Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

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.

It's always the same shit with some developers. Someone notices that an app is calling an API way too much, causing it to throttle. This is caused by a UI that does ~100-400 HTTP requests when you open a page. Someone comes and offers multiple solutions to cut down those requests by changing the UI behavior, dropping the request amount to less than 10% or maybe even zero.

Then comes one developer "WhY cAn'T We bAtCh thE ReQueSts?" Well, you fucking blockhead, what's the point in rendering 300 items on a page anyway when at any given time a user can maybe see five of them on his screen? These numbskulls have zero idea of how to solve technical issues with simple UX tweaks. Learn some UI/UX design if you're a front-end developer ffs.

My worst interview ever was my first interview fresh out of college. After the initial phone screen, they asked me to drive 2 hours to their office to give me a "code challenge."

The challenge was to spend 4 hours writing a simple rest API for a blog type thing, but the catch was to not use any existing libraries for data access and instead write an entirely database agnostic DAL. Then after I finished they sat me in a conference room with 3 of their engineers and the CEO to just tear apart my code.
For a JUNIOR position to someone fresh out of college.

I guess I defended it well, because they asked to continue the process l, but after that I found a different position.

Brain: it'd be cool if we could just specify vertex positions in 3D space using only bytes.

Me: what are you smoking?

Brain: bitch, what are YOU smoking. I got the big plan, it's gonna be sexy. Trust me.

Me: I don't know man. Kinda nice using floats.

Brain: 80,80,00,FF,00,7F,00,FF,7F,80,00,FF;

Me: what's that?

Brain: it's a triangle across the screen

Me: are you sure?

Brain: relax, bitch. I know what I'm doing.

Me: we'll see about that...

*writes some boiler*

Me: holy shit that IS a triangle across the screen

Brain: told ya, bitch. I've unlocked my powers -- now go get some fucking money.

Technology never stops to amaze me.

I bought hdmi stick with nes emulator, connected it to power using usb on my tv directly no power adapter needed - only cable, it has 2 remote pads powered by batteries, all fits into my pocket and it has removable sdcard that I can connect to my computer and upload games.
I can go to someone’s house, bring up this little fella and we can play games together. It only took 40 years to do it.

Damn I remember playing, mario, contra or micro machines as a kid.

Spent 8+ hours playing great old games already lol.

I just need portable 60 inch tv screen or projection screen and battery that would power it for at least 8 hours and fit to my pocket and my life is complete.

Imagine you go to the bar, sit, grab a beer and play mario with random people all night.

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

I was 8 years old the boy in the block invited me said I have something to show you. His parents bought him a Macintosh. He typed my name on the black screen and there was a response.
He said look it says “How are you?” And I was mesmerised got so excited I was like wow 😲
Guess what the text was actually saying? syntax error 😂 Little did I know at that time!!
I went home and told my parents, can you believe what I’ve seen today?? Computer responded me talked to me!!
On my birthday I got a Commodore 64 that year and the story begun.

Don’t forget to wait for this screen before you press the shutdown button.

Why THE FUCK is screen mirroring without being in the same wifi network a thing?

Why THE FUCK have all these smart tvs turned this on by default?

Why THE FUCK does the list of found devices SORT itself RANDOMLY if another device is found.

I probably mirrored my phone screen to a random tv in the neighbourhood because as soon as my finger was about to touch the name of my tv, a random tv swooshed into it's place.

WHAT THE FUCK THERE IS NO FUCKING NEED FOR THIS FEATURE IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ACCESS POINT AROUND, THERE WILL BE ONE IN 99% OF ALL POSSIBLE USE CASES.

I mean if I got it right, i can share porn with my neighbors now, or at least annoy them?

I'm forced by my job to use this fucking unusable piece of horse shit also know as a Windows operating system.

And it's not only that I have experienced every fucking corner case bug that is possible to occur in our universe.

Not only that that for last 2 years I seen more blue screen than blue sky.

Not only that forced updates fucked my schedules so many times that now I'm really *afraid* to turn off my computer off because I have zero guarantee that I will be able to restart it in a reasonable amount of time.

No, neither of those broke me.

The thing that kills me everyday is, piece by piece ...

WHY THE FUCK THERE IS NO SINGLE, USEABLE, SANE TERMINAL EMULATOR ON WINDOWS

I JUST WANT TO TYPE SOME COMMANDS, COPY/PASTE TEXT AND SCROLL

IS IT TO MUCH ?????

FUCK CMD
FUCK POWERSHELL
FUCK WSL
FUCK ALL THOSE WANKY THIRD-PARTY EMULATORS
FUCK EVERY-COMMAND-LINE-REALATED THING ON WINDOWS

FUCKING USLESS SHIT
CANT EVEN DO SOME SSH COPY/PASTE SHIT
WITHOUT SOME WEIRD CHARACTERS POPING OUT EVERYWHERE.

AND FUCK THAT EVERY ONE OF THOSE MUST HAVE TOTTALY DIFFERENT SET OF KEY SHORTCUTS

AND THAT FUCKING BELL
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN PUT A FUCKING BELL SOUND AS DEFAULT SETTING ??

GO TO HELL MICROSOFT

I WANT MY LINUX BACK

Being rejected as "unprofessional" for explaining that I don't want to rush a decision 2 days before Christmas. By the guy who, I kid you not, showed their EKS credentials on screen during a recorded online interview. Kinda glad I dodged that one now that I'm looking back...

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

OMFG, Dell, why can't you be normal and make your batteries die like any other batteries - by simply switching the laptop off immediately when the charger is unplugged???

Guess what it looks like when a JD25G (XPS13 9530) battery is dying (still 88% health)!

Constant screen flickering (yes, even in BIOS). Good thing I'm not an epileptic - my screen is fucking strobing!!!

I know it's a battery, because I had the same issue some years ago when I replaced the died original one with a cheapo made by GreenCell. Boi that was fun - I saw my laptop do miraculous things I never would've thought of! Screen flickering was one of them. As soon as I replaced that turd with an original one all these magic powers went away.

Windows is not full of surprises. One can expect the (light) blue screen.

(Picture in comments because it stretches like yo mama pussy in the post)

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

Is getting a screen I can use OpenGL calls on and NOTHING ELSE supposed to be this fucking confusing or am I just an idiot.

My last night :
- Had nothing much to work on
- Opened an anime site to spend sometime.
- Clicked on some really good shows.
- Realized full screen isn't working on that page.
- Fired up JS Console , spent next 30 minutes trying to get the video part full screen. Failed!!
- Opened up Google & navigated through stackoverflow looking for the fix. Still couldn't do it.
- Cursed the website for having a bad design.
- Left the site.

Anybody else work dual screen and every once in a while thinks.
You know want, I need a third screen!

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

Dear Apple, You made an amazing UI but Windows sure does beat you in terms of ease of use.

So my company provided us with Macbooks, I've been a windows users for almost 7-8 years now.

The thing I want to rant about is how we cannot switch between same application windows in full screen.

In Windows, you press tab, voila, the other full screen window. For instance, I want to use 2 google chrome "full" size windows, I cannot just press tab and view the other one, Like whaaaat!
There should be a provision to use the other window of the same application.

The same thins is so easily done in windows machine.

The blue screen of death

When it comes to using XCode, I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s a stupidly large file. Took a whole day to download, I know having a WiFi speed of 20Mb/s isn’t great but on a brand new iMac with nothing else installed you’d except it to download and install pretty quickly.

Also what is it with the Mac and things not wanting to be full screen??

What kind of shit fucking dickhead decided it was a good idea to make 10 seconds the default screen timeout turn off setting? I'm fucking reading shit and the screen turns off you faggot cunt ass eating pieces of fucking deadbeat horse manure bull fucking shit artist fucking cunts of whores you mother fuckers grow some fucking brains fuck you oppo you fuckheads

I formatted this code with my own code and one day I will format my formatting code with itself.

Chicken and egg *intensifies*

Also look at my stupid color scheme.
54 characters per row.
3 cool 5 me.

My manager sent me a Desktop screen without informing me and I also didn't ask for the same. Now, he wants me to use it. And i am like, WTF 😡😡. Who the fuck told you in ur dreams to send me this shit.

I was 7 years old, and my mom’s friend brought me their old computer as a new year present. I was absolutely happy that day, because I wanted my own computer as far back as I can remember. I spent that evening exploring russian psychological (!) sex quiz (!!) with pictures (!!!) :D I found it on C:\

Actually no, there is an earlier memory. I was four, and I really wanted to mess around with my sis’ computer, it was some kind of holiday, maybe the new year as well. They won’t let me do it, and being an engineer, I took a rectangle-shaped candy box and made a “laptop” out of it. I remember drawing the screen, the icons and stuff. And plastic mold that actually handles candy, I turned upside down, and the candy cavities became sort of “buttons” I could press.

So i have been thinking of buying a MacBook, but am pretty concerned since it currently does not favour my work and interests. I constantly require various emulators of lower sdks as well as emulators of TV/watch for company work. and i have interest in backend/containers , for which i have heard that m1 does not support virtualisation yet. Can anyone share there experience in this domain? Like what is the expected timeline for a processor like m1 to become mainstream and supported by softwares? its 2 years already and macbooks are currently the fastest available laptops, but only for a limited softwares

Google is doing its best but very slowly. I can see on my company's m1 that a very few emulator images are supported by armv8a but their forums say they are actively working on it. weirdly , they have a decent support for many intel processors. I think an i911th gen laptop will also come under the same budget as m1 pro 32gb but don't know which company laptop to buy that isn't a plastic hotshit. I am also not sure about ryzen based processors. heard they are very nice and power friendly , but they pose the same concerns as m1 i guess (docker/virtual box users , anyone?)

My other concern with a non apple laptop is the battery. do you peeps' laptops give any decent battery timings? I hate windows/linux laptops for many reasons, but shitty display, ugly hangs and poor battery are my main "am out" areas.

Source: currently struggling with a 3 years old HP pavillion laptop whose battery goes out in 50 mins and whose screen is so shitty that i can see pixels through a text word and the letters are all blurry and worn out

My first computer was an old Pentium 2 running windows 98 with no internet and just a CD Rom and Floppy Drive. Got it for my 7th Birthday I think and immediately wanted to make it do my biding.

Didn't work out. Had no clue what the words on screen meant and batch scripts looked like sorcery to me.
Hell even the options menu in German was a cryptic puzzle to me.

Got a little better in the meantime.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

How fucking hard can it be to show a simple image. Guess which app has this feature.

Images are cropped to frame, but you can tap to fit the whole image to frame instead. No way to see the image on full screen. Pinch to zoom works, but it will immediately unzoom if you let go even one finger.

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?

When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.

When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.

A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.

Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).

Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.

1997 Olivetti, 122 MHz Intel processor, 8MB RAM and 1GB HDD and Win 95. I mostly used software for children learning and games.

But my first “computer” was a shoebox with a keyboard drawn by hand on the cover and a screen on the bottom where I could change the “software” by swapping different drawings inside a transparent envelope.

All hardware and software made by me 😁

Anyone else get frustrated by the dust that sits on top of your computer?
Fuck me but I fucking hate this dusty shit, keep cleaning the screen and the keypad but oh well, next time I open there it is - all in its glory.
And there's this fucking constant worry that shit that dust might've gotten inside the laptop and now the performance is gonna fuck up.
SO FUCKING IRRITATING AARGH

Does it make sense to buy a Nintendo Switch second hand? What should I look for, besides that the console is clean and the screen has no burn-ins or dead spots?

Steering to regret that I traded in my 4a 5g....

Now, feel it would've been more useful now if I kept it as a backup in case something happened to the P6 Pro...

Fucking curved screens and on screen scanner...

Still haven't dropped the $$$$ to get a screen protector...

ugh... laptops are like , crazy addictions.

1 year ago, my hp laptop was the best for me, building android studio apps , keeping daily backups of all my home's appliances comfortably in it, running games and various softwares . i would carry it anywhere without fearing of any damage thanks to heavy cases and keyboard covers.

till i started my first job who gave me an intel mac to work with.I got a revised definition of a laptop. laptops are not what i knew .

- a laptop is something which does not take 20+ minutes to build android apps and can build in 60 seconds too
- a laptop is something which does not need to have a shitty plastic body and can have a high quality metal body.
- a laptop is something which does not need to have a shitty screen and can have a really clear (but fragile /s) HQ screen.

and

- a laptop is something which does not necessarily gives you ports. /s

- a laptop is something which does not necessarily needs large storage to store your stuff. /s

- INR 60K (or half of my 1st year college fees) isn't apparently not enough for a laptop

- a laptop can cost TONS to get fixed /s

.....

now , i did have learned all this and even after all the flaws , i feel like inclined towards buying a macbook. however coming from a typical lower class family from india , who DID break a laptop screen in 1 year, i am having some serious concerns buying a laptop , a 16 inch piece of aluminium for 300K (almost the cost of my four years of graduation)

but compared to that , i also have concerns buying any laptop above 100k because that's a lot of money , even though I could afford it. the whole point is, my non tech grocery seller parents worked too hard for very less money . i am in tech profile, i believe my work is not that much physically intensive, and i work half as hard as those guys , nd earn good yet spending SO MUCH feels like being an idiot

oh the headache :/

so i want to learn web dev basics. why tags behave the way they do ? why the need for a head tag, why some tags show on output while some don't . why doctype tag exists,... lots of stupid beginner questions. I can't just go with the flow and suddenly realize that i have been putting js scripts at the wrong place my whole life. or some crazy css magic can make screen shatter animations.

I wanna learn everything from scratch. what is the best place to learn about it?

So far i have found mdn docs to be decent, but what is so wrong with them to organise stuff the way they did ? we have bread crumbs on screen which i expect to work backwards, like if i select b from a>b>c.html , i expect to reach page b whch should be an index of all the pages. but instead, b is a link to a whole new page with a list of totally different wepbages to follow.
Any easier way to follow mdn ? or something better than mdn ?

When I do programming work from home, I put up a picture of my wife on my secondary screen.

I mean my imaginary wife cause I got no real wife.

Upvote if you agree 👌