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Search - "riot"
-
So I need to create a nice new web app. Let's look at some cool JS frameworks that I can work with.
*5 mins later* Hm, Angular sounds good, is there any good competitor?
*5 mins later* Wow, React sounds awesome as well. Let me learn it.
Google search result:
"Planning to use react? Check out Vue JS first"
*5 mins later* Ok so vue seems faster than React and much easier to learn. Let me see if Vue is the final choice.
Google search result:
"Angular VS Knockout VS Ember VS React VS Mithril VS Mercury VS Ractive VS Vue VS Riot"
Nope, fuck it63 -
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 204 No Content
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 413 Payload Too Large
Me: 102 Processing
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 444 Connection Closed Without Response
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 444 Connection Closed Without Response
Me: 429 Too Many Requests
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Me: 101 Switching Protocols
Me: 408 Request Timeout
GF: 102 Processing
Me: GET /sleep
Sleep: 404 Not Found
Me: 406 Not Acceptable
(Morning)
Me: 501 Not Implemented19 -
preface: I'm fucking exhausted and angry.
Why does everyone assume I know how to do frontend?
Why am I always the design girl?
Why?
You hire me to do backend. STOP GIVING ME FRONTEND DESIGN CRAP. I HATE IT.
AND STOP GODDAMN YELLING AT ME FOR NOT MAKING SOMETHING RESPONSIVE.
I DON'T KNOW HOW.
yes i can learn, but I CAN'T FUCKING PICK UP A SKILL LIKE THAT IN A DAY. Also, I fucking hate it.
STICK IT UP YOUR (min-width: 1400px) ASS.
But seriously, I've spent 13 hours today figuring out completely new things (webpack, susy, express.js, cloudinary, responsive best practices, more webpack) because the boss is in panic-mode (his preferred state) and wants this project released last monday.
guess what? it isn't done.
because i still don't know how to do everything. and ofc there's nobody to ask because there never fucking is.
Seriously, boss-man. hire a fucking designer, and stop being an illiterate sales goon while you're at it. ffs.54 -
If I have headphones in
and I'm intentionally away from everyone
and it looks like I'm working
and you want to talk to me
Here's some advice:
DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME.
If you're curious why, I've compiled a list of points:
1) DON'T
2) FUCKING
3) TALK
4) TO
5) ME
Also, see Fig. 1 below:
(Fig. 1)
| DONT
| FUCKING
|
| TALK
| TO
|
| ME
---------------------------------------
Don't fucking talk to me!26 -
Root's shortest and best rant ever:
I tendered my resignation today!
I feel so happy and free ^_^rant snip snip! resignation freedom is a wonderful thing three weeks before christmas not my problem root you little shit41 -
Root ain't givin' no fucks no mo'
My boss just demanded that I join a conference call. So, I call in, and there's three other people there.
He starts chewing me out for talking with some vendor directly (their VP emailed me directly and asked for a few things, and i was instructed to make him happy). Apparently I used "confusing wording" and "did not talk his language." Bossman was really getting into gear for a ten-minute berating.
It turns out that the guy in question only read half of my first email, and totally ignored the second email where I told him everything was finished and live and working. I told my boss quite bluntly that the guy should have read what I had written, and that he was an idiot. The boss's defense of the guy? "Well, he's a sales guy." I just laughed at him.
Later, bossman started in on me (once again) for not making enough progress on this ridiculous shared-spreadsheet sales tool he wants, saying "We discussed this a week ago!"
I casually reminded him that we had talked about it for the first time ever on Friday night (today is Tuesday), and he had said it wasn't going to be a priority for the next three weeks(!). Again he stopped in his tracks. Again, I laughed at him.
Guy's a tool and I'm so done with caring.
Root's going to be flippant and angry. Root's going to have fun (:
What's he gonna do, fire me? 😂25 -
Almost all fellow programmers I've met have either wanted to be my boyfriend, thought I was a fake geek girl, or were too shy/intimidated to talk to me. (or a combination.)
devRant is the only place I've actually met friendly developers.30 -
If you're going to ask for my help
... and then do the opposite of everything i say
... and then complain when things don't work
... and continue to ignore everything i say
HOW ABOUT YOU JUST FUCK OFFundefined fucking hell fucking fuck fuck try listening for a change and see how that works for you? maybe just once?8 -
Fucking intern.
While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.
I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).
This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.
She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!
She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)
She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.
Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.
Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!
`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.
I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.
It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.
She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.
... Just.
Fucking hell.
USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!35 -
How about some good news for a change?
We have new baby! 😊 He's our second.
And he was born on 10/24!
He's going to be my little devvy.
😊😊😊45 -
I'm tired of working for small companies.
I'm always either the sole developer, or the only dev for a specific stack, and therefore don't have anyone to ask for help. If I can't figure something out, it just doesn't get done.
It also means I don't have anyone to bounce ideas off, do code reviews with, or even friggin' have someone who understands what I do.
It sucks.
It would be nice to have someone I could actually ask for help! As it stands, I tear my hair out in frustration until I'm desperate enough to beg for help on discord or SO. whereupon, of course, I get ignored, as per usu. asdjfklasdjf
It really sucks.
It also means that I'm often surrounded entirely by sales people and managers... you know, those super-talkative people? who basically get paid just to talk? and are absolutely computer illiterate? Yeah. Think someone who says "I need my deliverables by end-of-week," "customer success representative," "turnkey solution," etc. completely seriously. (ew).
They're the people who constantly wonder why I can't push `n` features in `n/4` days, and ofc can't understand anything I say in response because of the aforementioned illiteracy. They're also the people who, almost every week, ask how long `y` is going to take, and then yell "But I need it by Friday! I just sold 50 clients on it!" (And they do this, of course, without ever asking for timelines)
It really fucking sucks.
Though I suppose larger companies would still have these problems.
but at least I could ask for help once in awhile. that would be nice.40 -
YELLED AT FOR 45 FUCKING MINUTES OVER OTHER PEOPLE’S FUCKUPS
IF YOU PIECES OF SHIT WANT ME TO DO SOMETHING, FUCKING SAY IT. WRITE IT THE FUCK DOWN IN THE FUCKING TICKET.
AND IF YOU WANT A FUCKING DEMO, SCHEDULE THE FUCKING THING, AND STOP FUCKING CANCELING THEM. DON’T BLAME ME WHEN IT’S YOUR FUCKING FINGER ON THE FUCKING CANCEL BUTTON EVERY. FUCKING. WEEK.
AND SERIOUSLY, DON’T FUCKING EXPECT ME TO DROP MY LAST FUCKING TICKET THE AFTERNOON BEFORE VACATION FOR SOME LOW-PRIOIRTY CRAP BECAUSE SUDDENLY IT’S ALL THE RAGE INSIDE YOUR TINY DUMBASS HEAD. BUT OH BOO FUCKING HOO, @ROOT DIDN’T DO WHAT I ASKED WHEN I WAS BEING A FUCKING MORON! GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FUCKING STUCK-UP IDIOT
AND FUCK BOZO THE CLOWN BOSS FOR BLAMING ME FOR THE FUCKING IDIOT’S BRUISED FUCKING EGO
FUCK THE LOT OF YOU39 -
My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.
Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.
Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.
Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.
akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.
"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.rant root gets angry this is the short-short version overpaid crap-tier devs but i got too angry this was originally to be a comment22 -
Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).
Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<
-------------
Le wild blackout appears!
-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*
-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!
Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)
-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.
-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]
Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.
Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)
What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.
Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.
I really hate him.20 -
FINALLY
GODDAMNED
FIXED
I'VE SPENT OVER A GODDAMN WEEK SWIMMING THROUGH DEMON EXCREMENT WITH A MAGNIFYING GLASS TRYING TO FIND THE SOURCE OF THIS SHIT.
I FINALLY FOUND IT. IN A FUCKING. CONDITIONAL. OVERLOAD. OF A MODEL GETTER.
THAT ABSOLUTE NONSENSE RETURNS EITHER THE REQUESTED COLUMN FROM THE DATABASE, OR AN ENTIRELY FUCKING DIFFERENT COLUMN, ALL DEPENDING ON THE VALUE OF A THIRD FUCKING COLUMN.
HKJSDFASKFJ
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE.
THE VALUE IT RETURNS. IS COMPLETELY WRONG. FOR ALMOST. EVERY. FUCKING. CASE.
BECAUSE THAT FIRST COLUMN? IT NEVER GETS UPDATED. EVER.
AND THIS DEALS WITH ACCOUNTING AND REAL GODDAMN MONEY.
AARRGHHHHH
WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!28 -
!dev
Bought a house. 😊rant listen to simon and it has an office! simon says the desert sucks it’ll be mine and it’ll be clean yeah yeah bought a mortgage whatever39 -
toxic workplace; leaving
I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.
I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.
------
On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)
Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).
I'm just.
so, so done.
I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)
Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.
But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.
So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)
I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)
With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.34 -
HR: "We want to hire you, but we shouldn't until after we finish this migration and set up an onboarding process. That should take about two weeks; is this okay?"
Me: "Yes, of course."
... two and a half weeks later ...
Me: "Hey, it's been awhile since our last chat. How's the migration and onboarding process going?" etc.
HR:
------
Ugh.
This is the same company that had me sitting by the phone waiting for an interview an entire day, and let me know their schedule got booked for the day three minutes before they went home. gg.
I should tell them to get bent.22 -
What the crap is it with job applications and requiring freaking videos now?
I'm not some social butterfly that wants to be all friendly with everyone and a part of their goddamn lives. Give me a problem and/or some code and I'll happily make it work; give me an extrovert with a goddamn video call fetish and I'll fucking leave.
I'm an engineer, not your salaried girlfriend.28 -
This post is in memory of all the devRanters fallen in battle against management stress and impossible deadlines.
Let their memories remain, and their loss never be forgotten.7 -
I was writing tests at work and rather enjoying myself.
Boss insisted we all go home early because "holiday halfsies," so I semi-unhappily pack up and go home. At home, I write tests for a personal project instead.
Dev life.8 -
!dev
!!personal
!!abuse
I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.
They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.
I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.
But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.
For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf
But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.
Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?
I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."
and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.
Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.rant merry fucking christmas all i want is to be left alone child abuse i'm just done. personal why is that so much to ask?42 -
!rant
I built a decently large project at work, and everything works perfectly. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's light, it's organized and clean, and deploying is a breeze. I'm very proud of it.
The biggest reason, though, is that it uses exclusively technology I had never touched before:
• React
• Redux
• ES6/Babel
• Webpack
• Express.js
• Material Design
• Apple lappy (I'm a linux girl)
I was completely new to all of these, including my dev machine. Every single aspect of the project was outside my skillet.
But it went from my first experimental `import React from 'react'` to production-ready in three weeks. I'm really proud 😊14 -
> Find new remote job that pays six figures.
> Only person in the house with income.
> Still not left alone to fucking work.
AFAJDLDHAFAHDKSLAKAGACAJFNSKDUEBXJCAWVWCSNXIXYEVXKCUDGRB/^&@FU+#9$/
JUST LET ME FUCKING WORK!19 -
I FUCKING HATE WAITING FOR PEOPLE.
It feels like a full quarter of my life is wasted just goddamn WAITING.
Fuck off.
From now on I'm just leaving whomever behind.11 -
Root interviews for a job
So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.
The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.
I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.
My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.
But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.
I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬
So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.rant i don't want to leave my job sexism but i want to leave the desert and the two are married ageism am i really going to tag this ageism? guess so 🙁 diversity hire interview31 -
A recruiter called me today. I had to barracade myself in the laundry room to hear him, and still needed to ask him to repeat himself 7-8 times. he spoke at what must have been 15% volume with a super thick Indian accent. He also couldn't pronounce a full third of the terms.
Here's how it went.
recruiter: you full-stack dev? what experience?
me: yes, about 8 years, maybe 10.
recruiter: you know C#?
me: no.
recruiter: you know java? tomcat? spring?
me: no, I don't know Java.
recruiter: you know react? angular? apache? node?xml? json? html?
me: yes. yes, angular 1. yes, yes, ...
recruiter: ok, i email you java job posting
me: I don't know java.
recruiter: ok, i email you.
Recruiter used "email java job posting." It wasn't very effective.
Recruiter moves quickly! Recruiter used "did you get my email? email" immediately after. It was super effective! @Root becomes angered!
Recruiter calls.
Recruiter calls.
@Root becomes enraged!
Recruiter calls.
recruiter: what [???] [?] [???] [??] java [???] [??] [???] okay
recruiter: You know C#?
me: No, I still don't know C#.
recruiter: ok thank you for time. 😡 *click*
What just happened?
I really don't understand their species.39 -
My 4yo monster just randomly told me:
"Mommy! One plus two plus three plus four plus five equals fifteen!"
I'm so proud.
And really surprised 🤔
I've been teaching him basic math (adding and subtracting numbers 0-20), but haven't gone beyond two operations / three numbers.10 -
Doot doot.
My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.
My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.
My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.
what a joke.
Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.
I told him it was going to happen again.
I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.
So stupid.18 -
I'm beginning to get burned out on coding in general due to work-related stresses.
Is anyone hiring remotely?
Please?
Will code in Ruby/Node/React for food ☹27 -
FUCKING LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!
I NEED TO FUCKING WORK!
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS.
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR RANDOM FUCKING DREAMS.
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT COINS OR THE PRICE OF GOLD.
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT SOME EXPENSIVE PLANE OR BOAT OR CAR YOURE NEVER GOING TO BUY.
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT CHINA.
NO I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR DRAMA.
I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THE ARBITRARY FUCKING BULLSHIT YOU BLABBER ABOUT.
STOP. WASTING. MY. TIME.
I'M THE ONLY ONE PAYING THE BILLS
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME DO IT!26 -
What the fuck is this one-way interview bullshit?
"The organization you are interviewing with has come up with a series of interview questions that they have requested you to respond to. This is an on-demand interview which means that you'll be recording your video interview answers at your convenience as long as you submit them before the deadline." -- sparkhire.com
Like seriously?
What if I have questions? I have plenty, and I find those questions considerably more important than whatever bullshit gotchas the company wants to annoy me with.
One-way interview.
Fucking really.
At least have the decency to talk to me.rant bullshit root gets angry one-way interview interviewing talk about lazy and unprofessional root swears oh my this just screams 'bad environment'36 -
My boss pissed me off so much yesterday I totally ditched work today. I had some spiced rum for breakfast (and dinner) and spent the day playing minecraft and browsing Black Friday specials.
I did a little bit of work that (oversimplified) involved paying a Clover contractor for doing basically nothing. Totes cool with that as the guy is really nice and a decent dev. Annoyingly, though, he started hitting on me and asked me out on a date at the end of the call. He's like 65 and has a daughter (grand daughter?) my age, so that's like totally creepy. Ugh.
Getting hit on by random old men is still better than talking to Mr. Asshole the Sales Fetishizer, though.11 -
Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.
And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.
And later:
Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.
Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.
And later:
Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.
*twitchy smile*rant useless people you suck because we are incompetent what's a query log? it's all your fault this is super urgent let's defer it ticket notes too long; didn't read21 -
At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.
He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.
Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.
But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.6 -
I am bloody sick of being on my own.
I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)
But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.
So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?
I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."
This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.
So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.
For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?19 -
Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
!rant
!!git
Who here uses `master` for development?
My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.
Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:
(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*
*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.
Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.
This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?
Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)
Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?
I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.
What are your thoughts?30 -
My worst dev sin is not throwing people under the bus, even when they deserve it.
Literally or metaphorically? I'll leave that up to the imagination.
------
I believe my second-worst sin is my tendency towards perfectionism. It's hard to finish projects quickly if everything has to be nearly perfect. I still make deadlines, but this is due to overworking, thus leading to burnout.
I could relax more if only I sacrificed my principles...5 -
My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.
It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.
like, fucking really?
There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?
What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.
But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)
So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.
"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.
Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.
And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.
Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.
talk about ridiculous.5 -
Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?
Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)
------
Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.
So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~
------
Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"
Cue Inigo Montoya.
------
Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?
Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."
------
Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."
I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.
------
Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.
------
I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?18 -
Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.
I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.
Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.
Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.
Anyway.
Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.
This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.
Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.
It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.
It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.random difficult communication too tired for anger or frustration nationalities tiring diversity root observes people23 -
Product: Hey, this screwdriver feature I never requested isn’t there. Why? Can you fix it? It’s kinda urgent.
Product: @Root please jump on the ticket above … fairly urgent.
Root: It’s Friday, I’m out next week, and I’m working on finishing <urgent comma ticket> right now.
Boss: Work on the screwdriver instead. But make sure you finish the comma ticket too!
Boss: By the way, I volunteered you for eight security reviews next month!
Security: You’re on call for AWS audits next month, too!rant just look at her she’s doing fineee she can handle everything she can handle it everything is urgent just dump it all on root10 -
!rant
I applied to three totally exciting jobs tonight. (!!!)
I feel so giddy ;3
Also: I had no idea salaries were so much higher than what I've been earning. I feel so horribly used and abused and undervalued. Toxic environment, indeed!
I will be so so so glad to leave it all behind. (And finally move!)
eeeeeeee!rant jeeze this place sucks. maybe it's the black mold in my kitchen good news root is excited and cheerful; what gives? job search17 -
!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?
So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)
I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)
One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)
That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.
Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!43 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
I really hate this company.
The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.
Fuck him.
And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.
Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.
and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.
Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.
But I digress.
I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.
just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.
'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.rant it's a cool day at 96f/35c root has problems and fan the flames as your blazes burn root should see a shrink desert kerosene asshole boss when you fall i'll take my turn15 -
"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"
1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.
Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?11 -
I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.
(tl;dr at the bottom.)
I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.
For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.
tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.
There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.
And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.
The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.26 -
!!fml
"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."
The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.
The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.
"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.
"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.
TC scoffs and closes the meeting.
Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.
"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."
But the bills remain, and so must she.
"Fuck my life" she finally decides.20 -
I’m surrounded by idiots.
I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.
Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!
While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.
To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.
He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.
This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.
It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.
This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.
The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.
What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.
No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.
Asdfajsdfk.rant fucking moron even when taking down the server hey bob pass me all the paperclips mysql murder terrible code slow query idiot can do no wrong but he’s the golden boy idiots repeatedly murdered mysql in the face21 -
Finally got a 200 response back from the server! Woo!
I've spent two days trying to get this to work (see my earlier rant). but yay! finally working!
So I log the response body just to revel in its lovely glow.... only to notice an error message saying "INVALID_INPUT".
WHAT THE CRAP.
200 FOR AN ERROR RESPONSE?
COME ON.4 -
Living in a tiny house and having a remote-only job (and no lappy) means I get the wonderful, lovely privilege of working in my bedroom... with my 18mo (who will not leave me alone), and my girlfriend (who won't fucking leave). It's positively great!
Blasting music is often not enough to drown out the sound, and certainly does nothing for getting hit with toys or screamed at to get picked up, so I get basically nothing done during the day. And that's presupposing I'm not begged to run errands/go to lunch with her, both of which take precious hours. (She won't take the baby out alone, so she's always here unless we find a babysitter)
At least it's quiet after 9pm, so I stay up coding for as long as I can. But 18mo's wake up super early, and the girlfriend prefers to stay in the room until I'm up... so even with earplugs I don't get enough sleep. A monster a day and a bottle of Tito's vodka a month is all that keeps me sane.
Why can't I just be fucking left alone to fucking work? I'm our only goddamn source of income.
It's no wonder we're fucking broke.
And to make matters worse, I'm being downsized... and considering the above, I doubt I'll be able to land a new job. 😡15 -
Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."
So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)
GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.rant my guess is performance reviews are coming up ahsflkiauwtlkjsdf root is angry how dare you not be a robot i used to call this place purgatory now i think it's just another layer of hell how dare you go on vacation everything is urgent15 -
So many interruptions!
So many distractions!
I just want to fucking finish this refactor. I dont' care about meetings, texts, bloody office game tournaments, lunchtime, gossip, or people trying to be friendly. Just let me fucking work!
If you see me rocking out with my headphones on and working furiously, seriously, just don't fucking interrupt. I'll bite.16 -
Had QA call my "simple, quick" ticket a "monster ticket" in front of everyone. Hear it and weep, micromanager!
Also had them tell me i thought of everything, it was beautiful, and that i have a knack for frontend :)8 -
@Root has a code review.
CR comment: “Why would you do it this way? It’s awful. Clean it up!”
Totally fair. I had copied the legendary dev’s code, and it was ick. Cleaning it was easy and enjoyable. I cleaned the source, too.
CR comment: “Why would you touch this? It’s outside the scope of the ticket. You could get it working without changing all this.”
Revert…
CR comment: “The interfaces don’t match. Now it’s confusing, and that makes it harder to maintain.”
🤦🏻♀️16 -
This bitch at work is afraid of hard work and is currently spending more energy fighting the work than just doing it.
She wants to keep a legacy setting that's on the wrong scope -- per merchant, not per payment -- in addition to the setting I've added on the correct scope. She's bringing in management two levels up all because "I've already moved on from this" and "it will require me to write code quite a bit" (first paraphrased for clarity, second is an exact quote)
Bitch, your way is dirty as fuck and is going to break things. Roll up your sleeves and do your damn job!11 -
Productive day!
Rewrote an intern's feature and briefly explained how/why
Gave intern a choice of projects, and explained them
Removed two unused models, one unused route
Dried up two views into a partial
Redesigned said partial
Tested validation edge cases (ex: Jan 10nd, 101bc)
Fixed an api
Simplified three models
Added scheduling and platform restriction to a feature
Le wild bug appears: a user with negative xp!?
Wrote a migration to expand players' max xp to 2^64-1 because a certain legacy game gives it away like my ex-boss makes promises. Chewed at devs, but they're all long gone so :/
Won two games of pool
Browsed devRant
Busy day, and all of this while falling asleep! 😊
I'm quite proud of myself today.16 -
It looks like we have been working on something that qualifies almost all of this (except the management wants it, so there's little funding) 😂
Haha, pretty shitty to work on something like this for the last 4-5 months.4 -
Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.
Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.
Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.
Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.
Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.
Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?
Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.
Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.
-------------
Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.
LF work, PST.13 -
My coworker requested I add a bunch of tracking to our product.
I've previously tried explaining to him (and honestly the rest of the company) about privacy issues stemming from tracking, such as by their beloved Venmo. Venmo tracks absolutely fking everything you give it access to, from location data to your entire facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc. feeds, and sells ALL of it to third parties. It's scary. but! this guy simply does not understand, and/or does not care, and marches right on into all the surveillance, loudly singing the song of convenience to all who'll listen. (Nobody else in the company cared, either. :/)
ugh.
Anyway, I'm conflicted.
I have to install some tracking, but I can probably come up with an excuse to cut most of it out and gimp their surveillance. It'll still be useful to us, but it'll limit the amount of data the tracking company can sell to third parties.
but they'll push this guy pretty hard on it, and he's as technically-inclined as a smudged glass of warm, stale beer. "Better for your conversion!" they'll say. "How much tracking do you want?" he'll reply. "@ashkin, why can't you do this right now? What else do you need to make this happen?" he'll firmly inquire. and so I'll be forced to make it happen...
ergh13 -
PineScript is absolute garbage.
It's TradingView's scripting language. It works, but it's worse than any language I have ever seen for shoddy parsing. Its naming conventions are pretty terrible, too:
transparency? no, "transp"
sum? no, cum. seriously. cum(array) is its "cumulative sum."
There are other terrible names, but the parser is what really pisses me off.
1) If you break up a long line for readability (e.g. a chained ternary), each fragment needs to be indented by more than its parent... but never by a multiple of 4 spaces because then it isn't a fragment anymore, but its own statement.
2) line fragments also cannot end in comments because comments are considered to be separate lines.
3) Lambdas can only be global. They're just fancy function declarations. Someone really liked the "blah(x,y,z) =>" syntax
4) blocks to `if`s must be on separate lines, meaning `if (x) y:=z` is illegal. And no, there are no curly braces, only whitespace.
There are plenty more, but the one that really got me furious is:
98) You cannot call `plot()`, `plotshape()`, etc. if they're indented! So if you're using non-trivial logic to optionally plot things like indicators, fuck you.
Whoever wrote this language and/or parser needs to commit seppuku.rant or python? pinescript or fucking euphoria? or ruby? why can't they just use lua? or javascript? tradingview17 -
I would absolutely love it if people would write their own stupid code instead of blindly mixing everyone else's mental diarrhea together and pouring the resulting mess into their bloody stupid IDE. At least then I could insult them properly. As it is, they're outsourcing their fucking stupidity to the lowest fucking bidder and then bragging about how quickly they get everything done. And management eats it up! No wonder everything is a slow, tangled, unmaintanable mess.
I can't fix much of anything because almost none of it is in my control. It's all autogenerated bullshit glued together with laziness and poor taste. "But Root, why is fixing this taking so long?" Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if someone had built it somewhere in realm of correctly the first time, it wouldn't have all fallen apart when someone looked at it the wrong way!
Seriously, there's no way this pile of stale fertilizer could have passed QA.rant idiots import * fragile monstrosity leggy devs why code when you can steal no independent thought npm mentality10 -
This company!
Ugh.
Two days ago we had an hour and a half meeting on which projects to focus on, with the result being all seven are top priority. Because of course.
Last night I told my boss why an api he has me hitting always returns 401s; even gave him the line# responsible for the response (in his code). After an hour and sixteen minutes of him debugging, he finally admitted I might be right. zzz. This morning, he tells me it's on my end, and to ask someone else for their project's API code. The problem is that the server is not accepting the new application's key, since that key is not in the allowed list. That other project works just fine. Guess why? Their key has been whitelisted for months. But it's totally my code. Yeah. Bloody brilliant. 🔅
Anyway, today we're discussing "Winning with Accountability," a 100 page book that boils down to "do what you say you'll do, by when you said you'd do it, and take responsibility if you don't." But a huge part that the boss is stressing is: provide the exact date, time, and timezone of when things will be completed by. I mean That's fine for sales calls and reports and such trivial busywork. But dev projects? Not so much.
And that's been my past three days!
Friggin joy.6 -
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.
While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.
So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)
After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.
The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.
My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).
So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.
... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.
1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)
2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)
3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)
4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)
I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.
just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.undefined surfboard another rant about the same project long rant pompous designer apples and asteroids design8 -
tl;dr I need ideas on how to warn the next dev(s) that the company is a dumpster fire.
------
For the past week (actual time: three days) I've been writing documentation for work, since there isn't any. It's been okay, I guess. Certainly more interesting than anything else I've done at work in months.
I'm up to 10k words / 67kb of markdown, and I think I'm done. I could easily write another 30k words on everything, but I just can't care enough.
However, what I do care about is warning the next dev(s) about how terrible the place is to work, so I want to add little references or hints or other such things to my writing. To complicate that, there's a contractor dev who said he will edit the document to strip out my commentary and make it "friendly" for the next person. (I can kind of see why: I've been quite honest about the situation of everything, and it's pretty dire. If they read it as-is, they might just walk out the door. I certainly would have.) I'm also going to commit it to the repo, and afaik he doesn't have push rights, so he can't force-push and remove it. (and a force-push by someone else, adding my documentation immediately after I leave... that would be pretty fishy, too.)
Anyway, at someone's suggestion, I added a "three envelopes" reference in the access phrase generator section. I also wrote "Promises made outside of ES6 will not resolve" -- in the warning section of a document almost entirely about Rails. (because the boss has broken every single promise he has ever made me.)
What other hints and subtle warnings could I add?
(And hurry: tomorrow is my last day! ;3)question warnings run run or you'll be well done! pocket full of mumbles documentation hint: gtfo three envelopes16 -
Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).
Root: Reaches out to spec author.
Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.
Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.
Root: Logs off.
Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.
TC: Still no slack response.
Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.
TC: Still no slack response.
Hours later:
TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.
TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)
TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)
———
Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…
I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!
Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.
And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!
And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.
Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)
Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.
Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.rant oh my root gets ignored. root swears oh my root talks in third person root solves a prod issue thundercunt root communicates root wants to leave root gets ignored15 -
Well that's a first.
A Chinese recruiter contacted me speaking entirely in what I suspect was Mandarin.
My resume and posted work experience lacks any mention of Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Then again it also lacks any mention of Java, and yet recruiters still call me a Java master. 🤔19 -
2019 resolutions/goals recap: (non-personal ones)
1) Improve diet (did; e.g. ramen and fast food to clean keto)
2) Lose weight (did; lost 24 pounds!)
3) Find a good job (did, twice)
4) Buy a harp (did not; large and expensive, no place to put it, and I have small children who would absolutely break it)
5) Keep house clean, even if it's by myself (did, somewhat; I cleaned some, managed to get one other person to clean semi-regularly, and another sporadically)
6) Work on social awkwardness (did; read and applied Dale Carnegie's The Art of Public Speaking, which netted me my last job offer. Still pretty awkward though)
7) Move out of the desert (did not; not enough money, and job didn't allow remote work)
8) Stop bloody waiting on people (did not; still very guilty of this...)
I don't remember the rest 🙁 didn't write them down last year. But I still accomplished 5 out of the 8 I remembered, with one being a pass, so 5/7!
-----
2020 resolutions/goals:
1) Finally move out of the desert
2) Invest 20% of my income every month
3) Reduce bills by 20%
4) Solve/address some health issues
5) Make a schedule so things regularly get done around the house, e.g. cleaning
6) Find some friends and make time for them
7) Replace Debian with something else
8) Revamp my backup system
9) Be proactive and stop waiting on people
10) Build a (stationary) coil gun for fun18 -
Our project Right now 😂
Original deadline for project was April, we're in August and we're still in Shadow :p2 -
Argh!
I just realized that I committed and ran a migration with a typo in a column name.
We now have a :last_polll_capture_at column. 😭
Time for a commit of shame...13 -
!dev
Just for fun, during meetings I look up “toxic workplace checklist” (and variants) and then score my employer.
So far they’ve scored 80% and higher on all lists except one.
Now that I’ve decided to leave, none of it bothers me anymore. It’s so freeing.8 -
aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.
I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.
anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.
but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.
the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.
The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.
Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.
But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.
EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.
And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.
All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)
just.
what the crap.
people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.
Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.
and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.
It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)
So.
yep.
that's been my week.
...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!rant sheogorath's spaghetti erroneous error management vomit on her sweater already your face is an anti-pattern dipshit api guy two types bad four types good root swears oh my3 -
Root encounters HR at her new job.
So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.
Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)
But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.
The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.
I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.13 -
Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<
I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.
The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.
I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.
After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.
I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/
But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/
But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)
I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.
... six seconds pass ...
... another two seconds pass ...
... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.
asjdlkagjdsk.
> Pic related.rant it was not simple. but i'm already flustered damnit it's probably the permissions documentation what documentation "it'll be simple" he said google sheets google "totally simple!" she agreed it's been days. days!19 -
!dev
!!misery
I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.
------
I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?
To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.
Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.
Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?
I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.
In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.
And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.29 -
Ay, I'm kinda new here but i have to say everyone is very friendly here. ☺
For the riot: i love PHP13 -
> Bang head against issue for days
> Finally get help from lead
> Watch them bang their head against it on video for 40 minutes
> Watch them shake their head in disbelief at how difficult to follow and objectively wrong the existing code is
> Talk through approach to fixing it and patching in the new functionality
> Listen to a short recap
> Ask question, get answer
> Chat about next company meet
> Meeting adjourns
> Jot down implementation notes before I forget
> Remember answer to question, forget everything else
FFFFUUUUUUUUUUU 😭7 -
!!rant
!!ANGER
Micromanager: "Hey, Root!
Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.
But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.
You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."
Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.
And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.
god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS
Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.
jasdkl;fk
ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.rant root swears oh my micromanager duckfuckers "trivial" ticket root is fucking fed up root swears a lot holy shit rewrite an entire library in 2-3 days14 -
Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.
It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.
One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.
While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.
During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.
After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.
(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)
But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.
One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!
Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.
Weird and scary.
Very scary.
Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.5 -
My day.
6 am: 2yo woke up
8:30 am: start work (from home)
11 am: go get breakfast/lunch
11:30 am: work call. while driving. Learn nothing new.
12:00 noon: infuriatingly slow errand
12:30 pm: work call. Learn nothing new.
1 pm: finally get to eat. It's cold. And terrible.
6 pm: 2yo finally goes to sleep (missed nap)
9:20 pm: 2yo wakes up screaming.
9:30 pm: find 3 or 4 tablespoons of leftover tuna in the fridge. No bread.
10:45 pm: I finally finish my work (super-urgent friday-morning release of a next-Wednesday-morning deadline... Yeah idfk.)
11:29 pm: 2yo stops yelling and screaming and goes back to sleep
11:39 pm: finish writing this while in bed.
11:40 pm: Sleep?10 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*65 -
Everyone's asleep.
I'm not tired, and coding sounds like the best thing ever right now. Figured out a solution to that blocking architecture issue, too. So: headphones on, blare Amon Amarth and Disturbed, bring up editor. It's time to work on that side project!
Best night in months.7 -
!security
(Less a rant; more just annoyance)
The codebase at work has a public-facing admin login page. It isn't linked anywhere, so you must know the url to log in. It doesn't rate-limit you, or prevent attempts after `n` failures.
The passwords aren't stored in cleartext, thankfully. But reality isn't too much better: they're salted with an arbitrary string and MD5'd. The salt is pretty easy to guess. It's literally the company name + "Admin" 🙄
Admin passwords are also stored (hashed) in the seeds.rb file; fortunately on a private repo. (Depressingly, the database creds are stored in plain text in their own config file, but that's another project for another day.)
I'm going to rip out all of the authentication cruft and replace it with a proper bcrypt approach, temporary lockouts, rate limiting, and maybe with some clientside hashing, too, for added transport security.
But it's friday, so I must unfortunately wait. :<13 -
Oh dear, another Tuesday!
That means I'll probably get chewed out for something in front of the entire company. What for, you ask? The boss is inventive, so it could be anything.
Instead, I'm calling in sick and taking the day off. 😊13 -
....
I give up trying to write this.
I'm just too fucking pissed off.
My interactions with my micromanager make absolutely no sense -- she is clearly just trying to piss me off and blame me for everything, facts and reasoning be damned.
I tried detailing this week's examples (there are lots, and it's fucking Tuesday), but. screw it.
Fuck working for (and with) her.
She's a bitchface and a thundercunt.
I'm updating my resume and fucking off out of here.
God fucking damnit i hate her.23 -
!!pointless story
Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."
"I'll look into it" I say.
I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.
I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.
"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.
Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.
I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.
"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.
I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.
I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.
Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...
Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.
"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.
After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.
I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.
I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.
Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.
About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.
Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?15 -
!rant
!!success
Finally, my project is done!
(and apart from UI/UX polish and some rewording by marketing, everything is finished! Wooo!)
Now for the fun part of the project... 😭5 -
Interview today! (Maybe?)
Sometime between 2pm and 10pm!
No idea if it's Skype or phone or what. Or with who. Or really when.
Sounds like I should turn them down. 😕rant schedule what schedule wait for us we'll call you maybe unprofessionally professional interview17 -
micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"
ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"
slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"
prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"
Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."
Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.
Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."
asdfjkagel.
This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.
At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/17 -
Micromanager: “@Root, you need to do <thing>! It’s important, and very unprofessional if you don’t. Bad things can happen if you don’t do the thing. You need to get into the habit of doing the thing.”
@Root: Already does the thing.
Micromanager’s boss: Doesn’t do the thing.
Micromanager: Doesn’t do the thing.
Team: Doesn’t do the thing.
Micromanager: “You need to work on your reputation, @Root!”16 -
I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.
Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.
But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.
Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.
I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.
Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:
Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.
Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.
Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.
Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.
It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.
Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.
I'm really beginning to hate this guy.
I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.14 -
Rant rant = new Rant
rant.isRant = false // !!!
I woke up this morning after not thinking about my code for a day, and realized i had a flaw in my validation design. I fixed it before opening my eyes.
It's kind of amazing how not thinking about a problem can help solve it. Even if you don't know it's there!6 -
!dev
New year's resolutions:
1) Rid and keep my life free of toxic people. This includes parents.
2) Find a well-paying job that isn't also toxic.
3) Take care of myself for a change!
4) Stop putting up with things I don't have to.
5) Actually enjoy things I enjoy.
6) Finally buy a harp. I've wanted one since I was 3 ffs.
7) Finish de-googling my life.undefined i am a girl you twits! toxic? snip. snip. resolutions parents always said a harp was too girly10 -
!dev
It's raining. I love it.
It's foggy. I love it.
But I live in a desert and nobody here seems to know how to handle the rain, let alone the fog. (It isn't hard, people!) Last night during my ~30 min drive home from work, five separate accidents/collisions happened just a little ways behind me because it was raining. Now it's foggy, too.
I have to go to work.
I'm scared.12 -
tl;dr Either I'm being incredibly touchy, or half of everyone I've interacted with is being a total jerk to me today.
I also feel like I'd be overreacting if I responded in a bitchy way, so =/ I must be nice despite everyone's behavior.
I don't want to people today.
I want to sleep.10 -
Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…
TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.
Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!
Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!
Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.
Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.
Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.
Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)6 -
!!rant
When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.
But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.
Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.
I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.10 -
Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.
Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?
Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!
Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.
Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?12 -
This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.
Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.
The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.
Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)
It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.
Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:
The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.
This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."
Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.
------
Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"15 -
I extracted a tangled action to its own api, and wrote a test for it.
The test failed.
I added debugging, more debugging, all the debugging. It still fails. But I can at least see why it fails!
It turns out the api finds and updates the wrong user. It finds and updates the wrong user EVEN WHEN THERE ARE NO OTHER USERS.
WHAT THE SALAMI.
Also, the user lookup it uses is extremely roundabout and takes several seconds with ~2 million users. Normally I'd fix the lookup, but it has been in production for several years, and I'm terrified it will break something if I fix it.
Blargherhagrid.7 -
I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.
Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~
There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.
This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.
It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).
GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.
GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.
Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.
We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.
Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)
So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.
Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)
If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)
Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.
So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.
Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!
AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.7 -
Code archaeology.
Almost everything I fix/update/build requires a ridiculous amount of digging through and carefully studying the mountains of neglected, decaying, and shoddy code that make up these projects.
I spend maybe 10% of my time (and likely closer to 5%) actually writing code now. I miss it so much.7 -
I installed a firmware update on my router, and discovered it both adds telemetry and breaks the navigation in firefox. 🤦♀️
It also started complaining that my password isn't secure (despite its length) because it doesn't contain a symbol.
Good freaking job.10 -
I just changed a bunch of comments, log entries, and removed some blank lines from one of my controllers. Zero functional code changes. Everything worked before; now it runs only half the code, breaks, and throws strange errors.
Fucking hell.
Screw today.6 -
A long time ago on a project far far away, I didn't realize there was a src folder, and made my changes in the build folder instead... And to makes matters worse, I asked a co-worker -- an ex-Googler -- for help with the issue I was working on.
Rarely have I been more embarrassed.1 -
A couple of weeks ago, I asked the "brand manager" if he knew how to reset printers to their defaults before reconfiguring them, knowing full well that he did not. He assured me that he did. I smiled and let him leave.
He called me yesterday, frantic, because he didn't know how to reconfigure a printer that already had a password. After reminding him of the above, I told him how to put the printer in diagnostic mode and how to navigate the menus. Literally: "Turn the printer off, then hold down the feed paper button while turning the printer on. It will print out a bunch of diagnostics, and a menu at the bottom. Just follow the instructions at the bottom to use the menu"
Apparently following simple instructions is well outside of his abilities. After he spent five minutes fighting with it and complaining, I called him and walked him through powering the printer on while holding down the feed paper button. Terribly difficult.
The next step amounts to "hold down the feed paper button for more than 1 second." He spent ten minutes (ten!) on this unimaginably challenging step, and, frustrated at his inability to outsmart a simple button, he gave up completely.
He literally couldn't follow the instructions on the printout. I've attached a picture to show how ridiculous this is, and it saddens me terribly to report that I'm quite serious. he was literally unable to figure this out.
HE SPENT TEN MINUTES TRYING TO PUSH A BUTTON FOR >1 SECOND! TEN MINUTES!
That's what was too difficult for him! A button! With written instructions!
I can't even.
But the kicker?
Now he and the bossman want me to drive half an hour so I can push a button for ~1.2 seconds because they're utterly incapable.
I'm soo done.
So. done.7 -
Background: I'm not drunk yet, BUT I'M WORKING ON IT.
okay.
I just finished a second sprint on my React app. The first was to build a merchant onboarding flow. The second was to do substantial cleanup as I learned more about react/redux, and to create a "supply order" flow -- basically purchasing marketing materials and services. I finished that in a week, and I'm pretty proud. api-guy wanted it done in a day. i laughed. he probably could have, but it would have been a copy of the code in a new repo with some lines changed.
ANYWAY. it's all done and It's super pretty and works amazingly well. It has both the onboarding flow and the ordering flow, with a nice pop-out sidebar for navigation, namespaced actions, etc. Everything is pretty clean. I even added a cart to the ordering (despite everyone telling me not to) because wtf, what if someone wants to order TWO items? dumbasses. So I made that. it's sexy.
Anyway, it's all done and shiny and fancy and wonderful and I'd *love* to share screenshots if only it didn't give away where I worked. :<
... but the point of the rant!
After the first sprint, I made a copy of the repo so I could rework it and add more functionality without touching the original. (Hey! That's what a branch is for, right? Why didn't I branch it up?
well, read on)
I knew we were going to have multiple separate flows for this app: onboard, ordering, merchant tools, admin tools, support, etc. So, I wrote its server portion (the webpack builder + http server) so it would serve the same app at whatever url the user hit, and set a cookie containing that host+url. This allows the app to serve different content (basically showing/hiding content) based on the URL and future login roles. If someone hits /order, it would hide everything but the order flow. If they're a merchant, it would show all the merchant views plus ordering, etc.
tl;dr This way I can use the same codebase for multiple sites, drastically simplifying development, branding, and what have you. This new app could obv also be a drop-in replacement for the original onboarding project because of the above.
HOWEVER. this apparently isn't good enough for api-guy. He's terrified that adding/updating future components will affect all the existing content somehow.
so.
now we have three repos for basically the same codebase. 1) onboard aka "surfboard", 2) ordering, 3) merchant tools, aka "ferrari" (the "future" app).
Except.
1) "surfboard" is a very old version of the code. 3) "ferrari" is also old, since 2) "ordering" has newer content in it now.
... and somehow this is better?
fuck if i can figure out how.
His reasoning is "well, you won't be touching surfboard or ordering for 6 months, so now you don't have to worry about it." Sure, except, you know, it'll be a pain in the ass in 6 months now when I have a crapton of code and branding to redo. ffs.
Oh. We also have three Heroku pipelines for these three repos. for the same codebase.
and now you know why i'm drinking.undefined idiocy fucking hell fuck this noise api guy i'm just gonna replace everything later this codebase is as dry as the friggin ocean7 -
Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?
It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.
Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?
It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.
I already did that. and it isn't working.
What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?
------
Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.
Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.
* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?
doot doot.
need to scoot.8 -
I have a problem.
My phone has "Rant" and [Comment] burned into the screen, along with the Facebook and share buttons. It's faint, but it's absolutely there.12 -
preface: swearing.
because anger.
So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.
It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.
HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.
Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.
What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.
Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.
You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!
oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.
SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.
Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.
The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?
like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.
Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.
then again, fuck this significantly more.
UGH.18 -
Fucking URLs, people.
They're not hard.
If you're going to give me a bug report, TELL ME THE GODDAMN URL.
If, after yelling at you several times for not providing the url, you instead just fucking GUESS at the url, YOU'RE A GODDAMN BLITHERING IDIOT AND YOU'RE WASTING MY GODDAMN TIME.
ALT+D, CTRL+C or CMD+L, CMD+C
SO HARD. ASDFASDJGHLKASDHFLJKSGDFSKDFrant the bozo didn't even recognize a 404 page bug reports without urls screenshots without context urls bug reports blithering idiots6 -
It's kind of neat knowing people who are famous for things I don't care about, and having their numbers / talking semi-regularly. They're a special person to so many others, but to me they're just some random person that's mildly annoying.
Like API Guy.
Freaking API Guy.
He's a millionaire musician who's adored by literally millions of people, but none of them know he writes absolutely terrible APIs, zero tests, rushes to the shiniest new things, and happily agrees to everything (often without listening) only to deny it later. Absolutely infuriating.
Or knowing one of Netscape founders as that strange and really terrible trumpet player with the great tequila. He did give me his copy of The C Programming Language (the bible) though. He was cool. Super weird, but cool.
It's just a strange feeling. I don't care, and yet others inexplicably think I should. I don't understand it. They're just people? idk.14 -
You know what?
Fuck Webpack and Babel, too.
They're way too complicated and finicky to set up.
I want to write a simple library, not a freaking research paper.14 -
I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?
This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.
In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.
Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.
Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.
... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.
I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.
just.
what the _fuck_
Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?6 -
Up for a rollercoaster?
I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.
Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)
Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.
Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.
Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.
I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!
🥶👰♀️💍👰🏻♀️19 -
Big "company summit" this week where everyone flies in and we discuss the future of the company (sadly not over drinks). I might be getting promoted with stock and pay increase, and allowed to hire another dev.
Yet, here I am, updating and sending out my resume, and hoping for something, anything.
A 30% raise wouldn't be enough to deal with all of this madness.15 -
Now I remember why I don't work from home.
It's 3pm and I've managed about an hour's work today -- most of which was debugging something really dumb. Lunch took me 2 freaking hours because I had help from a noisy smoke detector (EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! ad nauseam), and everything kept going wrong. Girlfriend went to the store to pick up groceries; they were order-online groceries from a store 6 minutes away, so idk why it's taken over an hour. Now the smoke detector is pretending to "go to work" by watching youtube, and when that gets boring, he fights with his baby brother and steals his toys.
Children are fun and all, but they require 98% of your attention. and fuck, nobody else in this house makes any money, why the hell am I stuck watching them? While working!?
asdfakshaslkgjasdg
Update: now the smoke detector is taking the computer apart with a random electric screwdriver i haven't seen in years, and the baby suddenly has no pants.9 -
Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).
The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)
I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.
So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.
My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.
Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.
I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.
I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.
I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.
But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.
I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.
Fuck off and die.22 -
!!office drama
I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.
tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.
------
Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.
Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].
Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.
Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.
Perhaps accepting is slightly better?
The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.
I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.23 -
I'm looking for a new job.
If anyone is hiring remotely or knows of somewhere that is, could you please let me know? 😊
(I'll be looking locally as well.)
Stack:
• Ruby+Rails
• Node
• Postgres/etc.
• React
• Angular 1.x
• Sass/Less
• MaterialUI, Susy
Timezone: GMT-733 -
(Written March 13th at 2am.)
This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.
Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!
1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.
2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.
3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.
4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.
5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.
6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.
7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.
8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]
9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..
(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)
At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.
10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.
11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.
A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.
After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.
I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!
oof.rant nightmare luks i'm friends with grub and chroot now realtek realshit at least my computer works again :< initrd boot failure9 -
The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊rant deploying straight to prod prod prod prod dev server? dev on prod you chicken migration on prod wk149 git? who's a git? you're a git! scariest deploy ever game development1 -
!dev
lol I keep getting in trouble over people taking secondhand-offense, and managers keep bringing up the same instances like I’m somehow at fault.
Look, if Alice says something to Bob, and Carol hears it and gets offended on Bob’s behalf, but Bob doesn’t? Carol should jump off a bridge.10 -
$work: Ey @Root, make this super simple thing.
$work: No, not like that.
$work: It also needs to do A, B, and C.
$work: No, not there. You should build it somewhere else, but I won't tell you where.
$work: You need to build out F and G, too.
$work: What do you mean you don't have the data? Just ask support drone #3. (who directs me to #2, and that one to #8 who doesn't know, and that one to #12 who won't answer)
$work: Why can't I do K, Y, or S? You should be able to infer these from the mind of whoever wrote the ticket by its wording, despite no mention of them whatsoever.
$work: Are you done yet? It's a super simple ask!7 -
I've been working on updates to a react app for a few hours today. Everything's been peachy except this shit job, this inane change demand list, my headache, my lack of quiet places to work, ... okay, so basically everything is terrible. But I've done lots of builds, and made lots of progress.
Then suddenly: my build script failed. 30 seconds after a successful build, with no (tooling) changes in between.
Reason? Incorrect version of Sass.
How? Fucking npm.
Isn't package-lock.json supposed to prevent this crap?
FAKDLKAUSUK.13 -
The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.
That sounds like a simple query, yeah?
Well.
Here's some background:
We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.
All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.
Here's how signups happen:
Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.
And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:
Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.
Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.
Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!
After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.
It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.
So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!
I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...
just...
errrrgghh9 -
tl;dr @Root refactors some spaghetti.
I'm refactoring an api that creates a support message. It's a post route.
When seeing a magic hardcoded message string, this route instead updates the user object, and does not create a support message.
It also returns different results if the user is muted (fine) or if saving the message succeeds or fails (fine).
But if the user is creating a duplicate message, it doesn't save the message (fine) and... redirects to listing their messages instead? Wat?
Also, when refactoring this (migrating to a new message backend), I discovered that not all routes return a response. If the message is a non-duplicate, from a non-muted player, from a non-redacted client, the route doesn't respond at all!
So, I'm having fun cleaning this up. I actually am. Except I'll need to support all of the legacy clients for the next lifetime or two. I mean, really. There are still people with Android v2 devices who are using this thing. not even kidding.9 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
I built a feature. I asked questions for days. Nobody helped. I built it anyway, and while I'm not sure it's quite right, it works.
During a code review, I asked for clarification on who the fuck it's for. Simple fucking question. Didn't get an answer. I did get the same crap response twice, though. It's great because it both doesn't answer my question and makes things worse.
Let's refer to this as "branding." Here we go!
------
Root: "Should this be changed to blue? I'm not sure who the end-user is."
TC: "should be purple, then call it something more convenient" (...what?)
Root: "Better phrasing: if we use the feature, it should match our colors and be blue. If customers use it, it should match their colors and be red. It shouldn't be both. I looked through everything again, and i'm convinced that it's only for us, so it should be blue so it matches everything."
TC: "this should be purple, and then call it something [sic] red" (...what!? also: lolcopypaste)
------
But like, that's wrong in every single way. It's internal, not external. Doing both makes it confusing. Doing both and calling it external is fucking stupid. Did she even read the PR? or any of my questions? ugh.
I swear, it's like arguing with a boulder and expecting it to listen. An ugly, oversized boulder that comically resembles Jabba the Hutt. No joke.
Whatever, it can be purple. Later, if someone complains that it's confusing, I'll just link them to the damned PR. Then again, almost everything here is confusing AF, so I doubt anyone will actually notice.
Screw this place. So glad I'm on my way out.rant thundercunt the ugly boulder responds jabba the hutt root asks questions root has a code review6 -
I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.
They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!
I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.
But! No audio.
Damn.
Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.
Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.
But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤
(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)22 -
Root has a deadline
I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.
Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.
Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.
I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.
The best part:
Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.
For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?
I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?
No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡rant root has a deadline traded my days for a pocketful of mumbles blockers deadlines nobody cares the boxer18 -
god i hate this company's product.
Visit merchant-facing sandbox -> 404. works after a refresh.
Log into sandbox with admin account -> redirects to a different signin url -> 500s -> signin no longer works.
wheeeeee!11 -
Root has standup.
Root: I had no ticket yesterday morning, so I followed up on <TicketA> with <PersonA> and updated it in Jira and linked its related tickets; talked with <PersonB> about <TicketB>, and reviewed code review comments on <TicketC>, and thought about those while looking into the CI spec failure on <TicketD>. I collapsed for 3 hours before fixing it. Halfway through the collapse, I talked with <PersonC> on <TicketC> CR comments and the spec issue in <TicketD>, then went to lay down again. Afterward, I solved the spec issue in <TicketD>, and started on the new ticket <TicketE> before calling it a day. Plans today are to <…>.
Manager, in private: I need you to proactively let me know if you’re taking long breaks and aren’t working as this impacts business flow.
—————
Yeah.
My update was four times longer than the others’ despite her not giving me a ticket to work on. I responded to slack while I was collapsed on the floor and discussed tickets. And, after I recovered, I went back to work to finish my 8h shift. But this isn’t good enough? And I need to let her know in advance when I’m going to collapse and be a bloody mental zombie for hours? It would be amazing if I knew. I barely have a few minutes notice, and that’s only if I’m really paying attention and looking for signs.
And (conjecture) she probably still thinks I’m not performing well enough. “Affecting our business flow” probably means she’s angry I didn’t talk to other people about low-priority <TicketE> yesterday while I was laying on the damned floor.
Goddamn I hate her.11 -
Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.
Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.
I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.
He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.
He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.
At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.
Did everything right, still in the wrong.
Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.
You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.19 -
!drunk (yet)
It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)
Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.
More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"
and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.
I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.
Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)
I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*6 -
If you’re having trouble with the bossman’s ‘tude
He’s giving you the blues
You wanna dev, but not for this dude
Here’s what you gotta do:
Pull up the CV, it’s that easy
Send it every time
Just use a throw-away email, hey.10 -
!code
I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.
I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.
I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.
Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.
After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.
So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.
what the crap? why?
So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.
Windows greets me.
Again.
What the hell?
At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.
But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.
If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.
Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/16 -
Without you, the world falls silent. It feels cold and desloate, and there's nothing to fill the void. You've been my faithful companion for many thousands of hours. Your passing pains my heart.
Rest in peace, my friend.5 -
I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.
He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)
Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.
Does that sound strange?
well.
We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").
So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-
What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)
And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.
just. UGH.
every day with this guy, i swear.16 -
I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.
Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness
I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.
The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.
Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.
The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.
well.
1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/
2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/
3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/
Honestly?
I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)
I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.
fucking. hell.undefined fuck off we urgently don't need this yet! unnecessary work unsung heroine i'm starting to feel like dark terra.7 -
Trash, trash, trash.
Who the fuck writes this shit?
Who the fuck lets these trash should-be-junior devs roll their own crypto? and then approves it?
The garbage heap of a feature (signing for all apis) doesn't follow Ruby standards, doesn't follow codebase conventions, has `// this is bridge` style comments (and no documentation), and it requires consumer devs to do unnecessary work to integrate it, and on top of all this: it leaks end-user data. on all apis. in plaintext.
Fucking hell.8 -
Paycom is utter dogshit.
Clunky, error prone, junior mistakes on every page, and filled to the brim with HR doublespeak and legalese.
A roving gang of quadriplegic interns could do a better job if the requirements were written in cuneiform and they were paid, up front, in cocaine and whiskey.14 -
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the scum of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pig can spit
and it's filled with people who are filled with shit
and it goes by the name of EU...
At the top of the hole sit a privileged few
making mockery of the vermin in the lower zoo
turning beauty to filth and greed...
by passing shit like article 11, 13, and 17.
for the corruption of men is as wondrous as Perurant article 13 license: poetic probably illegal in the eu now joke/meme musicals are the best eu article 11 lyrics article 17 sweeny todd5 -
Get assigned ticket.
Finish the most of the feature. Finish most of the specs.
Push.
Second dev wants to own accounting half of the ticket.
Rip out half my changes, rewrite specs.
Push.
Code review asks for minor changes.
Finish them.
Push.
Product creep creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.
Product creep creep-creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.
New release happens.
Merge in master; fix conflicts. Run specs; random unrelated specs fail, some fail intermittently. Rabbit holes of complicated, unexplored, obviously-flawed code.
Fuck that. Push.7 -
Man, this guy is fking useless.
I'm learning something new and ask him for help; he both mishears and confuses topics, so his explanations only ever make things worse. 😧6 -
I built a tracking suite for our fleet of printers quite some time ago. Once a day, "bizteam" (aka sales) gets an alert detailing how many printers are in critical need of attention (out of paper, mechanical error, etc.), and how many of them are flat-out offline. They don't seem to care. I mean they do, I think? but. the offline percentage hasn't changed much in the past month or two.
These printers constitute a primary part of our business model and... screw it. they're goddamn important, okay?
A full 16% of our printers are OFFLINE. Most of those HAVE BEEN OFFLINE FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS.
3% of our printers have been online BUT OUT OF PAPER FOR OVER A MONTH.
and what really baffles me...
We've convinced a few of these merchants to actually plug in their goddamn printers. (and yes, they actually *paid* for these things, and they're absolutely not cheap.) Some of those were previously both offline AND out of paper, yet after being plugged in, they're *STILL* OUT OF PAPER?! What the crap, people! It's a printer! it's not difficult! It's the same as every other fucking printer you have! and it's probably the same goddamn fucking model!
Did AlexDeLarge skullfuck your brain into mush? FIX YOUR SHIT!12 -
I just had to ran to get my train in time. When I sat back I saw this alert on my phonescreen.
That's nice of the Riot app developers to detect frustration like that :)7 -
The company got a new office just in time for the "company summit".
I checked out the address on Google maps. It's a cinderblock building with the number spraypainted on the side, a battered cyclone fence in front, a cyclone gate off to the right side (apparently falling off) leading to a random battered shed, and immediately on the left is a dental office with bars on the windows. Also, the fence has spikes on top.
I'm terrified.rant i don't want to go i'm actually a little scared everything else and this too i'm going to finish my feature and quit what the hell scary11 -
I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.
First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.
Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!
Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!
Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.
Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.
So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.rant security exploit root swears a lot actually root swears oh my stupid fucking people what the fuck fucking stupid fucking people20 -
Running a huge migration on our production db.
Takes 45+15 minutes (migration+tests) on my lappy. So. I'm going to be bored and slightly worried for the next hour.
Hopefully the production servers will be faster.7 -
Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.
I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.
(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)
But onto the story:
Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).
I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.
However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.
But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.
That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.
Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.
But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.
Ugh.
`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`rant zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance postgres heroku ship's sinking and the fixer's all fixed out burnout21 -
I fucking hate HTML forms! Especially representing bloody nested objects within them!
Fighting with html forms has taken at least 80% of my time over the past three features. Why can't I just do this via API? It would be soo much freaking simpler! ugh.
But today.
Today is not going to be a good day.
I not only get to expand a complicated vanilla form with with one nested object today, I get to expand it to include three nested objects. Normally this wouldn't be a problem because it's just moving elements around, but two of those nested objects need to be broken up and combined into three+ segments each. I have no idea how to even approach this.
ugh.17 -
Had a great day yesterday. Productive, happy, felt great, and was focused despite a lot of cute distractions. Finished a third of my feature.
Today, I wanted to start work early because I had planned out what I wanted to work on next and how to approach it. I felt motivated. I’d jump out of bed, get ready, and start early. No breakfast but maybe some coffee.
Woke up to two hours of constant distractions, irritations, and time wasting instead. Anger. Everything sought to prevent me from starting.
When I finally got to work, the first thing I saw: political warmongering bullshit.
Guess I’m not getting much done today.13 -
I just got stood up by a hiring manager.
This person emailed me directly and said (paraphrased) "I found your resume on StackOverflow and you look perfect for a lead software engineer position at [semi-big-name company]. [...] If you're interested, book some time on my calendar for a call."
So I did, and got a confirmation back. Exciting!
I called into the hangout conference at the specified time, and... well, so far it's been twenty-three minutes of listening to some faux-melodic chimes and Google's faux-soothing voice saying "You have joined the call but you are the only one here!"
ugh.
the search continues.rant stood up again if you look to your left you will see root's job safari adventures easy way to tell i shouldn't work there chris the blithering idiot4 -
(Forgot to post this a few days ago. Was just too tired.)
Finally finished the code review from hell.
The patch on top of the PR is +1448 -1114, and nearly all of it is rearchitecting, not moving.
I think I spent six days on it, 4-5 productive hours a day? Seems like a lot. This codebase is a bitch to work in.
I’m spent.1 -
I realized this week that my CPU is almost 12 years old!
It's an AMD FX-8150 8core @3.6 (recently overclocked to 4ghz). It's still a good chip for my needs, but eep. I had no idea I bought it that long ago.
I really want to replace it, but that would require a new mobo, too. which I suppose wouldn't be a bad thing...
------
Unpopular onion:
AMD was comparable to (and occasionally better than) Intel before, but now? Ever since they bought ATI, they've just spiraled: virtually everything they've produced has lagged behind.
However: the Ryzen seems to break this trend, so maybe there's hope yet?undefined ryzen anachronism much? cpu intel seriously though: gtx970ssc + amd8150? 8150 unpopular onion he's a dorky one outmoded tech amd10 -
I finally got Redux-Form’s `initialValues` to work! Wooooo~!
/giphy confetti cheering
It turns out I haven’t actually been doing anything wrong for the past week. I mean, I've been working on other things during that week, too, but I've been trying to solve this the entire time.
The cause? ReduxForm made a breaking change awhile ago (v5; we’re using v7) that prevents the `initialValues` prop from working if you decorate your form component in the wrong order. Many examples online are incorrect because of this.
Basically, the decorators `reduxForm` and `connect` do not commute:
Incorrect:
`reduxForm(...)( connect(..., {...})(form) )`
vs Correct:
`connect(..., {...})( reduxForm(...)(form) )`
But what really pisses me off is that the fucking documentation specifically fucking states that you may decorate your component IN ANY [FUCKING] ORDER.
/giphy that is [fucking] false
So, I've been following example after [fucking] example that either list these in the wrong order, or I just don't notice the different order because it doesn't matter. AND because of that NONE OF THE [...] EXAMPLES WORK.
ARGH.
I've been pacing around the office trying to figure this out for days. I've rewritten my code three times to try to solve this. I've written two workarounds for it only to rip them out and try again because they both broke some other part of the UX. (e.g. causing false validation errors after rerender)
just. hafhsldkjhgjkhagklwhsdjfkahslf. 😡
/giphy angry hades
You know how I discovered this?
I found it in a github ticket. One solitary, untagged ticket from October of last year. Not a single goddamn post anywhere else mentioned this. And the [...] documentation specifically [...] states the [...] opposite!
Bloody [...] hell.
but it finally works.
as;kgjhaekl;gahgjkdflssdafh.
I could scream.6 -
Dropping out of college because it was useless, and getting a job in the industry while continuing to teach myself.
That way I was paid to learn instead of the reverse — and I learned newer and actually useful things. I also saved time to boot.
I might not have a masters degree, but that doesn’t matter, either. Experience is always better than a comparable amount of education.
Honestly, none of the good devs I have worked with held masters degrees. To a one, they were all self-taught.7 -
So, I'm using a new MacBook Air (running Sierra), and while I'm still getting used to it (especially the different Sublime hotkeys), overall it really is quite wonderful. I particularly love the magic touchpad and ease of scrolling/swiping between desktops.
However, I ran into an issue this morning that gave me pause: apparent file caching.
My webpack setup auto-compiles my project when files change, and I noticed something was causing errors -- not really surprising since I was in the middle of fixing the project last night. However, the error it displayed wasn't something I was expecting, and referenced a line I was positive I had removed several hours before calling it a night. Whatever, I was probably mistaken, so I went to remove it.
... It wasn't there.
I double checked that I was looking at the right file. Yep, src/styles/header.scss -- that's the correct file. Figuring webpack was acting up, I killed and restarted it.
Same error.
So whatever, maybe Sublime cached it. Rather unexpected, but possible, and I am on a mac now... so maybe. So, I closed the file and reopened it. The line wasn't there. I did this twice more. It STILL wasn't there. Maybe I'm going crazy...? I checked the file with cat. The line was there. I checked with vim. The line was still there.
OKAY. I've seen a lot of people with beef with Sublime, and I often defended it. but maybe they're actually right. maybe Sublime really isn't the way to go. :( So, I killed and reopened Sublime, and I checked the file again.
The line STILL ISN'T THERE.
Maybe I'm going crazy? I double, triple, quadruple checked the path. all correct.
Alright; let's try again and make sure I do it properly. I closed everything I had open in sublime (two projects), and quit. I reopened Sublime, navigated to the correct path, and reopened the file...
The offending line STILL wasn't there.
I'm angry at this point and just mash the keyboard. I save the resulting garbage, and cat the file again. No visible changes.
KAJSFLK STUPID PIECE OF <redacted>
okay, whatever. Reboots fix everything, right? So I reboot, and keep the option to re-open everything again ticked.
The terminal comes back up, along with half(?) my browsers, but Sublime doesn't. grrrrrrr.
so I cat the damn thing.
GUESS WHAT.
THE GARBAGE IS THERE.
Sublime was doing its job. BUT EVERYTHING ELSE FAILED.
(Oh Sublime, why did I ever question you? 💚)
... but seriously, what the fuck could have caused that? Was the OS caching the file for some programs, but not others? Now I'm questioning the macbook...23 -
$work is migrating to a new HR performance review service (15five). Instead of a private (ish) review once a quarter, it'll be public (and uneditable) reviews due every friday. Better make sure that review is perfect.
also, praising a coworker is required.
<sarcastic thumbs-up>13 -
The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.
The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.
The documentation does not exist.
Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).
The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.
The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.
The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.
The new type has practically zero test coverage.
The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.
And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)
But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.8 -
While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."
... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.
How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?
Fuck these people, seriously.8 -
So, I was going to complain about JS being finicky and not making a damned bit of sense, but it turns out that it wasn't JS's fault. Not entirely, anyway. It was the halfassed JS minifier middleware (written by the legendary dev himself) that was breaking the JS while writing it to the page.
The original problem:
My code worked. I removed some comments. Big ol' block of //'s. And suddenly $() isn't a function. But if I call $(); at the top, it all works!
It turns out the "minifier" caused JS to think my code was chaining off the previous JS line in the rendering pipeline instead of being a separate statement. so all it really needed was a `;` at the start. What threw me, though, was the last line of the previous blob of (non-minified) JS was a comment, so it should be a separate statement, right?
But as it turns out...
```
console
// JS really is finicky.
.log('Sigh.');
```16 -
Currently watching a bunch of drunk Irish people try different whiskeys and drunkenly banter with one another, while myself sipping Irish whiskey. It’s nice.
Slàinte! 🥃6 -
C0D4 kinda hangry!
Yes that's a word...... maybe.
Ok, so I'm starting to see memes, memes and more fucking shitty memes, don't we have Reddit for that?
I wonder.. if it's a terrible idea in this day and age to remove the ++ button from meme posts, it would immediately remove the incentive to farm ++ and not contribute other wise, and it's not necessarily penalising them for doing it, it's just not rewarding them...
I know... I'll go jump in my bunker and hide from the riot that will probably begin now.16 -
Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.
First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.
Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.
Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.
yeah...
I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...3 -
Material-UI.
I'm exhausted, so I'll keep this short.
I changed a TextField to a TimePicker, and noticed my className prop didn't apply anymore.
I thought it was my mui/redux-form wrapper for that component since I had just written it, but that was basically a straight copy/paste from the other wrappers, and both receives and passes the prop just fine.
After a lot of fighting, I finally found a workaround: if I add a `data-work-you-piece-of-garbage` prop alongside it, only then will the className show up on the rendered element. Why? I have no freaking clue. I tested it three times and got the same results. I looked through the MUI source and it still doesn't make any sense.
Fucking whatever, only three hours wasted.13 -
I’m conducting a train.
For testing, I tell the train to go to station C when someone requests station G. But when I request station G afterwards, it sends me to station H instead.
I never asked for this.6 -
Every time I interact with this DBA he treats me like I’m some fucking moron who barely knows what a query is. It doesn’t help that I can’t get him to understand a damned fucking thing, no matter what the topic is. We speak the same language, supposedly, but can barely communicate. I can’t even begin describe how his half of the conversations go because I am unable to follow much of it.
Maybe if I start aligning my fucking chakras and channeling my inner goddamn cosmic peace energy, or whatever it is he’s on about, he might start making more sense? I swear he’s been so high so often that he’s never quite come down.
There’s obviously a language barrier, somehow, but the guy is also such a douche every freaking time. Ugh.rant i could call him mr. mushroom? maybe it’s me? drugs are bad mmkay root queries the dba’s sanity13 -
!!oracle
I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.
So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.
Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.
On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!
So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.
Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.
Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.
Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.10 -
Ticket: Allow merchants to customize how their Wallet Passes look! It’ll be super easy, just add these nine merchant-modifiable strings (they support vars) and use their contents for text instead of what we use now. Simple!
Reality: There need to be 24 strings, there are some rules I can’t convey to the merchant (because the system literally does not include instructions, only a name and a textbox), the code to generate the wallet pass is inefficient, uncommented, branching spaghetti that I’ll need to rewrite (it seriously generates every possible field, and then only uses the ones it needs), the specs are so much worse, and half the default values they want aren’t even possible. As in, I don’t know if it’s a car loan, let alone the exact make and model of the bloody thing.
And no, sorry, we have no way of knowing what their fucking “vertical” is, either, so we can’t display that. Fucking sales.
Asdhkjfsjfads
WHY MUST EVERYTHING SUCK7 -
This goddamned sewer-tier, rancid-as-fuck code may as well have been shat, eaten, and re-shat by a slug-fucking muck demon.
So fucking vile.1 -
I want a case/skin/idk for my lappy after I finally leave this company. I have this awful habit of associating things with memories. If the memory is bad, seeing the object reminds me of it, and e.g. makes me feel burned out again. So, I want to add a really pretty case to my lappy so it feels like my laptop instead of the company's.
I've found a few really beautiful ones on Etsy and Pinterest, but they're so ridiculously expensive! I really don't want to pay $90 🙁
Does anyone know where I can find alternatives?13 -
!dev
!!vodka!
!batch files. because they're stupid.
Preface: I may be drunk. If not, I'll keep trying ~
Update: no, i'm already kinda wasted.
I told @AlexDeLarge that I would try Reyka today and let him know how it is. So, let's have at it!
At the recommendation of a friend, I tried Deep Eddy (vodka) a few weeks ago. It's extremely smooth and very good. Totally recommend. I can drink it straight, or with a tiny bit of water.
The same friend also recommended Reyka, which I bought earlier today (among quite a few other things, because alcohol). Here's what I discovered:
With Reyka, I was expecting something extremely smooth and almost tasteless, but tasteless it is not. Reyka tastes halfway between vodka and a good gin, like Bombay Sapphire. It actually has a *lot* of flavor, but the vodka itself is actually pretty high quality. I haven't found anything to mix with it yet, and I don't really like it straight. I might try lemon or lemonade next.
If I was to recommend vodkas, it would be either Tito's, or Deep Eddy. (Reyka is kind of strange, so I don't know if I can recommend it yet.)
Tito's is smooth and tasty -- absolutely not a gross vodka flavor, but ... nice. All alcohols have different effects and make me feel different. Grey Goose makes me tired, Tito's makes me happy.
Deep Eddy is incredibly smooth, and has almost no taste at all. It's wonderful.
UPdte: I took awhilfe to wrte this and... I'm getting a little tooo drunkt o conitinue so i thnkg oin going to nd this rannt here. ssorry! ^^7 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.
CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.
CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!
CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.
CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.
CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.
CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.
NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?
dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf5 -
Fuck long covid / ME/CFS.
This is day two of being bedridden.
I want to have energy again. And be able to move and do even simple things without collapsing for hours or days at a time.
._.14 -
!rant
... ahem.
I CAN TYPE IN THE BOX
AND IT SHOWS UP
AND IT STAYS THERE
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!6 -
Adios Motherfucker!
Finally got that pile of misery finished. That simple ticket exploded in complexity and had quite a bit of scope creep. So so glad it's over. I mean, apart from code review and QA. But still. It's done!
Also: I may have been drinking already. Clearly not enough from the painful lack of typos and silliness. Gonna go work on that.6 -
My project at work (an electron/angular desktop app) has an exceedingly rare bug that causes it to crash-to-desktop while loading. Nothing about the bug makes sense, and there's no way to catch or detect it until the next run, and it happens 100% of the time for affected users.
There have been six confirmed cases so far (out of 500k+ users), and nothing linking them together. None of the fixes discovered by those users have worked for other affected users.
The worst part?
I was the first of those cases. I inadvertently fixed it for myself and haven't been able to reproduce it since.
I'm stumped!17 -
Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?
Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.
Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.
If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.
And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.
Fucking double standards.
And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.
Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."
Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.
I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.
That's right: one pea among the lot of them.
goddamn I am fucking pissed off.rant drop everything and rewrite your rewrite oopsie someone else made a mistakey double standards shell game root can do no right root swears oh my8 -
I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.
The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).
To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.
I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!
I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.9 -
> pic related
This is what I've been putting up with on my personal machine for months.
tl;dr: Suggestions for a wlan card/adapter for Debian9? My current RealTek wnic is barely functional, and my replacement (a TPLink... something) is completely incompatible.
I don't need anything super fancy, though I would ofc love support for AC/AD if at all possible.
I don't care (too much) about price, since I'm only going to buy one and very likely won't replace it for years.
------
I'm running Debian9 and have a have a RealTek card. Even when it's not arbitrarily dropping packets like in the screenie, it randomly caches them for up to 90 seconds and dumps them hilariously out of order. I can't play games like that. I can barely even browse devRant. Steam goes offline about once every 30 seconds, and therefore spams all of my friends with online/offline notifications. Streaming "works" on good days. Git works fine, however, so most days I don't notice the connection issues.
And yes, I'm using a community-patched driver (rtl8188ce) that's supposed to fix some of RealTek's more major screwups and increase the transmit power by ~20x. The driver helps, but only a little.
I've done some reasearch on wlan linux support, but haven't found anything very reassuring. Mostly just forum posts saying things like "Intel cards usually work fine!" I don't want to gamble. I just want to buy a card that will work and be done with it. :(
Suggestions? Insight?10 -
!wifi
!!anger
I bought a new wlan card to fix my infuriating wifi issues. It's a TPLink Archer T6E, supports ac, and ostensibly uses Ath9k drivers. Multiple reviews said "installed, booted, and connected! So easy."
Guess what?
I've spent the past two hours trying to get it to work. No banana.
Some other reviews have them fighting with the drivers for days. Looks like that's going to be me, too. 😡
Why the fuck is wifi so fucking difficult?19 -
If you're so fucking mentally lazy that you can't write something halt-decent the first time, maybe you shouldn't write anything at all!
hsdkghajsghasldghj
HATE9 -
So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.
First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)
It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.
Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.
But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.
After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.
I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.
I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.
Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.
I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.
I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.
I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.
Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.
No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.
No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!
So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!
I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.
Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.
Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.
Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf
Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.
Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.
I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.
I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.
Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!
I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.
Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.
I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!
What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.rant just like always eep; 1 character left! first day back from vacation miscommunication is the norm endless problems ruby6 -
!rant
!!pride
I tried finding a gem that would give me a nice, simple diff between two hashes, and also report any missing keys between them. (In an effort to reduce the ridiculous number of update api calls sent out at work.)
I found a few gems that give way too complicated diffs, and they're all several hundred lines long. One of them even writes the diff out in freaking html with colors and everything. it's crazy. Several of the simpler ones don't even support nesting, and another only diffs strings. I found a few possibly-okay choices, but their output is crazy long, and they are none too short, either.
Also, only a few of them support missing keys (since hashes in Ruby return `nil` by default for non-defined keys), which would lead to false negatives.
So... I wrote my own.
It supports diffing anything with anything else, and recurses into anything enumerable. It also supports missing keys/indexes, mixed n-level nesting, missing branches, nil vs "nil" with obvious output, comparing mixed types, empty objects, etc. Returns a simple [a,b] diff array for simple objects, or for nested objects: a flat hash with full paths (like "[key][subkey][12][sub-subkey]") as top-level keys and the diff arrays as values. Tiny output. Took 36 lines and a little over an hour.
I'm pretty happy with myself. 😁6 -
001 REM Code review
010 PRINT "Nitpick nitpick nitpick nitpick nitpick"
011 GOSUB REFACTOR
020 PRINT "This function is too complicated, break it up"
021 GOSUB REFACTOR
030 PRINT "Why do you have three methods for this? Put all the logic in one method."
031 GOSUB REFACTOR
040 GOTO 020
041 REM ARGH
998 PRINT "Looks good."
999 STOP9 -
I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).
summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations
summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!
Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy
Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.
Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.
Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.
Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?
Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.
But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.
Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.rant weekend work debugging in production miscommunication no call no text still my fault hope you see this it's urgent clover strip club3 -
When your specs simply won't run new code no matter what you do, non-conditioned (and unmodified) calls don't get called, and 2+2 somehow equals Q, you know it's time to give up and restart the simulation by going to bed.
Except it's early afternoon and the project deadline is tonight. 😔
Back to debugging reality.11 -
Yes yes yes
Let's spend countless hours writing painful spaghetti that generates a financial report, extend that spaghetti for specs, then not bother to check the amounts or status. or where it says the money went. Nope, checking non-unique names is totally good enough. We're so good at this. Ten points to the legendaries.
Let's also make the object factories not create the objects correctly, and make sure that report includes entries for orders that don't include any actual payments. Oh, their status? "Ready to send" of course! Let's send that totally valid $0.00 to nobody!
Oh, but Root. Root, root, root. You can't ADD payments to this. no no no. if you do, it'll break specs everywhere else that uses that factory! Shame on you for suggesting it.
Pssh, now you want to make a payment just for this report? Why would you do that? Our best devs have been working on this for years! What could you possibly know that they don't? No, they're perfect. Don't touch them. Just make them better, okay? No take, only throw!5 -
Stupid javascript.
Stupid hoisting-oblivious "frontend devs."
Stupid browser-specific javascript behavior.
Stupid thrown-together javascript minifier that literally only strips out whitespace and comments.
Stupid poorly-written javascript spamming my api.
Time to rewrite it. Grumble grumble. Soo not how I wanted to spend my morning-turn-afternoon.
Leading to the last but not least:
Stupid me forgetting javascript's quirks.12 -
My superpower:
The ability to work on huge, complex projects/features without ever getting burned out.
In lieu of that, foregoing the need to sleep! -
Please fix this @dfox :<
When opening devRant after having my phone locked for awhile, the app freezes for 30-180 sec. It usually recovers, but not always. It's painful 🙁17 -
Poorly written docs.
I've been fighting with the Epson T88VI printer webconfig api for five hours now.
The official TM-T88VI WebConfig API User's Manual tells me how to configure their printer via the API... but it does so without complete examples. Most of it is there, but the actual format of the API call is missing.
It's basically: call `API_URL` with GET to get the printer's config data (works). Call it with PUT to set the data! ... except no matter what I try, I get either a 401:Unauthorized (despite correct credentials), 403:Forbidden (again...), or an "Invalid Parameter" response.
I have no idea how to do this.
I've tried literally every combination of params, nesting, json formatting, etc. I can think of. Nothing bloody works!
All it would have taken to save me so many hours of trouble is a single complete example. Ten minutes' effort on their part. tops.
asjdf;ahgwjklfjasdg;kh.5 -
My phone is finally giving up.
It's broken beyond repair, and the screen is starting to fail completely. I managed to fix it enough to pull my data off, and post this.
It's been my reliable companion for years, and we've gone through a lot together. You will be missed, Glassy. 🙁12 -
After eating nothing but fresh food/ingredients for the past year, I ordered a carne asada burrito from Cafe Rio. I remember liking them, and it tastes just like I remember, but I'm amazed at how little flavor it has by comparison. It's maybe a third as flavorful as my salads? A quarter? ☹
Eating well really spoils you.7 -
I've run into my first nVidia driver issues. Ever. ☹
I'm attempting to install the drivers on my shiny new Dell XPS15 8750. It has both an Intel (default) and nVidia graphics card; the Intel works just fine out of the box with Nouveau, with terrible fps. Installing the nVidia drivers causes a conflict with those, and X just displays a black screen. I can still interact via the virtual terminals, but with a 4k display it's kind of annoying.
I'm currently trying to install nvidia-bumblebee and related crap, bur it is not going well.15 -
1) Schedule an hour for the meeting.
2) Tell attendees that any excess time will be for SSBB throwdowns. Fastest meeting ever.
Oh, you asked about being productive?
Making both Adam from frontend and Karen from HR cry at the same time is productive enough for me. 😊4 -
I was talking with a guy who is making an android app for his thesis but hes "shitdamn awful in java". I offered to help because im so fucking nice.
"oh but i dont have facebook, is it a problem?"
Nah sure i dont use facebook anyways, got telegram?
"No"
Riot? Irc?
"Nope"
Then what do you use???
"Skype"
?!!?!??!??!!???!??!7 -
This feature I'm building requires crossing over to a second application for some actions (fair, this reduces repetition), but the method used for it is kind of ridiculous.
To keep with the existing patterns, I followed suit, and added two PATCH and a DELETE routes, wrappers, and calls. (Typical CRUD + de/reactivate).
But. This freaking halfassed HTTP model doesn't support anything but POST and PUT! wtf. (Also, the various IDs, naming schemes, and required json data/formats differ across view, controller, and endpoints. but whatever?)
Two and a half hours later, and the feature is done and works wonderfully. Four times the functionality of the previous incarnation, and the code is only about 25% longer! haha.
Ahh, I'm complimenting myself again. (but somebody has to, right? 😅)
but really, when i want to get something done i'm actually surprised at how quickly it all comes together. Even when I need to patch API Guy's madness.
(and this time I actually found someone else's code in the mess! It was actually worse!)
I suppose taking a day off yesterday did me some good.rant double entendres are the best rest after rest root compliments herself expanding someone else's crud1 -
This freaking laptop.
The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.
The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.
The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.
nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.
In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.
Just. It's frustrating.
It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.28 -
Out of necessity (or rather: lack of support) I've been neglecting my test suite for the past ~month. Now that one of the beta versions of RSpec has better Rails 6 support, I can finally get back to writing tests. Yay!
I just merged staging into my testing branch, and it's now 344 commits ahead of origin! eep.
So, I've got lots of tests to write. yay.random root loves her tests test suite yay! i didn't break anything! rspec root talks in third person in the tags surprise!3 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
Spent an hour and a half renaming a method everywhere in a project from `feature_name` to `feature_name!`. There are a lot of constants, symbols, and other methods that use "feature_name" as a prefix (plus comments and spec descriptions), so was a little more difficult than normal.
Should have taken like 5 minutes with a proper IDE refactor tool. but noo, it was too difficult for RubyMine. wah wah wah. Stupid thing. Not even the search tool was useful -- it's limited to 100 results, and there were around 250 for that substring.
I ended up having to run specs repeatedly to find all the remaining instances, which took freaking forever. blahhh20 -
Ticket user story:
“Brown Chicken Report A and B do not include rows for Blue Chickens. I want to see Blue Chickens in both Brown Chicken reports.”
Ticket summary:
“Currently, the Brown Chickens reports mentioned above do not accurately report Blue Chickens. The columns P and Q are incorrect and need to be updated. See below:
<Copy/pasted table from All Animals Report showing a White Chicken>”
———
Are you okay? Do you have brain damage?
(Also: Blue Chickens are not supported and do not exist)6 -
Cool, so it looks like updating my nVidia drivers somehow killed LUKS on my machine? or whatever happens immediately after decrypting the volume group; honestly can’t tell.
To the uninitiated, this means my machine no longer boots. Like, at all.
Looks like I’m spending tomorrow reverting. 😕10 -
!rant
!!devRant
Is it just my device, or are images not loading?
I've seen maybe ten image posts today, and only the Firefox one would load.4 -
`npx create-react-app blah`
`cdls blah && npm audit`
63 vulnerabilities.
good fucking job.
To be fair, they're all minor, but they're all *exactly* the same, caused by the same freaking package. Update your dependencies already!
------
`npm i --save formik && npm audit`
68 vulnerabilities, three of them critical.
ugh.6 -
Boss: <Commits odd and breaking changes to my specs>
Boss: How did these specs of yours ever pass!?
Boss: That's not how this gem works!
Boss: <Doesn't mention that the gem was updated well after I finished the ticket>
Boss: Go fix your specs!
...2 -
We share a fate, trapped on a page by the author of our world’s demise. In your eyes I see the pain, your targets slain, I will be the whispers in your mind, the demon inside.
Don’t let down your guard, let in the darkness. You will defeat this trial of ancient gods. Take me in spirit, demon adherent. When you’re the last one to survive. Spirit, stay gentle, next monumental. Will you keep the fire alive?
I, with the power inside, set an end to these lies from the deep and the quiet. Sleep, my old enemy, let an end come to me. traveler please let me fade.10 -
My rants have been too long lately. Have some distilled ire instead.
Fuck computer gremlins.
Fuck non-deterministic BS.
Fuck shit working the third fucking time I try it with no changes in between.
Fuck MojoJojoing
Fuck ExecJS laoding only half the time
Fuck RubyMine for fucking up seven times a fucking day.
And fuck this dev environment!
I just want to fucking work!
adfjlkasdly15