Just discovered that our student housing rental portal transmits our password in plaintext.

WHAT.THE.ACTUAL.FUCK

Password complexity checker for big car rental company is set to insane mode
☑️ 30 char
☑️ symbols
☑️ numbers
☑️ upper & lower
❎ still 'too weak'

Friend: Hi! Can you create a car rental website for me?
Me: hmmm... yeah, we need to define some..
Friend: I will pay you in beer! 😉
Me: We need to define how you want to die.

Why some people try to ignore the fact that programming is a fucking job?

Me, a 19 year old student at a meeting with a "potential new project" today:

Her: So, we would like a website where people could rent a conference room, and pay for it on the website. After they have paid, we want automated emails to go out to us and the person that rents the room. We basically want an automated rental system.
Me: Sounds fair, what kind of budget do you have in mind?
Her: Well because you are a student and you still live at home, we have a budget of about €200 (~$220). We thought it'd be fair because you don't really need an income yet.

At that point I slowly tried to fade away from the meeting... Please help me 😭

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

I've found an affordable flat and it feels like winning the lottery. Before this one I wasn't even getting the overpriced ones!

*discards the tent*

I was young and stupid. Remember floppy disks? Yeah, we still had them when I was studying. Went to a computer cafe, rented a PC and DOS was already booted up (I'm an old fucker). I didn't want to reboot because PC rental was metered. I inserted my floppy disk and got infected by a virus that deleted my work. No git back then and my backup was on the same disk (fuck me). Back home, rewrote the whole thing from memory.

I got mad and wanted revenge. De-constructed a floppy disk, replaced the magnetic media with sandpaper and went to each and every PC on that computer cafe.

It was closed for day.

Tl;dr: I spent more than 2 hours and $429 on a book thats as thin as a pancake.

I needed to go to my campus to pick up my textbook from the school store for my Software Management class. The bookstore is in the building next to the construction site. I had to park on the opposite side of the campus and walk the 2.3 miles to the store, stand in line for 20 minutes to have them tell me that i need a printed out class schedule. I had to walk all the way back to the building next to where i parked to print out my schedule in the library. I then walked all the way back to the bookstore, and the line has maybe tripled in size. I stand in line nearly an hour to have them tell me that they no longer had rentals available for my book, even though i reserved one (they thought it was cool to just rent it to someone else apparently). So instead of paying $45 on a rental, i payed $429 for a brand new textbook that looks like a magazine. Its stupid thin, i could probably read and study it all in less than a week. Thinking of this, i ask the cashier about return policy. She says i can't return it, but i can sell it back to them within 10 days of purchase for about half the price i paid for it. I walk the 2.3 miles back to my car, decide to sell the book on Amazon or something after the semester, and once again leave my campus angry. I cannot wait to be done with this place.

Client wanted a website to offer rentals for her collection of student rental properties. She was adamant and stipulated that it had to be the Rightmove of student lets. I asked her if she had a £million plus budget for the marketing and then some for the infrastructure and mobile app development. She disapeared. Months later I checked the URL she had purchased and it had been done as a free site on wix.com and was a dreadful piece of shit. You just know instinctively that a client is going to be worthless.

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

The first program that was used at a company.

I wrote it on suggestion of my father to help with simplifying calculations for rental machines at his work and once finished it reduced time from start to finished report from 2-3 days down to 30 minutes, and corrections could be done in minutes instead of starting all over.

It also featured saving and loading old reports.

And for context, this was 1987 and excel did not exist and existing spreadsheets was not nearly as easy to use.

Hertz the car rental company wanted a new website. They hired accenture. Accenture did allegedly a poor job. The site did not come with responsiveness, not with web components and 2 years over deadline. Hertz sues Accenture for $38+ million.

Scope creep deluxe?

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

I really just came across this on a legit apartment rental website.

I can see no possible way for this to go wrong.
No possible way that anyone could exploit this... 🙃

!dev

Fucking money problems..
Had 20k on the side before relocating..
Old country wanted 10k taxes, 10k left..

Flight, hotel etc 2k..

8k left..

Bought a cheap car, 5.5k left..

After the rental cars, 3k left..

Bank blocks card because of potential fraud, so I can’t pay the insurance and have to take another rental car..
2.5k left.
2.4k deposit so I can’t pay the insurance for 2k..

At least 0.4k left and first salary comes in, but since I’m new, I’m on emergency tax so I only got about 1.5k.. will get the taxes back later but for February I’m so fucking broke..

At least everything is paid now so I can start to safe from 0 again...

Fuuuccckkkk..

Totally worth it though..

#lifeIsSoMuchBetterOverHere,ImNeverGoingBack..

#iDontThinkCommasInHashtagsAreAllowedButIDontGiveAFuck!

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

Just earlier today I was looking at the hosting packages for a local hosting provider in my country (who shall remain unnamed as I want to work there and criticizing them might not be a very good idea right now) and they start at €250/month apparently. I thought - that's fucking ridiculous!

Like for real, I could literally buy a server for.. I dunno, €600 from the likes of bargainhardware.co.uk with some pretty darn good specs, put it in my home, get a business contract with my ISP for say around €100/month (and use it for my own purposes as well instead of my consumer contract, win-win!), and the server would pay for itself in no more than half a year, probably even less! And you're even getting the actual hardware with it!! And that is for the price of that hosting provider's starting option!!!

Now I know what you're thinking, sure there's more to servers than just the server itself, like redundant power, generators, SLA, multiple routers and switches, and all sorts of failover measures. And you are absolutely right. But does that really justify a rental cost of a server of €250/month?

Not only that, even their shared hosting.. shared hosting, the dreaded, shitty shared hosting! solution is starting at around €10/month. I'm paying about €5/month for 3 light-duty servers and a domain for Christ's sake!

So.. is this hosting provider just expensive as fuck or is this really the industry standard, particularly for the dedicated hosting part? And maybe that's why some services like.. say devRant which apparently gets around €600/month from 299 supporters at the time of writing, yet still has @dfox and @trogus pay from their own wallets for it (if at all possible, please let me know if that's still the case).. I wonder if those costs are all really justifiable?

It just strikes me as odd.. you can get *a lot* of server for a couple hundred bucks if you do it well.. no?

Do you say to police officers "Please stop me if I'm breaking any laws"?
Do you say to traffic wardens "Please fine me if I'm parked illegally"?
Do you say to rental agents "Please reject my application if I don't meet the requirements"?
Do you say to Restauranteurs "Please turn me away if I don't have a reservation"?
Do you say to Airport staff "Please confiscate my item if it's prohibited"?

...

...then why would you say to a Facebook Group Admin "Please delete if not allowed"?

Better start saving up to afford rent...

> Rental agreement ending this summer
> Sign up for apartment in rent controlled country with 10+ years in queue
> Be told I might have to relocate anyway because dropped clients
> Say yes, that'd be cool
> Apply for apartments in new location
> Get offered one in this city
> Get offered one in other city
> Have <1 week to sign
> Declining would mean no first hand contract ever in that city
> Contact boss man to know where I can work
> On vacation until end of June

Nnnnnnnggggggghhhhhhhhhh

!dev random question vacation

So this is completly non dev and off topic. A friend and I will spend our vacation (2 weeks in september) in Guadeloupe (french oversea department). Both of us speake some french and we've got a rental car.

Has any one of you ever been there (or lives there) and could give us some advice on what to do/where to go?
We also plan to go scuba diving, which we'll probably do on the western side of basse-terre.

So, if I was to emigrate, should I come to your country?

I'll finish my bachelors in Comp Sci next May and Ireland isn't really livable right now with property rental prices. Time to look elsewhere I think.

Quickfixes... This is an oxymoron... Like torch rental or microsoft works...

The Berlin rental market is so bad that I have to spend my long weekend figuring out how to write a bot to send applications for me.. (or keep hitting F5 all day and still be too late)

Okay, so I'm developing a system for a global rent-a-car broker. Basically website + a bunch of third party APIs + analytics, it's been running in production for over 4 years now.

Anyway, we had to connect our system to an external rental insurance API, nothing too complicated, got it to production in a month and it seemed to work okay, except the insurance provider claimed they're not getting any analytics data, which was weird, because there were no errors with API calls, and customers had no problem with the insurance.

After going back and forth for a month, we finally figured what's going on: after each API request, the insurance provider expected us to send the exact same data to their analytics API, because for whatever dumb reason they were unable to internally log requests in their analytics database.

tl;dr: we're doing 2 API calls with the exact same data to different endpoints, because a large rent-a-car insurance provider can't log their own analytics data.

My problem now is:

- I want my linkedin profile to be public
- I don't want to be bored every day by spam from recruiters that claim to offer me "A NEW JOB OPPORTUNITY!!!" but don't put any other details about.

I am 100% sure that most of them are searching monkeys for stupid jobs in body rental companies.

At the moment i put a warning on my profile for recruiters to not contact me. I hope this will work.

!rant

I have raspberry pi 3 lying around; at the same time, I want to make a minecraft server to play on with 4-6 friends. Is the pi3 capable of running a server? I tried running it once but it was so slow you could outrun the world rendering with as few as 2 players. Would trying to run it multithreadedly help?

Or should I just resign to a server rental site? it'd preferably be a vps since I really don't like these 'management' sites gaming providers often make - any recommendations that are as cheap as possible)

PostgreSQL => DVD rental Sample database
MYSQL => Sakila Sample database
MongoDB => ?

How do I streamline the vacation rental management process?

How old do you have to be to rent a car in the US?
I first flew alone to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I wanted to rent a car to see more interesting places in San Francisco. As it turns out, rental car age requirements are important when you're on the road. However, people under 25 can rent some vehicle classes for an additional daily fee.

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