Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

Watch 3 videos about iOS/Swift on YouTube, and now I'm getting a frontpage full of recordings of app development events and iPhone reviews.

Listen to one kpop track on Spotify out of curiosity, and now the recommendation playlist is polluted with music I really don't like.

If we are going to hand our balls to AI and expect it to be a glorious fondling fest, don't cry if it suddenly realizes "nuts? aren't those supposed to be cracked?".

I mean what's fucking next? Where will this "smart" shit end up?

I accidentally click on a my little pony meme, and amazon will drone-strike me with 500 gallons of glitter? I drunkenly mumble "OK google how do kangaroos fuck" in the back of a self-driving Uber, I'm going to be dropped off in a shady alley and raped by a dozen walibis?

STOP FUCKING TRYING TO UNDERSTAND ME, INTERNET. I JUST WANT TO FUCKING USE YOU, NOT BE USED BY YOU, THIS WASN'T THE DEAL.

If you truly understood me, internet, I would probably not even give a fuck about privacy. But you are all building these profiles wrong.

You don't understand that I might be interested in juggling tricks today, tomorrow it might be all about crocheting a wool sweater for my penis, and the day after that I'm curious how many corpses it would take to fill up an olympic swimming pool.

NO I'M NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN THAT QUORA, STOP SENDING ME RECOMMENDATION EMAILS ON HIDING MURDER VICTIMS, MY BOSS WILL THINK I'M WEIRD.

Yeah of course I could pulls some plugs, anonymize the shit out of my online life. I respect those who manage to just say "Fuck you Google, I'm sick of your shit, I'm going cold turkey".

But these platforms are feeding us heroin-laced candy.

All your coworkers friends and family with their oled-lit zombiefaces, staring at tiny screens, all absent-mindedly grasping your ankles whispering "aww take one more hit with us, check out this funny youtube clip, let me send it to you on whatsapp.... what you don't have whatsapp? You deleted your facebook? don't you love grandma anymore? Why do you hate your family?"

Before you know it, you watched ten episodes about cultivating cactuses, have a year subscription to brilliant, skillshare, squarespace and 3 different organic foodboxes are delivered to your door, Netflix is spamming you about a cupcake baking show, and you're thinking about same-day delivery for a baseball bat so you can just beat the crap out of every pretty glass display you see.

I want to break up with you, Internet.

I love you, but I hate you.

Since you passed 2.0, you have grown into a manipulative bitch.

I just don't know if I'm strong enough. It's all "let's just be friends" with you, but I know you'll be trying to reel me back in.

Before I know it, you're feeding me cookies once again, and I'll end up balls deep with your trackers stuck to my dick.

Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.

As you could probably have guessed, your account [cozyplanes@tuta.io] was hacked, because I sent message you from it.

Now I have access to you accounts!
For example, your password for [cozyplanes@tuta.io] is [RANDOM_ALPHABET_HERE]

Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited.
So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers.
Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.

We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..

But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!
I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...

Transfer $700 to our Bitcoin wallet: 13DAd45ARMJW6th1cBuY1FwB9beVSzW77R
If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.

I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)

A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.

Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.

You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.

>> RE >>
Well f### you, thanks for telling my password which is obviously fake. I have sent your details to the local police department, shall rest in peace. Don't earn money by this kind of action. STUPID!

I have the urge to fucking smash all of the mosquitoes on the whole universe.
I tried to sleep many times after killing 2 of them. But there are still more of them. Anyways, "since I am fully awake, let us do some research" I thought lol.

-In the research I found that only the female mosquitoes are the ones who are annoying us.
The male mosquitoes dislike drinking blood and eat nectar instead.

And not only that...
-There are approximately 3.5k types of mosquitoes and only a few hundred of these are the bad guys, even if they look all the same.
-Human-biting mosquitoes fly at heights of less than 25 feet in general.
-Mosquitoes are hunting us, because of a specific substance. Carbon dioxide. Every time we exhale CO2, we kind of create a path for the mosquitoes to find us :). They think about it like this:
>co2 detected
>there is probably going to be a meal
>let us fucking get it
-Female mosquitoes flap their Wings slower than male mosquitoes thus it makes it easier for male mosquitoes to detect female mosquitoes.
-Male mosq. do not touch female mosq., when they are resting, but once a female starts buzzing the male recognizes that pattern, flies to her and starts making love.
- A scientist who was working for the US Army found out that the male mosq. will even try to mate with recordings of female mosquitoes' sounds.
-They can not fly until the 10th floor as someone has observed it.
-But then again they have been found breeding up to 8k feet in the Himalayas.
-They live in the water and barely come to the surface for food and o2.

Ps: While I was writing this rant, another 2 mosquitoes bit me and I fucking killed them.

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

If you like purely electronic music, try drum'n'bass, more specifically neuro(-funk). Believe it or not, it really boosts productivity.
I can recommend:

For getting used to it: Noisia, Teddy Killerz, Neonlight, Zombie Cats

When you are used to it: Current Value, Pythius, Hydra, Jade, Machine Code

When you need the next level:
Billain

Generally good labels: Eatbrain, Blackout Music, Terminal, Bad Taste Recordings, Invisible Recordings

I find driving to work is a very creative time for my brain, seem to come up with solutions to problems I’m currently trying to solve and come up with good ideas as well, take voice recordings of the ideas not to lose them.

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

So I recently had a university project which focuses video game audio. We had to work in groups of 3 students and the task was to create a video game which uses audio as a gameplay mechanic.

Our idea was to create a game where you collect different audio samples which get looped as background music, and you have to select the correct ones to have a nice tune. To make it a bit more challenging we had enemies, guns and grenades plus doors which only open if the correct music is playing.

The guns fire on-beat, and the grenades always explode on the first beat of the next bar.
It was quite challenging to get things synced since even small offsets are noticable.

I wrote some nice code and theoretically it should have worked but for some reason the gun shots and the grenades didn't quite hit the beat of the music.

I tweaked stuff, created workarounds, optimized lot's of code to get execution times down but it still only worked sometimes.

I tweaked more and more only to realize that the timing drifted over time.

At that time I worked 20-30 hours on tweaking and trying to get it perfectly timed.

After recalculating some numbers I realized that all the audio samples are recorded at 135 bpm, but the guys who did the recordings said it was 130bpm.

I asked them if it could be the case that the samples are 135bpm and they said:
"yes, they are at 135 bpm as we told you"

I scrolled back in the telegram conversation only to see that they said 130.
Changing the number to 135 resolved all the problems and all of my workarounds and tweaks weren't needed.

So I worked for nearly 30 hours just because they didn't notice their fault and even when they realized that the timing is off sometimes (which took forever because they never played the game), they didn't even consider that they might have given me the wrong numbers.

This all wouldn't be that bad if both of my teammates had worked for more than 15 hours but they didn't. I did all the hard work and the only single thing they did fucked up my workflow. It fucked up the system I created and it fucked up the gameplay as things got unpredictable. Because of their fucking fault I worked as much as both of them combined IN ADDITION to all the other work I did (built 3 maps, coded everything, created animations, ...)

I love working in teams, but only if the whole team is motivated. Those two fuckers were the exact opposite.
Luckily i found the error so I could fix it, but guess with whom I'll never ever work together again?

My phone's space was almost full so it automatically deleted 3 gigs of my videos, photos, songs, recordings and I don't fucking know what.

FUCK these Chinese shit phones.

Saw a reddit thread earlier asking about the most unsettling shit that people have found out Google has on them by downloading their data. I saw a bunch of comments about people finding voice recordings that Google had taken. After reading these, I was wondering what I could find from downloading my data. Decided to download my data, and on the page for it I saw that apparently I had disabled location history, audio activity, and device information.

Knowing companies like Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't stop recording that stuff, just that they're not providing it to me. There were zero voice recordings, but there was location history up until about the beginning of 2017.

Another thing they have is all the pictures from all of my hangouts chats. Apparently there had a good amount of older pictures of myself in there. Going back to probably 2-3 years ago, when I had my emo hair. Just a bit of a throwback. One picture I saw was from last January, when my hair was reaching my chest. Made me really miss my hair.

Other than that, nothing that interesting. Just something I thought I'd share.

Scariest moment of my life:

Known mouse holes: 4, so far

Known mice coming into the house last night: 5, verified by recordings

Mice left on floor by cats the next morning: 7... wait.

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.

After 20 minutes of recording a coding tutorial video in Quicktime, I clicked the "stop" button and waited for the file to write to the desktop. And I waited....and waited....and waited....and....nothing. Short test videos I had created saved fine, but not this long one. I've tried all the recommended "how to recover Quicktime recording" tutorials, but no joy. Does this ever happen to you? If so, were you able to recover any recordings and how did you do it?

Well... I recorded my boss's talk at a small tech conference. Everything went just fine until I tried downloading the video from my camera.

It turns out under-priced 32 GB SD cards from eBay may actually only contain 256 MB worth of memory, while quite happily accepting recordings that are far larger than that.

What is it about robot collected data that makes researchers so anal? Like, dude, it's not even personal data. It's literally robot's joint motor recordings. It's not nuclear data, so why the fuck do you protect it like your life and your country depend on it?

I hope you get fisted by that data every night and how it will end up in oblivion sooner because you didn't publish it. You asshole.

Our ISP, that also offers us Television is smart, very smart... “One option is to provide an anonymous mailbox (eg. Gmail, Hotmail”
Wtf... Gmail != anonymous.
I was about to report a vulnerability I found in their system, with that I could access the whole digibox, recover recordings, copy the on demand things, and watch films.

How is there no open, accepted, widely used standard to store & tag things like old family photo albums, diaries, books, etc.? Surely I can't be the only one who wants to digitise all this stuff to preserve it many years from now in case the drunk Uncle pisses on it, or Grandma's dodgy electrics burn the house down and it's all lost permanently. Or perhaps I am; it does seem that most other people doing genealogy work have the technical competence of a lemon.

Like, I get it, there's *some* online solutions for this stuff (not many and they tend to cost a fortune), but if I want to store it locally or in a private git repo or whatever... well, no-one seems to do it. I want to be able to interlink individual photos with their contextual pages in albums, store metadata about them, store audio recordings of older relatives with transcripts linked, etc. - and it just doesn't seem to be a done thing.

Ah well. Perhaps I'll do it all anyway as some kind of side project, then all being well my great great grandchildren will be immensely thankful if family history stuff ever becomes popular again.

Anyone seen the series "You Are Wanted Wanted" with the german actor Matthias Schweighöfer on Amazon? (Don't know if it's available outside of Germany)

Anyways.. they basically took scenes from various known digital works and put them in there. And whenever that happened i felt the cringe rising in me..:I
Examples are faked cctv recordings as seen in prison break, JASON with the red balloon, heavy rain and the all people are hacked and used thing from a black mirror episode..

When you spend hours in a messy codebase to fix a bug properly and add an integration spec to cover that specific case.
And even you do a round of testing on staging + providing screenshots, there is always someone on the team that will write in your PR, "It works, I tested the change on my machine".
I understand that some people are skeptical but to the point of not trusting integration tests + screeshots/recordings then please test it on staging or production next time because if it works on your machine doesn't mean it will work there ;)

setting up cisco webex makes me want to commit die
it’s like they made a video calling platform but then wanted to be like slack and started throwing all sorts of stuff inside
and the recordings keep giving me .webex files instead of .wrf or .arf which is annoying asf

WOO!!! Taking cord cutting to the extreme!!

The dual channel TV tuner arrived, took it out for a test drive by setting up a few scheduled recordings.

Quality isn't as good as 4K TV and it takes a lot of space as it doesn't use a compressed format... But no more Prime, commercials, and now can watch at 2x speed! Plus that's what the 1TB HD is for...

Though now my worries about drive failure are coming back...

!Rant about dev but a rant about one of my classes

Have this group project due on Monday, haven't gotten any audio recordings from the other members in the group can't actually start on it till I get the audio.

I hate economics.

recently, I was working on a project to playback archived call recordings, and another developer was hired. part of my job is also to support a third party automation framework for customers, so I got "seconded" to support a proof of concept. the original project had now been messed up, it works, however, the functionality that made it secure has been MASSIVELY compromised for the sake of effort. I've tried to cause a stink as we have a major customer who will fail the next PCI audit. opinions on the situation. the other developer has a lot more experience, but seems to have chosen to satisfy management on deadlines over the original spec...

The one thing I can remember was getting an old thinkpad from dad and changing all the sounds in windows xp. So recordings a spoken "click" and changed the click sound to this.
Further on changing icons from files and more. I knew all the settings ;)
Some years later change from windows to linux

Second run of recordings, let's go boys. Take out the Tascams.