I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:

I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

I wrote an answer, in my exam, about the precedence of operators.

Took a random example: "3+4*6", and explained that "*" has higher precedence, so "4*6" would be executed first and so on.

Long story short, this was the last line in my answer:

"The answer is 27, not 42."

Gahaa!!! Finally back home, after 7 fucking hours of sitting in busses and trains!

BUT I GOT MY NEXUS 6P!! Yoo-hoo!!! :D

And I've got a nice story about it.

So when I bought it, the guy selling it to me was a nontechnical type (I think?) whose wife was the previous owner. So I thought to myself, cool a nontechnical user used it.. probably no hardware mods or anything to worry about. Apparently they even factory reset it for me :)

Now, when I left to go back home, I of course immediately booted up the thing and did the whole doodad of logging into it, setting up the device etc.

Then it struck me. When I booted up the device and wanted to log in, there was a lock from Google that required me to first authenticate as either a previous account of the device, or their unlock pattern. So I figured, eh fuck it, I'll just flash some AOSP without GApps or send the owner an email asking what the previous pattern is.

But I still had to wait 30 minutes at the bus stop so I thought to myself.. previous owner was a nontechnical woman.. maybe I could crack it. No way to know if I don't try. So I started putting in random unlock patterns.

3 attempts later - I shit you not! - pattern accepted.
Do you want to add this account?

Oh boy Google, of course I do! Thanks for letting me in pal!

3 fucking attempts. That's all it took to crack the unlock pattern of an unknown person. 😎

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

Coding won over my first girlfriend!

My senior year of high school I taught myself C++ and thought it was the coolest thing (lol). So I wrote a stupidly simple program that would ask your name and output a random riddle. But if the name was hers it was a riddle in which case the answer was "a date". Looking back, even if she was on my robotics team it was the nerdiest thing.

We dated for 8 months and broke up as friends. But to this day it provides a great story as I pursue software development.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

Very funny/random/weird partly non-dev related story that happened today.

We're selling our coffee machine at work since the coffee is gross.

Someone wants to buy it and wants it to be sent.

Coworker: just the general way through a package?
Other coworker: hmm yeah through post is fine
Me: POSTAL PIDGIN
other colleague: BY PENGUIN
Another colleague: BY LIKE 100 PENGUINS FLYING THAT THING THROUGH THE AIR WITH LIKE WIRES ATTACHED TO IT
Me: just hold on for a second and imagine this graphically...
Colleagues: damn that would be fucking genius xD

Yeah we're quite random 😆

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

(sorry if someone's already shared this)
Very true though. I remember very clearly when I was around 10 years old, wondering what all these random symbols on a keyboard were for and what type of person would use them.

I guess I'm that type of person; never would have guessed at the time that my fascination with technology would lead to where I am now.

Anyone here have a cool story to share about why they decided to become a developer?

Someone played a random game that I'd made. He was really impressed by the story (mostly dialogs). And he asked me:
Him: "Did you pay much?"
Me: "What???"
Him: "Well, I'm sure you had to pull some strings to get that dialog"
I laughed hysterically.

This is how I found about devrant

Yesterday night while I was coding,
suddenly something hit me hard in my mind and that was

" You have your semester exams from next Friday"

and guess what, I haven't even touched my books the whole semester.
I began to stress, started to overthink, the mind went completely blank...

This morning when I woke up, found myself in my bed. I don't even remember what happened, how I got in my bed but one thing was same
I was still stressing about my semester exams

I sat in front of my laptop and opened Firefox > google.com > and this is what is typed and searched :
"Programming sucks "

Going through different search results and forums, sites I landed here ...

This is how I ended up here in devrant

Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

Can we, please, put some substance into our rants? Over the course of the last weeks the amount of rants of the type "%NAME% %SWEARWORDS%" has increased tremendously. You want tell everyone that (for example) Windows can go fuck itself? Great. But why? What is the story behind you're enragement?

Please make this place more fun to browse by sharing stories. Not just a random amount of names and swearwords.

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

Today I met a random guy who contacted me through Facebook to teach him some C++.

He wanted to create a small anomalies detection system on x-ray images with OpenCV (for industry purposes).

The guy came from Nigeria, where he studied medicine, but here has to work on two completely unrelated minijobs to survive.

And he still finds energy to keep learning new crazy stuff like C++ (he definitely chose the hard path to learn some programming).

And that's it, there's no moral for this fable, just a short story. Learn whatever you want from it.

I just love refactoring :) that feeling when an agonic 50loc method with ifs, loops, streams, other shit shrinks down to 3 lines with descriptive and SRP-compliant method calls.. When you can actually read code as a nicely written story. When there are no rubbish comments, cryptic variables and no overly complex if-else skyscrapers jamming all the logic in one conditional chain. When all the abstractions are designed so nicely and design patterns applied so perfectly that extending either of the components is as easy as a walk in a park.

When everything is nice and neat. Only then can I sleep well and enjoy the autumn :)

just some random thoughts after today's coding session :)

Can't tell what my most successful project is...
But according to GitHub Stars, my
most successful project is my RandomQuote Bot (@RandomQuote).
The story behind it is pretty boring:

One day little Skayo thought: "Hey there is no bot on DevRant yet, let's make one!".
Then he began to think: "But what should it do? What would be easy to do for an inexperienced programmer like me?".
Suddenly he got an idea: A Bot that posts a random quote everyday!
Yay!
He instantly started making it.
About a day later, it was finished.
"Let's bring this thing to live", he thought.
And there he was, quickly getting a lot of fucking ++'s...
This bot is like my first born child! I am so proud of him!

And that's the story behind the bot.
Very spectacular, isn't it?

Two days ago I went to change an Nvidia driver on my Linux mint partition and it ended up breaking everything, all my fault because I'm so new to Linux, anyways to dig that hole deeper I looked for ways to fix it, found some random command that managed to destroy mint even more lol. I had no start menu and cinnamon kept going into recovery mode.

But the next day after spending time working through what to do I managed to fix it, I basically downloaded mintmenu again and uninstalled the graphics driver

All in all I think I've come closer to learning how fun Linux is, it was fun fixing what I broke rather than actually clean installing mint again.

Morale of the story: don't randomly use commands found on the net that has 3 upvotes lol

Sometimes i'm reading a rant and thinking this could be my colleague two desks further.

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

2nd day in new job. Random HR training blabbing about something (thanks God all remote so I just did things around house). Blabbing about diversity and other corporate brainwashing. Then she proceeds to say that if someone is introvert and doesn't like to interact with people then such person should look for work in some other company (wtf x1). Next in line her real life story how she yelled at her subordinates (wtf x2 who admits to mobbing xd ) but that's ok because she is choleric and people have to understand that different character types make their team better xD
I have a bad feelings about where this is going...

!rant

I promoted duckduckgo to friends on Facebook and got them in a discussion about it. People generally are fairly receptive (with one annoying uncle pointing out the irony of posting it on Facebook xD).

One mentioned it was difficult to switch because Google was "just there", so I pointed to instructions on how to make it default.

Also enticing them with theme changes.

Feels good. Next to teach them how to use proxies :p

meta rant: I categorised this as a rant/story, mainly because it is related to tech, should I have just done "random"?

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

What is your story of your first encounter with a Linux Distro?

Here's mine (Slight long version) –
Back in my 8th grade I used to buy Tech magazines that used to have DVDs filled with random updated contents like Audio/Video tools, Wallpapers and other stuff. There used to be this "Linux Distro of the Month" section that I used to ignore because I didn't know what it is.
But one issue of the magazine had a review of this "amazing new" Ubuntu 10.10. I read it and at first I thought it's some kind of theme for Windows (I know). But then I tried it out on my HP Compaq nx6120 which had a pure BIOS. No UEFI shit. Ubuntu came with it's wubi installer and it installed Ubuntu smoothly like a normal software. Later I discovered that it is a completely different operating system that doesn't run anything from my Windows. I was upset about it and I booted back to Windows.
But I never removed it. I felt like exploring what it was and why people use it.
It's almost 9 years later and I'm so glad with what had happened back then.

Three word story:

I saw the infinity rant @linuxer4fun created and got inspired--it's about time we write one of those somewhat nasty, utterly random, amazingly sophisticated three word stories (spanning unto eternity!)

This means I start by writing three words, somebody else responds to that with three words, keeping within the context of the previous one, with the ultimate goal of writing an epic tale together (of dragons and stuff!)

You're not allowed to write a comment if the previous comment is yours:

if (comment.previous ().owner == you)
return false;

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

So I finished my first semester in NYU as a CD master. During the first semester I took a class called heuristic problem solving. Every week a competitive game will be introduced to us, and will be played in two weeks. And trust me, the games aren't easy. I teamed up with another guy who I had no idea was and named our team as we don't know. At the end of the semester we won seven out of nine games, and by won I meant that we beat the whole class in the match. And my teammate became a really good friend.

By telling this story, I want to make a point. I love problem solving, and not problems in a algorithm book where you apply an algorithm and do some trick to solve it, but real world problem where you hope for the best and anticipate, predict your opponent's move. However, American's school system doesn't teach that.

When I applied to graduate school, no school wanted me because I have an average GPA of 3.6, and no outstanding achievements. I can solve problems in my dream becaus I have an active mind, I can propose solution to a project one month before my teammates realized they essentially were doing what I told them the solution should be. But so what, I can't write those on my application.

One of the professor told me that my professor shared the story of my team during a faculty dinner, and they were very impressed by our achievement. So I guess I'm not dumb. But after all, companies and schools will look at your transcript and decide who you are.

I love myself for having random thoughts all the time that can lead to innovative problem solving. But I also hate myself for not able to study like the good kids are.

Why tho.

I feel the whole universe is a programmed game and someone is playing us. Like when we're playing GTA.

Few of us are the main characters and the rest of us are just random objects to populate the earth, we don't have any rule in the story. :(

Birth is the Constructor()
Death is the Finalizer()

2 Things:. Never symlink the root directory and don't try to remove a symlink with rm -rf

Nearly shit my pants today.

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

Story Time.

I was hanging around at a friend's place when she informed me that her roommate is throwing a really lavish party 50kms away from the city. I got invited by said roommate and I agreed to go.

When we arrived at the venue, there were like 100+ people at this place, all smoking weed drinking and dancing in loud music. I was also stoned at that point.

So at one point, my friend abandoned me and I found myself talking to 10 complete strangers. I realized that I was on my own and thought about seeing how much rizz I got.

Mind you that everyone was drunk and there was loud music everywhere so there was no way anyone else knew that I was getting shot down lol.

After couple rejections, I straight up went to a girl and said "You want to smoke weed and make out in the bathroom?" And to my surprise, she said yes. So, we both already high and drunk slipped into the bathroom and made out for like 10 mins and I smoked all my weed with her.

Then, at some other point, my friend showed up and we went home. The one thing I missed, was asking for her number, which I kicked myself later for. I guess stoners don't realize they have phones.

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

A story about RAM and being... well... not so clever...

I've built a mid-range gaming PC for a friend, based on skylake, with 8GB DDR4 RAM. So I filled up only 2 slots to leave 2 more for upgrade. So he decided to do so.
Later he calls me and says "Hey, can you visit me? My PC won't boot".
So I came and he told me what happened: he found a random RAM stick and decited to put it in. He somehow(wait for it) managed to do it and PC refused to boot. He removed this stick, but PC won't boot anyway.
Soo, when I came, he showed me a stick he found: a random ddr2-533mhz 512 mb stick. Ofc, MB was shocked to see "grandfather" and refused to boot. I looked at the post code, which said ram error, cleared the cmos and it booted just fine.

Check compatability, young builders, and use Google if you're unsure :)

Random story, I was working on a project a few years ago that had a very tight deadline and a lot of code to write. I had been working late in the office most evenings but one night myself and a colleague had stayed later than usual as we got carried away with supporting peripherals​ in the epos.
The cleaner came in on evenings and we had seen her that night, but had not heard anything for a while so when it came time to leave we figured we best lockup the 2 offices.

After making a quick pass through the building we couldn't see her so proceeded to lock up. Fortunately before setting the alarm we spotted her motorbike in the adjacent car park and decided to have another look.

I'm not quite sure why I decided to look in the tiny supply room/closet but fortunately I did as I found the cleaner standing in this tiny room​playing games on her phone 😂

(short story)

happened a couple of months ago. I was drawing some diagrams on the board -- planning new infra for the app. While explaining all this to the analyst I needed some random number. It was smth like 1470285206. Half an hour later I need another random number. And I again come up with the same exact sequence....

It was both funny and spooky at the same time. Apparently my biological RNG is utterly broken.. Either that or my subconsciousness wants to tell me something about an early morning of 2016 Aug 4.

“You will never be good enough.”
I say to the scented wax warmer as I leave the bathroom.

I was using the app Jobr to apply for random positions. It’s like tinder — only you swipe to send your resume.

A week or so later I got an email from a company locally that wanted to set up an interview. I honestly thought it was a scam! I didn’t even remember applying for the job.

Long story short, they’re mostly desktop developers, and I’m the first front end web guy. I was initially hired to help with UI stuff but on the last project I was developing Service Workers. So I guess I just get invested and give my fullest.

Now myself and one of the other programmers are working on the 3rd gen of our software, built with Vue.js and rest APIs.

Impossible deadline experience?
A few, but this one is more recent (and not mine, yet)

Company has plans to build a x hundred thousand square feet facility (x = 300, 500, 800 depending on the day and the VP telling the story)

1. Land is purchased, but no infrastructure exists (its in a somewhat rural area, no water or sewage capable of supporting such a large facility)
2. No direct architectural plans (just a few random ideas about layout, floor plans, parking etc)
3. Already having software dev meetings in attempt to 'fix' all the current logistical software issues we have in the current warehouse and not knowing any of the details of the new facility.

One morning in our stand-up, the mgr says

Mgr: "Plans for the new warehouse are moving along. We hope to be in the new building by September."
Me: "September of 2022?"
<very puzzled look>
Mgr: "Um, no. Next year, 2021"
Me: "That's not going to happen."
Mgr: "I was just in a meeting with VP-Jack yesterday. He said everything is on schedule."
Me: "On schedule for what?"
<I lay out some of the known roadblocks from above, and new ones like the political mess we will very likely get into when the local zoning big shots get involved>
Mgr: "Oh, yea, those could be problems."
Me: "Swiiiiishhhhh"
Mgr: "What's that?"
Me: "That's the sound of a September 2021 date flying by."
Mgr: "Funny. Guess what? We've been tasked with designing the security system. Overhead RFID readers, tracking, badge scans, etc. Normally Dan's team takes care of facility security, but they are going to be busy for a few weeks for an audit. Better start reaching out to RFID vendors for quotes. Have a proposal ready in a couple of weeks."
Me: "Sure, why not."

! random story

Today i was cleaning my laptop and on right side of it i suddenly touched a button... !!!

!!!!SURPRISE !!!!

DVD player popped out.. and it's dusty as hell.. I was like what ?? How long this has been in laptop.. It's weird.. I never used it.. Why the heck we need it.. I didn't saw anybody holding dvd disc nowadays .. Man nobody uses those shit's anymore.. we have pen drives and External HDD's now. Why the heck manufacture's still keep these dvd player in Laptop's..

But it brought my childhood memories back though.. !!

What fascinates me the most about the industry we work in, is the disruptive and transformative nature of ideas the come out every day.

The technology we use augmented with the software we build have the capability to disrupt and shift the existing paradigm of absolutely any industry today. The solution we construct changes the way in which an industry functions, and brings the horizon closer while making the ocean wider.

So does our capability to design and transform the existing landscape with the ability to visualise the many dimensions of a problem that are otherwise overlooked by others.

I had one of the best feelings today when 3 extremely prolific doctors in the Indian opthalmological industry told me how the solution i built could change the way in which they have been working for almost 20 years ... For the best ...

It's just such a great feeling to know every line of code we write , execute and debug would one day disrupt and transform an otherwise traditional landscape.

So hooray to us and the things we invent, because at the end of the day a PC to code and internet for the outreach ( and stackoverflow ofcourse. 😅 ) Is all that's needed to bring about a metamorphosis of conventional thoughts and theories.

rant = Rant.STORY_TIME

<<<Story
This is still something funny me and my friends often remember.

There was once upon a time we were young and stupid, playing on the internet with fake credit card numbers, sometimes we had luck and the orders passed.

We were on the living room, checking who could put an order for a coffee machine, while another friend of mine was talking about the deep web and what he found there.

Suddenly, someone knocks really hard on the door... We went silent...
Me: "Who's there?"
Voice: Federal Police, open up!

Me: *shiiiit*

I went blank, close my laptop as fast as possible, I thought of throwing it away through the window. My friends panicked, I had my laptop upside down, opening the lid to remove the HDD.

One of my friends stood up and went to the door, looked through the eyehole.

Friend: *whispering* The eyehole's covered!

We quickly stood up and looked at each other, like we were acknowledging our wrong doing and getting ready to face the consequences.

I took a deep breath and put the key in the door to open it. Sudden heavy knock again. I jumped and yelled "I'm on it, wait a minute!".

Slowly I opened the door... And there they were, another two of my friends.

F1: hey...what, what happened? Why are you so scared.

They stepped in while we told them what we were doing and they laughed their asses off.

We were shit scared, and those two were laughing.
Story;

So, nowadays, I don't even think about doing that kind of stuff again and I'm hoping to make a Master's degree in security...or electronics, whatever happens first.

GIRLS PRANK
Omg I changed her lipstick with one of a slightly different color I'm so random she'll go CrAaAaAzY

BOYS PRANK
Use Tampermonkey to transform your colleague's pc into a chinese botnet and redirect him to some PCC website on every click forever

Yeah long story short that's how my previous firm blocked access to domains hosted by the Chinese government.

I hate apples. I buy them at the grocery store. They taste bland, they don't have any smell and by eating them I don't get any positive emotions.

Well, at least this is the conclusion in my head every autumn after a year of eating store bought apples.

Then the end of autumn comes/winter begins and I visit my grandparents, who live in a village. I get a bag of apples (15-20 kgs) and this bag smells wonderful. Heck, the car smells wonderful for a few days after transporting the bag back home.

My grandparents give around 7-8 varieties of apple, mixed. Each and every one of them tastes amazing, even if I have to cut some spots out from a few. They don't always look perfect, but I think these are the noble ones and the store bought would be the peasants.

I know, it's kind of obvious, that the homegrown fruits are better, but it still amazes my tastebuds every year, plus I'm really grateful for having my grandparents.

Background story:
One of the projects I develop generates advice based on energy usage and a questionare with 300 questions.

Over 400 different variables determine what kind of advice is given. Lots of userinput and over a thousand textblocks that need to show or not.

Rant:
WTF do you want me to do when you tell me. It's not giving the right advice for the lights.

Why the for the love of.. do I need to ask you everytime. If something is not working. Tell me what and for wich user. Don't tell me calculation whatever is not working, I don't know that calculation. Your calculations are maintainable in your cms.

And how, like I really wonder, do you expect me, when not telling me what user is having this problemen to find and fix it, You just want me to random guess one of the thousands users that should be given that specific advice?

FCK, like 80% of my time solving problems is spend trying to figure out wtf your talking about.

And then what a miricale the function is doing exactly what is it doing but you forgot a variable. It's not like the code I write suddenly decides it does not feel like giving the right answer.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

!rant !dev Still funny office story

This happened last november. I decorated my desk for halloween (plastic bats, vampire stickers, more bats, a plastic raven, a little skeleton, etc). I also put a photo of Chris Pohl (vocalist from Blutengel, a electro-goth band).

I decided to remove all the decorations except for the raven and the Chris Pohl‘s photo.

One day, a partner and I were cheking out the code, and she suddenly saw that photo.

She: Oh, who is he? is he your boss?
Me: What?
S: Yes, is he your direct boss?
M: No, you‘re my boss
S: No, no, is he the vampire who you report your activities with?
M: Oh! XD No, it‘s Chris Pohl, Blutengel‘s vocalist
S: Mmm... he‘s pretty weird... his eyes...
and then, she got back to her desk.

That‘s it, continue reading rant stories 😅

P.D. What‘s the weirdest thing you have on your desk? 🤔

A couple times a week my girlfriend tells me that she leaves work. She travels with a motorised vehicle for about 45 minutes. I am responsible of cooking food on those days. The food preparation takes around 7 minutes of cutting vegetables and the cooking takes around 20 minutes. the current time of reading the message is 17:17. She had send the message at 17:08. At what time should I start making food in order to be finished at the time she gets home?

I start to relate more and more to school math questions...

Maybe I should make an app for this or website to calculate automatically.

ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev

code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev

- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups

1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.

2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.

d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3

day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.

day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?

🥲🫡

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

It's the best thing ever where watching one tutorial doesn't work. So you go to another. Then you see a suggested video that's unrelated to your current task, but it's a short video. So you quickly watch it.

Boom. Next thing you know, it's fucking 45 minutes later and you just watched some random ass dude's entire fucking life story in his vlogs.

Fuck my life an Adderall would be fantastic right now.

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

I already wrote this story in the comments to some other rant, still it's pretty funny.

So, i was modding my wii u by messing with system files, the only way to do this is to run an homebrew that hosts an ftp server so you can connect with your pc, the thing is, this server was not protected and allowed anonymous login, not an issue if you have a firewall.
BUT i had this console in the DMZ on the router for online play.
~You can see where this is going~
While doing stuff from my pc i started seeing a lot of entries on the console's log and i didn't understand why, i thought filezilla was doing some shit so i closed it but the log was still going, then i realized and quickly shut the server down.
Then i disabled the DMZ and went back to check what happened (unfortunately the log was only shown on screen and not saved, by closing the server i lost it) so looks like the attacker uploaded a lot of files with random names in pretty much every folder.
Due to the random names, I don't know which are system files and which attacker's files so i just kept them there. And today they should still be there.

--Random thinking--
What if the attacker also stole some files, he was hoping to get photos or valuable documents, but just got the console's system files and he thought something along the lines of "wtf is even this".
Also, how likely is that an ip scanner script gets to my ip in the 5 minutes i run the server, and (on the attacker side) how likely is to hack a server just to find out that's a wii u (the least successful console in the last generation)...

Moral of the story: double check your firewall if you are going to run an unprotected server.
That's it, stay safe :P

Funny story...
Got a small college assignment based on Java and Cassandra(database). The database shell was running fine. Spent 5 days removing the random java exceptions and working on the basic connectivity, searched everywhere on Stack overflow and other forums for solutions and still no help.
So, I decided to write a program that would print only the output as I knew what would be the output when it will run. Took a screenshot of it and made up a cover story to tell my professor that I did it on a friend's computer.
But while I was taking a screenshot of the Eclipse with code window and output window, some random syntax errors popped up.(but they weren't syntax error).
So I created a new project and copied the pom.xml file and the code into the new one(I tried this one before and it didn't work). And there were no errors. So I took a screenshot of it with output of different file and opened a different file.

But then, don't know what came across my mind and I clicked on run just to see if this works, and it worked fine. And now I'm like.. WTF JUST HAPPENED!!

## building my own router

I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.

What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.

I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??

And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.

Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.

Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?

iw list

My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!

Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.

BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?

In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.

This is another high school story. mostly because i’m in high school.

like most schools we have horrible forced passwords. Our school recently purchased microsoft 365. which means we all use outlook for our emails. the logins for our district follow the sand format.

s + first five of last name (x’s for missing letters) + first letter of your first name + the last three of your student id.

so for example Sean Peterson 456705 would be speters705. since we have outlook we can look up a persons name and get their email which gives you the last three of their password. All passwords start with a 4 and most are followed by a five so you pretty much can get 5 out of the 6 numbers in their password.

so to mess with my friends i signed into all of their accounts and messed with their emails so they thought they were getting random emails. and then i made word documents on all of their accounts and just pretty much messed with all of their school stuff.

so that’s my “hacking” story. my district doesn’t allow you to change your password so i’m pretty much stuck. pls help.

I was hired in a company for the title of Front-end Developer. I am qualified as because I have skills and experience with regards to doing front-end stuff. But it turns out that the work will be Full Stack. The employer was reasoning out that after your done with front-end task, I must do backend stuff as well so I would not be idle on may day's shift.

Is it my fault if I already done with my respective task and just mingle with random task of backend stuff that is not my real skills or forte?

I can understand and know PHP & MySQL, but I am not guaranteed to finish the task quickly compared to my backend counterpart in doing their task.

To cut the story short, they terminated my contract and claim that I am not performing well with my duties and responsibility, though most of the Front-end stuff I was assigned were already done and deployed.

There's no justice in this typical world of start-ups and noobie HR people that always one sided and they always say that it's their policy and they cannot do anything with regards to the incident happened to me.

is soo cool when people is up to joke around with my bad jokes.

-- Talking with a coworker about a new button in a results table --

dude: hey jhon, I'll name the button 'SHOW RESULTS' and the endpoint will be named that too. cuz there is a 'SHOW STATS' already

me: dunno, use something more meaningful, this is about unparsed results, right? so what about...

me: unparsed results ? unparsed stats ?

me: another one bites the dust? show must go on?

me: innuendo?

me: pick one 8D . But I think innuendo is pretty descriptive

dude: ok

me: seriously, 'show unparsed stats'

dude: got it

-- then the dude sends me the screenshot --

me: LOL, 8D

me: you got my respect man (_ _)

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

lord knows I have missed devrant. my dad dragged me away on business. the hardest part was parting with my PC. I felt it.........

we buy cashew nuts and have them exported for this random Chinese lady. tried discussing about computers to the village boys but none of them understand anything. everyone is surprised I have a whole computer to myself at home, most have never seen any and just nod their heads like they understand 😂😂😂.
my dad wants me to be a produce exporter I keep hearing things like "there's a lot of money here, if you want to start on your own I'll support you". but then it's hard for him to drop a penny so I can buy a proper PC that is used(I just needed something efficient). I kinda feel like this struggle will make my success story much more interesting but then, what if I dont succeed?

Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.

A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.

In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.

These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.

The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.

Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.

When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.

After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.

This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it.

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

Continuation from last rant
Yay I got my first internship as a software-engineer!
Now the story how I got it.
For my bachelor’s degree I need to get a internship, after searching companies in and around my area I found a company that focusses on app development. I’ve got some experience in that, And really enjoyed it. Well I figured why not apply there right. After not hearing anything about it for a week I gave up hope until I got called by an unknown caller.
They saw my e-mail and wanted to talk with me. So Super excited we made an appointment for today. Not knowing what to expect I came there about 10 minutes early searching for a receptionist or something. But they didn’t have one… then I just asked a random employee. He offered me a coffee and I waited a while. Until one of the senior developers brought me to the big boss of the company and the interview begun.

First they asked my about myself and what I do besides my study, once they had a good idea who I am they explained a bit about their products and how they developed them. Then the scary part started… They wanted to see my skills, And I hadn’t done anything with apps in a year. I showed them some code I wrote a year ago hoping it wasn’t as bad as I thought. So while feeling super uneasy about that they asked me on what skill level I thought I was. I told them I’d manage myself after a summer focusing on app development and they accepted me as a future intern.
Next week I get shown around the code base. And I start after the summer break.
Updates come when something interesting happens :D

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.

In my country there is a huge economy deflation.
Like 1 year ago 1USD used to be 1500 pounds.
Nowadays 1USD is more like 7800 pounds.

Wait a second let me explain more into details the whole flow.

There are 3 to 4 prices we are being dealing with:
* Official Bank price that refuse to change the base price: 1500 pounds
* Bank ATM machines that exchange your dollars on a 3900 pounds per usd
* Black market: 7800 pounds managed by random mobile apps that spread rumors
* Foreigners currency: the only way to grab your reach dollars.

Long story short:
Whenever you want to win extra cash, you ask any of your relatives to lend you money from any bank in the world ( foreigners currency), try to ask in black market who is willing to exchange, you meet, you check on any mobile app what's the current price and you do the exchange.

So in order buy USD dollars on a low price, devs build 2 mobile apps one that send a POST request to change the amount in DB and a second one fo retrieve this value.
So whenever he want to buy dollars he change the value to the lowest. And whenever you want to sell the dev raise the amount slowly. So far the government has no regulations over developers why? Because the one behind the forensic are at least 60 to 70 years old more like their informations are dead.

So we struggle.

This is something that I hadn't done or that directly impacted me, but that had an effect in my life several years after it happened.
It's one of those stories that you think "this only happens to others", and then someday you're the "others".

So when I was born, I was, naturally, registered on the health care system. My parents chose an uncommon name for me (uncommon in my country) so I think I wasn't registered by the time of my birth, but 4 months later when all the bureaucratic crap came to an end (long story short, the guy that was there when it started died and my parents had to wait 4 months for another person to be appointed). So, when my parents finally went to register me, apparently, for some reason, the computer took my name and assumed it was a male name. As I've said, my name is uncommon in my country, there're probably 3 or 4 people with the same name here in Portugal.
Why did the computer assume it was a male name AND why didn't nobody check that? Since my parents had to ask to government entities to let them name me that name, I'm assuming it wasn't in their db. So why did it assume male? Was it purposely programmed that, by default, all "newly-registered" names were to be male? Was it random? Who the hell knows.
And how did nobody check that, every time I went to take vaccines? I don't think anyone told my mom that everytime we went there that the data was wrong, otherwise the situation wouldn't have lasted for 14 years.
We only knew about that mishap when it was time I had to take vaccines specifically for women and that I wasn't being noticed of it even though a friend 1y younger than me had already taken hers.

I find this story amusing but now that I started thinking about how it came to life (no pun intended) I'm actually a bit pissed off about how they didn't think of uncommon names and that how that could affect their registry in the system. They could have - IDK - placed "undefined" in that field so that it would caught the register's attention.
Moral of the story: don't assume stuff :v

How do you approach generating "random" unique numbers/strings ? Exactly, when you have to be sure the generated stuff is unique overtime? Eg. as few collisions in future as possible.

Now I don't mean UUIDs but when there is a functionality that needs some length defined, symbol specific and definitely unique data, every time it does it's stuff.

TLDR STORY: Generating 8 digits long numbers so they are (deterministically - wink wink) unique is hard but Format Preserving Encryption saves the day. (for me)

FULL STORY:
I had to deal with both strings and codes today.
One was to generate shortlink word for url, luckily found a library that does exactly this. (Hashids)
BUT generating 8 digits long, somewhat random number was harder then I thought, found out on SO something like "sha256(seed) => bytes => ascii/numbers mangling" but that had a lot of collisions because of how the hash got mangled to actually output numbers and also to fit the length.
After some hours I stumbled upon Format Preserving encryption (pyffx) and man it did what I wanted and it had max 2 collisions in 100k values. Still the solution with this feels hacky af. (encrypting straddled unix timestamp with lots of decimals)

This is the story of probably the least secure CMS ever, at least for the size of it's consumer base. I ran into this many years ago, before I knew anything about how websites work, and the CMS doesn't exist anymore, so I can't really investigate why everything behaved so strangely, but it was strange.

This CMS was a kind of blog platform, except only specially authorised users could view it. It also included hosting. I was helping my friend set it up, and it basically involved sending everybody who was authorized a email with a link to create an account.

The first thing my friend got complaints about was the strange password system. The website had two password boxes, with a limit of (I think) 5 characters each. So when creating a account we recomended people simply insert the first 5 characters in the first box, and the rest in the second. I can not really think of a good explanation for this system, except maybe a shitty way to make sure password are at least 5 characters? Anyway, since this website was insecure the password was emailed to you after the account was created. This is not yet the WTF part.

The CMS forced sidebar with navigation, it also showed the currently logged in users. Except for being unreadable due to a colorful background image, there where many strange behaviors. The sidebar would generally stay even when navigating to external websites. Some internal links would open a second identical sidebar right next to the third. Now, I think that the issue was the main content was in an iframe with the sidebar outside it, but I didn't know about iframe's back then.

So far, we had mostly tested on my friends computer, which was logged in as the blog administrator. At some point, we tried testing with a different account. However, the behavior of sidebars was even stranger now. Now internal links that had previously opened a second, identical sidebar opened a sidebar slightly different from the first: One where the administrator was logged in.

We expirimented somewhat, and found that by clicking links in the second sidebar, we could, with only the login of a random user, change and edit all the settings of the site. Further investigation revealed these urls had a ending like ?user=administrator2J8KZV98YT where administrator was the my friends username. We weren't sure of the exact meaning of the random digits at the end, maybe a hash of the password?

Despite my advice, my friend decided to keep using this CMS. There was also a proper way to do internal links instead of copying the address bar, and he put a warning up not to copy links to on the homepage. Only when the CMS shut down did he finally switch to a system where formatting a link wrong could give anybody admin access.

(Random, but probably can be rant/story)

Me: *responds nothing*
The AI: "I think you're probably right. :("
...
Me: "Bruh"
The AI: "I know, I know. I just want to know."

(Yes, it does type the sad face)

I love devRant, show new prespective and many related story around me and my job.

For me devRant is like medicine, help me smile and make my good mood sometime.

But, also like medicine I only open the app on spare time or when I need it.

I just curious why so many people so addicted to this, also I see some user maybe like 90% exist and continously comment on every rant that I open.

Maybe our reference/priority is different, I prefer playing game mostly.

Well that what I think, just random spawning before go to sleep mode.

Yesterday I started working as a web developer as a holiday job once again. Glad to be back!

Story about someone elses rant
A = coworker;
B = random guy from company, but from another office;
C = manager we like a lot, cause he has IT background;

A asked B about a problem, because B worked with the that thing. B answered I dont know. So A asked C, and told him, im asking you, because B said, he dont know. C went nuts and pulled a shitstorm on B, like who WTF do you think you are, that you cant give at least a hint to A on the problem or Cc someone who may know more about the problem.

what i wanna say is, shouldnt it be common sence if someone asks me about a problem i navigate him to a person, who knows more than me? Even if its the first day i the office, I know this is my team leader he should see the bigger picture of the problem, so ask him. But telling idk is like, go fuck your self.

I never thought that my usual lunch buddies/co-interns leaving would cause me to have a hard time coping up. I'm very unproductive these past three days. I feel so sad.

I have this database systems professor who cannot for the life of her teach this class. She goes on random tangents about anything and everything. She asks weird trick questions and gets mad when we don't get them right. She is just very unorganized in general. Her lectures just feel like one long run on sentence. So I guess to make a long story short, anybody have any good resources when it comes to learning about databases?

I had a group project due for a object oriented programming class. I noticed my partner hadn't made any commits to our git so I asked if he had anything made. Turns out he was partying all weekend and didnt commit anything until the last day. We failed that project... At least I passed the class and he didn't. Moral of the story is, don't choose a partner at random

New office stories during the emotional turmoil...

Story 1: The creepy fuck

So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.

Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.

I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.

The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!

👀

Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.

Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.

Fuck this guy.

Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect

So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.

The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.

But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.

Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..

To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.

He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.

That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.

I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.

I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.

The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol

Never again he'll school anyone.

I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.

Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.

I was writing a random rant about something that happened to me this morning, and the app decide to crash a second before I could post it.
I get it devRant, my stories aren't interesting, but you could at least have crash at the beginning and not after I have already spent half an hour writing the story :(

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

Random thoughts...
Just implemented policy-based authorization in dotnet core, long story short to lock an endpoint to a certain policy I just add: [Authorization(Policy = "NAME")]
on top of function/controller declaration

Was wondering how it is done in other languages, like NodeJs, Java, Kotlin ...etc

Is there a random rant/story button?

Paid brain.js for some time already because it is so awesome that I feel bad not to.

Then this is a random day that I want to know more about the back story of it, turns out the original author @harthur had such a bad experience on the open source world.

Double-downing on this is that she singlehandedly made 3 of my most favourite packages which is too cute to forget since Node.js has came about.

My gawd, what have people done?

So earlier today I went to a super market store and started gathering some items. After collecting a dozen items I felt like not buying. I put my trolley in a corner with items still in it and walked out if the store without buying anything. My first encounter with abandoning a cart in real life.. 😁😁

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot

!Dev
Fuck people using trace rifles in momentum control. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone who kills me in two rounds and also fires at 1000 rounds per minute. I was trying to get the catalyst aka upgrade for the seasonal weapon which is pretty bad and the upgrade makes it usable but I am getting ripped apart after my first kill because someone can kill me with 2 bullets wherever he shot me.

Yes momentum control is supposed to be a gunfight mode and it comes around rarely but that does not mean a broken weapon can roam around killing anybody in sight before they even know you fired a shot at them from some lane. Shotguns do the same but you need to get close. Shotguns are still a problem but at least you can dodge or counter with a shotgun since your radar tells you someone is nearby and snipers need a headshot. These weapons can fire at your toe and you are dead. Oh the devs knew that such fast firing weapons wil be op and needed their damage and made them use the same ammo as shotguns, sniper and non heavy grenade launchers. However the game mode gives all weapons a damage buff which is enough for trace rifles to be broken. Yes you can use other primaries but what are you gonna do when a auto rifles kills you with two shots to the toe. And since they burn ammo quickly and take more rounds to kill then their counterparts like shotguns which use he same ammo as them they spawn in with 50 in the mag and anybody who is using shotguns snipers or grenade launchers give them ammo and they only need two rounds to kill. Also after I kill 50 PvP opponents I need to kill a few hundred opponents in PVE or PVP to actually apply the upgrade and who you kill does not matter.

Seriously and the second weapon I want to upgrade which is able has tracking but you need to aim down sights after hipfiring the tracking shots
which dl negligible damage so they explode or aim down sights and shoot which deals more damage but I am probably not going to have enough time before some random kills me again.

And this is just the first game. From what I heard it was supposed to be a fun game mode which focused on gunfights with your primary not the infamous laser tag show of Prometheus lens which happened a few years ago but now all trace rifles can do that. Oh and I still need to get 50 kills there for a seasonal challenge so I can get the free version of the premium currency and I can only skip one challenge and I have already skipped one challenge since it requires a dlc K don't own.

Seriously why cant some actual good game come up to challenge this. All the competition seems to be third person shooters. Also most of the guns don't feel good and lore is pretty lacking but lore is not top priority. The only competition is Warframe which is not my style, Titanfall 2 but I get insane pings from here so no multiplayer so after the story nothing to do unless I want to do airtstrafing which is useless since I can't play multiplayer. Granted Titanfall 2 is not a looter shooter but the guns feel good and the movement is too good and Halo 1 - 3 since I heard 4 and 5 are pretty bad and I have only played halo 1. I might complain about jackal snipers in halo 2 but at least they have fixed spawns.

Maybe I am overreacting since it is my first game of momentum control