

Rando Person: Also this doesn't work, and this, and thi----

Me: Wait, what doesn't work and where? Show me...

Rando Person: Here see-

Me: Stop ... see how that says 'beta' and not to use it?... and how did you find this / get access to this?

Rando Person: Yeah the customer is using it.

Me: For fucks sake....

I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

Client: A thing I know abso-fucking-lute-ly nothing about shouldn't take you long to implement.

In my 6 years of professional experience, after receiving hundreds of messages from recruiters, only 3 of them actually read my profile, where I have very detailed instructions on what I need to consider an offer.

Amazing. Best part is when I tell recruiters they haven't read my profile, they get super defensive.

Is it a job requirement to not be able to read?

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

DataDevNerd (ofc down to hardware bits)
Briefly blending amoung holiday tech consumers at Micro Center waiting for key-holder assistance @SSDs.

Rando: "they finally have a sale on *X, rebranded, price++* for my *ref'd only by part names* setup! What are you getting?"

Me: "replacement SSD, laptop's finally failing"

Rando: "Yeah, I totally get you, I hate that. How old is it? Hopefully you got a couple years outta it?"

Me: "over 7yrs old."
Rando: "Wow! Mustve not used it too much, still that's pretty long."

Me: "Actually, it's been my primary device, heavily used, as I'm a dev. I just know what/when to use SSD vs the HDD."

Rando: "Duuude, that's awesome!...wait...why haven't you just bought a new laptop yet?"

Me: "I'm not for hardware abuse or burning money"

I was quickly reminded why I tend to avoid typical consumer tech stores.

Since early 2016 a LinuxDev at my work, pushed me (windows admin) right in the CentOS world. With some practise I had to build a infrastructure to deploy Ubuntu to development clients (laptops with stuff without windows) In perspective I had to migrate this infrastructure to my team (windows admins) and run it there as were this all the time our business. I loved powershell but for some reason I have had to learn Ruby, bash etc.. Now I am the first Admin with some pretty skills in Linux, my workplace comes without any version of Windows. I am flying with Debian, Ubuntu, redhat and CentOS. The finished work from past enabled my team and me to drop fully automated Linux Clients for our developers.

Well last weekend Windows 10 fuc*** up with the creators update and destroyed even my USB3 ports... I didn't even spend lot of my time playing with this machine... So my desk is now running arch.

That day my colleague thought, windows isn't my passion is thanked every week once for directing me in this pretty good world.

Today I am still the first Linux DevOps in my team, but still happy.

Funny article and perfect placement of undefined.

"Always program as if someone who has to work with your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

Control your searches like an ADULT damn it!!!

So we have records that can have any of a bazillion different reference numbers associated with them. No big deal. Everyone does right?

Our customer's love to run reports and so we have this one option for "just look at a hell of a lot of reference numbers". I call it the 'fuck all' search.

Really it is just there to find something that you don't know where a rando string or number might be in the record and just want to do a "fuck all" search across a number of likely fields to find it... and then presumably you'd be an adult and refine your search from there. LOL yeah right...

Customers get lazy and include that stupid option in their reports and we get a lot of.

Customer: "I always run this report (that includes the fuck all search) and now it isn't working. I want records that have ID 2222."

Me: "Yeah well that was only working because you were rando typing '2222' in like several fields and it would find those .... but now you quit doing that so it won't find them. If you want ID 2222, click the drop down and search by 'ID'. That will find it right away."

Customer: "But I want to just search by 'fuck all search' to find it..."

Me: "But then you get all these other records too right?"

Customer: "Yeah but I just delete them out of the spreadsheet ... "

Me: "Look watch this <screen share> there, look all records with an ID of 2222 and no more extra records you need to delete!!! How great is that?"

Customer: "But why do I have to do it this way now, I want to do it the old way..."

ಠ_ಠ

(granted I could add their ID to the fuck all search but we try to avoid adding too much because it gets out of hand / stops being useful the more fuck all it gets)

I MISS TIGERDIRECT! a haiku&rant

Tiger, so direct
Hardware haven, my tech friend
Killed, by poor Insight

I thought I had found ways to cope with it all... became a cert'd refurbisher at enough lesser operations to rebuild some semblance of my hardware connects. I even resorted to newegg to fill small voids... why is it so hard to find a quickly shipping, scriptable, 2 WAN in 6+ channels out, non WiFi noob crap, router... or even an L3 managed switch for <250$ not tied to some bullshit excuse for network management like a "cloud management platform" with some rando 'security' bloat?!?! Not even trying to force the PoE functionality (realistically i know I'll just wire that up myself after procrastinating too long)... i even tried newegg and damn amazon, neither seem to realise that real routers and switches arent interchangeable terms.

I even tried tolerating supporting the murderous, treasonous, obfuscating high prices and insisting you register as your business and let them trap you in the equivalent of a 'free' ski trip, with "short" timeshare presentation.

All bullshit and overpriced af trying to force some bloat down your throat so you "feel" like you're properly managing a network.

Anyone have an ace up their sleeve? For quick delivery (USA) minus bloat, pandering and ass-to-mouth rape???

I even tried stooping to a current Cisco OEM!

I mean, if it was *only* a bit of ass rape, I'm fine with that... but the bloat, pandering and shit-stained lollipop...

I'd rather just disappear from valid business obligations, get somewhat intoxicated, and hyperfocus tear apart my tech graveyards, go ghetto apocalyptic tech macgyver on that shit and emerge days later low on solder, in dire need of a flintstones size whetstone, more arduinos, a tetanus shot and a shower.

Yocto is the most overly complicated shit on earth! How the fuck did i ever get my board to boot? You get so easily lost in layers and bb and bbappend and there are like 20 flavours of assignement operators and to configure the kernel you need to run one command for menuconfig and then another right after to pull a diff out of the .config into your project. otherwise noone else will have your changes. TrY the same thing with the bootloader and the whole thing shits its pants. Also there are like four devicetree that are required for boot. And if you specially fuck up here, your hardware will be an expensive paperweight. Also there are like featuresets that enable shizz like wayland or ethernet but good luck finding out what in the actual genderbent jesus the thing you just configured does. And there is like no way to visualize any of it as its just a cockblock of text and files. Also if you use search the results are most likely useless. As the thing you are looking for is a filename and vscode does a text search only. Also you can add layers but whatever the fuck that means as a bsp is like a layer but so can also be a kernel patch or some rando variable change. And good luck fugurig out to which dir $PWD points to. As it could just be on the Elon Musk nazi base on the dark side of the moon. Also every folder starts with meta for some dumb reason. And if it starts compiling you could just aswell build a coffin and go into winter hibernation. It takes fucking forever. I have a 3800x and the build takes 1.5h. Why? Because, BECAUSE, B E C A USE! There is a require package called optee. Which need a python package. That package depends on a crypto lib thats written in rust. And since its all from source, it downloads the FUCKING rust compiler source and compiles the compiler to compile a lib that only takes like 5 seconds to compile. Also good luck figuring that out without constantly staring at the compile log. As there is some compilation time info but you need to write a parser for that first as there is no included anal -lyzing tool for it. I could keep on yappin' waaay longer about why dantes inferno is kindergarten compared to yocto, but i dont have enough alcohol in the house to fuel that.

"Can you do the job without this colleague?"

"No! It is system-relevant."

"why?!"

"cause, he is cooking coffee..."

I've adopted this per task desktop management think. Anyone else do this?

I make a new desktop, for a given task, support ticket, or whatever. And when I'm 'done'. I keep everything (ticket, whatever I was working on in vs code, related emails) open but minimize it all except the pull request waiting to happen.

If I get some feedback on the PR / changes I just fly through my virtual desktops and there it is and I'm ready to work.

Then after the PR goes through ... I keep it open for a bit anyway to be sure nothing bad happens.

Then after a while I shut it all down assuming that it is working well.

All this so I don't have to fire everything up again for a rando request or dork up or whatever.

I don't know if I have very high expectations, but joining a company as a Tech Lead and seeing that none of the 100 programmers in the team know the difference between unit and integration tests is kind of a letdown.

This nonsense gave me an idea. Now I want to start building a big, organised, db for good bad examples. I can think of so many uses for it if everything is tagged/categorised well.

Thank you rando LinkedIn reject, you gave me the best birthday gift I could hope for... another potential branch of my data architecture to play with new data in new and to be discovered ways!

The site of the rando is athensnexus.com

SQL is amazing.

I'll toss out some bassakwards query and the optimizer will make sense of it and suddenly I'm searching a amazonillian records in no time.

Then rando one day (today) I fire up what I think is really not the most wonky query I've ever written and ... "Well shit this is surprisingly slow."

So then I go full n00b and add some fields to the query that I know would limit the number of possible records to way low thinking that might help and ... nope no faster...

Guess it's time to bust open some books about SQL....

Does anyone have a handy macro sort of quick automation windows desktop tool they use / like?

Scenario: I fix a rando thing on a rando web app. Now I need to go through 4 clicks in a browser and enter some text to make the thing happen and see the result....I'd rather not do that 8 times as I iterate / try stuff.

I've been playing with some more automated testing stuff but I'm not there yet and the granularity of those tends not to be in the area of "make quick task and watch it happen" kinda thing.