Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Me: *sends email 45 minutes before a meeting*.

Boss: *20 mins into meeting*, any updates about the issues found yesterday?

Me: Yep I sent an email with an update on everything.

Boss: ok great, *shares screen*, *opens email*.

Ok want to walk us through it?

Me: ...... walk through my email?

Boss: Yeah we have everyone here in the meeting.

Me: ...... yeah I included all of them on the email.

Boss: Right, but it would be good to go through it for everyone’s benefit.

Me: *Reads email word for word, from the screen share*

I will now refer to him from this day forth as “The Time Vampire”.

Just a joke I found online:

One day I was facing some issue with Outlook and I raised a ticket to get it resolved. I got a call from the Service Desk lady after some time and it went this way:

Lady: Hi I'm calling from service desk, what is the problem?

Me: (I explained the problem).

Lady: Can you please share your screen and give me the control so that I can solve the issue?

Me: (I shared the screen and gave the control. She solved it!!)

Lady: You may close the ticket from your end, the issue is solved.

Me: Thank you very much, I will close the ticket.

I opened her profile in lync and had a look at her profile. The display pic looked small in size. I instantly messaged her Employee ID to my colleague and asked him to have a look at her. He replied "She looks good in some angles".

I tried searching her FB profile with the help of her name, but there were too many results.

I started searching on Linked In instead, I found her profile this time. I was trying to enlarge the profile pic and suddenly a message popped up - it says

"I'll share my better picture with you on your outlook ID but you may please stop sharing your screen??"
😂

Manager on the meeting room suddenly talking to me:
Coffe2Code, share your screen please to show us the progress.

Me: *minifies all windows fastly and plugs the laptop to the big screen *

Manager : we start with documentation, open the world file that you sent to me.

Me: *opens word*
Word: *freezing on my CV that I was editing for another job application*

Me: ...
Manager: ...

Word: oh everyone seen the CV? cool here your document

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!

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

Yesterday I used a company service account to email over 1,000 internal employees (mostly application managers and the like) about an old OS version their servers are using which must be upgraded in a few months. It's an automated email that will repeat each month until the servers are upgraded.

That is not the part that might get me fired.

The part that might get me fired is an easter egg I left in the html content of the email itself.

In the embedded html of the message, I buried a comment block that contains a full-screen ascii-art drawing of a spooky tree and grim reaper standing beside a tombstone. The tombstone has the OS info and dates on it. Beneath the ascii-art is a bastardized quote in homage to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", referring to the OS end-of-life.

The ascii-art is visible in both the html and the internal git repo that contains the email template.

This is a bit of a shoe-horn for this weekly group rant, as I doubt there is any chance I would really be fired over this, as I (sadly) expect that absolutely NO ONE who receives the messages will ever actually see the comments. But it's out there in the corporate network now... and will be sent over and over for the next few months...

There is a better chance someone may catch the easter egg in the git repo, but I kind-of doubt that, too - so I wanted to at least share with my devRant friends that it's out there, so at least someone else knows than just me. 😝

Life of an IT guy

1.Born
2.Study
3.Job
4.Shall I share my screen?.
5.Are you able to see my screen?
6.Am I audible ?
7.Correct me if I'm wrong
8.Sorry I was on mute
9.Ok.. I am sending that email.
10.Did you receive my email?
11.I am on a sick leave.
12.Death

Pretty much it!

Colleague started to share their screen

Me: screen is not visible to be

Them: let me just increase the brightness of my monitor

I have to share because I'm so confused at the moment. After troubleshooting for months trying to figure out why my laptop would randomly go into sleep mode, as I was typing. (Imagine my frustrations working on exam projects to have the screen just go black on me every 30 seconds.)

Today I found a post on the Dell forums by another person with the same problem. Apparently a magnetic closure on my bracelet triggered a sensor to think I had shut the lid on my laptop. What. The. Fuck. Guess that explains why it would only happen sometimes, as I don't wear this bracelet often 🙃🔫 definitely the funniest and weirdest problem I've ever had with a laptop.

!Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life of an IT guy

1.Born
2.Shall I share my screen?. Are you able to see my screen?
3.Death

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.

I built very involved code with multiple auth systems, async programming, business logic, error handling, and etc. I was asking for the missing environment variables during the call with devops and had a screen share going. Environment variables were the last thing I needed before knowing if it would work. I filled in the config and all the code worked perfectly.

The devs lost their shit. One suggested that I had somehow tested it beforehand because it is impossible that it would work the first time. “How? I didn’t have config details or access to any of the remote APIs until now.”

The dev lead finished the call with, “That was some big brain next level shit.” Then they went and reviewed and tested it after the call and didn’t have much to suggest besides naming nitpicks.

It was at that point I knew I was a hero to the other devs.

#TheCoronaEffect

Before Corona: (Work From Office)

Boss: Let's have a call.
Me: Sure, allow me some time I am assisting the team on a new feature in the app.
Boss: Ok, ping me as you get free.

----------------------------------------------------------

Now: (Work From Home)

Boss: ***Calls for the 15th time in a day...***
Me: (With Bleeding Ears) Yes sir, am here...!
(Having to pick up every single time as he knows you've got nowhere to go 'coz the whole city is in LockDown)
Boss: ***Talks for another 1 hour with screen share***

My Boss is a bigger threat to my health than Corona now!!!

#GoCoronaGo

Currently on the train to work:
*Guy pulls out his laptop

Me: *Oh nice. Dell laptop. Oh wait, shoot, that’s a Dell XPS 15. 😎Sweet!! Looks super clean. Get it boss, I salute you. Anyway, it’s probably running Windows 10 as expected. It’d be super cool if it run Ubuntu though.

*Guy lifts laptop lid.

Me: *Ahh, look how clean it is too. No fingerprints or smudges on the screen or keyboard. That’s my style. I like this guy. We can definitely share laptops.

*Guy powers on laptop

Me:*Woooooohooooo, no way!!! Gets a little tear of joy in my eyes. I want to hug this guy. This guy rocks. Oh mann, I want to start a conversation with him but can’t because another passenger is standing between us.

*The laptop run Ubuntu! 😍😱😁

import LongRantKit
import NonRantKit
import TldrKit

I don't like stickers on my laptop because it clutters it up. But today I realized the importance of them.

A few months ago I was sitting at a coffee shop working on a paper and I noticed a guy with this cool sticker on a MacBook Pro: it had the integral symbol to the left of the Apple logo, and to the right of it a lowercase d and another Apple logo. It took me a few hours to realize what it meant, but I finally did and at that point I also guessed that not many people know what it is.

So I, as antisocial as I am, I finish up my work and before I leave I walk up to him and say hi. At this point I'm a senior in high school and I learn he's a junior in the same college I plan to attend. We talked a little before I had to leave and got to know each other somewhat.

After I leave I find him on Instagram and Facebook and friend him and such.

Recently I posted a picture saying I had recently joined the Apple Developer Team, and also recently reposted a memory on Facebook from 5 years ago that was a screen capture of an iPhone 4 simulator running iOS 5 showing off one of my first apps.

Then yesterday I get a message from the guy I met at the coffee shop asking for some help with an iOS project he's working on. We decide to meet today and I spend the entire morning showing him the basics of Swift, Xcode, Interface Builder, etc. I feel like I really helped him jumpstart his app and helped him understand the basics of different concepts.

If he didn't have that integral sticker on his laptop I would have never had this opportunity to finally share some iOS development experience.

For this I would like to thank my high school calculus teacher, with whom I spent many classes at Starbucks because I was an only student. I'd like to thank laptop stickers, and finally I would like to thank the coffee shop.

TL;DR: Said hi to a guy with an integral sticker on his laptop, a few months later he approaches me for help understanding iOS development.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

Today I found my sister take a photo of her laptop screen with ms word open to share her class report which is just pure text file

I really hate it when people asks for help on forums and mailing lists by taking a screen capture of code instead of pasting the text or using a gist or pastebin or any other USEFUL way to share code.

If you think meetings are bad.

Have a day full of license renewal and price negotiation talks regarding technical products.

It's funny how you can blatantly say: We don't need feature XYZ, we get it for free via BLA.... Yet they still present it in all glory.

Even better when they don't even know their alternative / competition products...

X: "our tool is better".
Me: "We have tool XY. Doesn't cost a penny, does the same, we don't need your tool".
X: "No it doesn't. Look at all the features we have *screen share presentation* with long explanations".
Y: "Yeah... You've certain additional features, but the basics are all present in the tool that we use, so my statement remains the same".

These meetings are really mind boggling insane.

Even more insane when you get the price offers.

The cloud only madness is absurd.

Sure, we move 50 terabyte plus to the cloud from premise, no problem. *🤡*

Not that we haven't told them explicitly that cloud only isn't possible....

The worst: every motherfucking company does it for every stupid single craptastic product...

You cannot even swoop it up in a single meeting... Every company. Every single product.

*booze liberate me from madness and remove the filthy stain of humanity*

Things I learnt by attending meetings from home:

* Wear pants even if no one can see them
* After meeting is done, turn off your computer to ensure it has ended.
* Mute and screen share is not reliable
* Tell your family members that you will have a meeting so they do not do anything weird.

Client : We have performance issues on <this> page.

US : Testing with their data on : Xeon : All good, Core i7 : all good, Core i5 : all good, A smartphone : all good, core i5 UM version from 5 years ago (You know, 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, not 4) : all good.

US : Could you share your screen and show us ?

Client : Sure ! Shares his screen. Chrome is already opened. Refreshes the page, after 15 seconds, chrome : Would you like to stop script on this page ?”

US with mic on mute : “WTF?! It cannot happen here. It’s only a list of about 500 rows!”.

US : “Hello, could you open a tasks manager?”

Client : “ Sure, but I need to do it through here”

Some random VID interface popping up. Opens tasks manager with a beautiful “48 vCPUs detected”.

I have no idea how their virtualization is settled, but it seems to be messed up. Tomorrow going to be fun. I have a call at 9am to explain them their problem. Their IT will hate me forever.

If anyone has tips on Chrome through virtualization, please tell me.

EDIT : Yes 48. Not 4-8. It's not an error

My friend a backend dev who manages a little UI by using bootstrap themes. One Saturday he calls me up says "Dude, I need your help, we had a demo and the CEO decides to demo the project to prospective people on Internet Explorer. It looked alright on Chrome but the whole UI has gone haywire on IE. Need your help asap. Join me on screen share". I checkout his HTML code and find a file where the link tag is inside the body tag. I ask him to move that into head tag as in wherever the master template is, I tell him to change the doctype, add responsive meta tags, and even after all these, it just doesn't render bootstraps media queries. After beating my head for around 15mins, I see a drop-down caret in IE's inspector with 7 besides it, someone had set the compatibility mode to IE7. Why in the world would someone set an IE11 to IE7.
My friend heaved a sigh of relief and walked to his boss to show that he isn't a bad developer, his boss is just a bad user.

That awkward moment when your family and friends sit behind you and ask questions;

What is this you're typing on the screen?

Why words have different colors?

Why so many tabs?

How do you type so fast?

....... and more

Share yours.

I just want to share my very first companion. Haha... This is btw my laptop way back 2011, used it to store highschool memories and silly stuff, if you know what I mean. This is the laptop that I first used the labrynth of directories such as A folder contains A to z Folder and again inside one of those contains A to z again lowered and upper. This is also my partner in coding C++ back in the days, I usually write code in paper and when back to school I used our lab's computer. Ohh and I also have my anime addiction started on this too! One time I discovered the side VGA and connected it to our big LCD screen but by the time I plugged it in, it produce explosive sounds, and my grandpa said that that lcd tv is only for 110v not for 220v. I learned the importance of voltages that day. I just went back and open it to backup my highschool memories and stuff to my external hdd. Ahhhhh memories.

Ok might as well share my misadventure on a phone screen:

It started pretty normal, the guy talks about his background, the position, and asked me about my background.

Move on to the language trivia; I’m not good at memorizing language features, but I guess it’s what people want, so I’ll be working on that down the road… Anyways it didn’t go well, and the guy somehow made me feel like an idiot even on the questions I got right.

It’s really awkward at this point… but let me tell you I was not prepared for what I can only describe as the fucking coding portion of the phone screen…

No computer. No pencil or paper. No whiteboard. Over the phone I’m saying: “class Dog with a capital ‘D’ colon newline tab def space bark open parentheses close parentheses….”

what the actual fuck

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?

📱ANYONE INTERESTED IN A HOME SCREEN THREAD? (!RANT) SEE THE COMENTS AND SHARE YOUR HOME SCREENS!

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Had to refresh a group session in my program, spent 15 minutes looking at my phone, put my bare feet on my desk and did this thing where I lean back in my chair and stick both hands in my pants, possibly smelled one. Thats when I realized my camera was on the entire time. Was also the only other person on stage/presenting so my screen was directly next to the instructors face cam.

Having heart attack during "share screen" session cause Proxmox' icon looks like some porn site's icon

I've had my share of "Hey you know computers, right?".
When I was getting my degree I drove a taxi on the weekends.
My boss calls me:
"Hey, my laptop is acting weird, could you have a look?"
Curious; I ask what it's doing.
"There's a pair of sunglasses covering the entire screen. Maybe it's a bra, I don't know."
Wtf?
When I left the taxi at his house, I had a look. I start the computer, Windows boots up, and sure enough, it looks like a pair of sunglasses is covering the screen, kind of.
I also notice a crack in the screen from top to bottom.
"So what kind of virus is this?!"

He felt stupid when I told him what the problem was. I ordered a new screen and replaced it for him and told him not to sit on his laptop again. 😜

Share your look-busy scripts

I'm talking about some script, or command(s) which output impressive garbage to the screen. For instance, `tree / | od` or `ping google.ca | xxd` might be enough to dazzle an executive, but to really ensnare a fellow dev, you need to get a bit more complex.

So let's see those scripts! From stupid simple, to application-level complex, I wanna see 'em all! :D

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

I’m on a screen share watching an offshore associate copy code from my email to the target script...

... by switching back and forth between windows and typing in the code...

Is COPY-PASTE a little too advanced for this team???

Once in corporate stuffy devland a major monopoly-in-their-field client was raging at our tiny company and trying to scrutinize everything we did for whatever reason

The client's head huncho, some department head below the execs or something, insisted he have a code review meeting with the lead developer, which was me, and scrutinize my code in a 2 hour impromptu meeting one random Tuesday. Up until this point I was not allowed to even be introduced to the client so I'm a little ticked my company is throwing me under the bus like this.

So I get into this call, share my screen, guy is raging and asking questions left and right about every line I had written, firing, fuming, shouting... But it's clear he doesn't know how code works. So then I start teaching him how variable assignments work and function calls... He got so bored he left the meeting in 30 minutes and it was never spoken of again lmao

I was getting assistance over screen share to install an application on my work computer. The person helping me was sending commands through chat for me to enter into command prompt.

At one point I needed to change directory but it didn’t work. I asked what the problem was and they responded with D:

My immediate thought was that I’d done something terribly wrong and irreversible, until it became clear they were just having me switch to the D drive.

Using Zoom to share my screen so my colleague can use his Skype Business to record the Zoom window so that the other people can see my screen and I can call in using my phone

All because Linux does not have skype business :p

My new home office.

I haven't posted on DevRant in a while so thought I would share my new home office set up.

My old set up was great. Dual screen standing desk, fast desktop and great monitors.

Since having a new baby a few months back, the home office is now a nursery. My only option is to sit at the kitchen table or stand in the kitchen (I prefer standing).

So here it is, my new office. Laptop on a kids toy box, fit snugly between chopping boards and tomatoes.

And hey, I don't actually mind at all, I love my family.

Just remember that when life gives you tomatoes 🍅 ...

When you have standup meeting and your mates share the screen of His own hangout window

Share your phone or desktop home screen setups!

I’m on a screen share watching an offshore associate copy code from my email to the target script...

... by switching back and forth between windows and typing in the code...

Is COPY-PASTE a little to advanced for this team???

Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.

For starters, it's JavaScript, so you know this isn't gonna end well. Second, it's still in kinda beta phase for some browsers so you gotta add polyfills. Let's talk compatibility now. During normal days, yeah, I could ask for a couple of computers in the office, each using a different browser. But, covid. One browser mishbehaves and doesn't wanna share the camera with the other browser, so I can't really test a connection with the only 1 computer I have. I can't take my partner's computer all day to debug.

Solution: ask the marketing department or even the execs to video chat with you to test it on a staging server. So I push my changes to the server, wait for them to build, call my lab rat, check all the bugs, clean the code, push the changes back up. No fancy breakpoints. I'm doing the old style like my great uncle did. Oh wait no, he was pretty intelligent, but my lab rat isn't. They probably don't know what a console is. So no baby I'm not only talking about console logging the problems, I'm talking `alert` the heck out of the bugs - okay no, I'll just display the objects in the middle of the screen. The screen is my console.

Any HTML / Frontend designers here who could share their opinion on the following:

A company project of mine is basically a document store with a (deep) folder hierarchy.

The deep folder hierarchy is not negotiable / changeable.

However my brain fries when I try to come up with a - mobile friendly / responsible - design.

There are ~ 10 - 15 root folders, having a maximum of 3 subfolders, so:

Folder 1 -> Documents
Folder 1 -> Subfolder of 1 -> Documents
Folder 2 -> Subfolder of 2 -> Documents
...

Any ideas on howto design something like that?

Was thinking about using a top navigation for the folders and then the rest of the screen for the document information...
But with 15 elements in top navigation it would be hard to navigate on mobile I think....

The naming and everything else ist managed by the customer.

Any ideas?

let me preface with the fact that I'm now known at my new job for being the resident cli hipster. I can't lay any claims to knowing if it's "better" but I like it, I don't care if you do or don't, it just works for me and my flow

so at my job, we generally squash all our commits into one commit and delete the source branch upon merging; i accidentally committed all my work to an old, already merged branch, so my boss tells me it would be more of a PITA with the weird references we would encounter by merging the branch again, rather than just cherry pick the commits into a new branch, which i'm like "eh, fine.".

HIM: "You want to share your screen so we can resolve this?"
ME: "k"
HIM: "Oh, you won't be able to do this in a terminal, you are going to have to load up a GUI of some sort"
ME: "lawlz, no you don't"
HIM: "i highly doubt you will be able to accomplish that, but if you wanna make an ass of yourself, i'll humor you"
ME: "yeah, watch this"

> git log > log.txt
> git checkout <new branch>
> git cherry-pick <copy-paste-full-commit-hash-here>
> git push

ME: "done"
HIM: "what? there's no way you did it that easily, where are all your other commits???"
ME: "i usually try to amend my commits since we squash them anyhow. it really helps in situations like this"
HIM: "well, you go girl"

roll that up in your fancy degree and smoke it, why don't ya?

!rant && Android

I thought I found something on devrant app turn out it is an Android thing. Not sure if a bug or not.

I use Android 7.1.2 default keyboard . And Google place a small G logo at the top left corner of keyboard. Clicking that show the gif, emoji, language setting etc menu.

On devrant and a few apps I have tried, that G icon remains on the screen in a transparent and almost not visible state but at the same position after hiding the keyboard. Like a watermark.

At first I thought devrant app background has that mark. Even took a screenshot to share here. Turn out it doesn't show up on screenshot. Because when I zoomed in on the image, the icon remained at same position on screen. So it is showing on Google photo app as well.

Any of you guys have that issue?

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

Soo I've written some python code to test things for my soon starting bachelor thesis. I work with a little robot car I share with other people and use 2 cameras on it. Today I make the extra effort to go to the lab to test my things as there were too many people busy with the available cars yesterday.
Set it all up with ROS and my project as per usual just to see whether python fucks me over again ... nothing, ok what a surprise.
Good part: my python code seems to work flawlessly
Bad part: cameras don't work, although they don't throw any errors. Quick check with rqt_image_view ... everything seems fucked up, but not broken. Cameras not accessible as they should be, only 1 view available instead of the normal million modes and a blank grey camera stream on the screen. But no errors, nothing.🙄😪

I also wanted to capture some footage to test at home, well that's gone to shit. Now I had to simulate that using my phone camera ... while crouching.
Fuck ... me.

Has anyone else encountered this issue with installing a distro before?

So my colleague has installed Elementary OS 5.0 and he recommended me to do the same (on my personal dual boot laptop). However after the installation it doesn't reboot after clicking the button, and when I turn my laptop off and on again I get the grub as I should, choose elementary, I get the login screen all fine. But after logging in I only get the wallpaper and my cursor. I can't even open a terminal...

I've searched my ass off and everyone is saying to wait around 5 minutes before everything shows up after which you get to install graphic drivers. I've tried that but nothing happened so I just left it for the night hoping I could at least open a terminal in the morning, but there is still only the wallpaper and cursor.

I've tried pretty much anything at this point but I just can't get it to function. Is there anyone that has had such an issue before that could share a solution?

Control your searches like an ADULT damn it!!!

So we have records that can have any of a bazillion different reference numbers associated with them. No big deal. Everyone does right?

Our customer's love to run reports and so we have this one option for "just look at a hell of a lot of reference numbers". I call it the 'fuck all' search.

Really it is just there to find something that you don't know where a rando string or number might be in the record and just want to do a "fuck all" search across a number of likely fields to find it... and then presumably you'd be an adult and refine your search from there. LOL yeah right...

Customers get lazy and include that stupid option in their reports and we get a lot of.

Customer: "I always run this report (that includes the fuck all search) and now it isn't working. I want records that have ID 2222."

Me: "Yeah well that was only working because you were rando typing '2222' in like several fields and it would find those .... but now you quit doing that so it won't find them. If you want ID 2222, click the drop down and search by 'ID'. That will find it right away."

Customer: "But I want to just search by 'fuck all search' to find it..."

Me: "But then you get all these other records too right?"

Customer: "Yeah but I just delete them out of the spreadsheet ... "

Me: "Look watch this <screen share> there, look all records with an ID of 2222 and no more extra records you need to delete!!! How great is that?"

Customer: "But why do I have to do it this way now, I want to do it the old way..."

ಠ_ಠ

(granted I could add their ID to the fuck all search but we try to avoid adding too much because it gets out of hand / stops being useful the more fuck all it gets)

MORE WEBDEV ADVENTURES

Took a break for a while due to personal stuff. Just got a job (have to get a stupid work permit from school first to actually be able to work tho), had some shit happen with two close friends that now hate me. Right now I'm upset about something that another really good friend did. So I've been doing some webdev to distract myself for a bit.

So I'm turning my URL bar that I had into a little command bar. It'll be what I use to configure stuff along with URLS and shit. I was building a little config menu that I really hated doing, was just becoming too much of a mess. Currently changing the look of it just a bit, then I'm gonna work on the functionality of it later.

Made my weather divs dynamically generated. Turned like 65 lines in the HTML file to ~20 lines of JavaScript that makes that ~65 lines. And it turns out that it doesn't really affect the loading time at all, which was my original worry. My next task for that is to save the weather predictions so the script doesn't have to grab a whole 14kb file every reload (I know, that part's a little bad). The entire page with the icons and all comes out to ~30kb so far. The icons make up about half of that, but they'll never all be in use because only 5 are on screen at any time and there are 7 total. Plus the fact that one may be in use multiple times (like this very moment actually).

Then I want to have an RSS reader which I've been putting off for a while now. Trying to get everything else done before I do that.

At this very moment, the page takes about 1.4 seconds to load. I'm trying to avoid putting anything I don't need in it. Like I'm using vanilla everything. No frameworks or anything. But that's just my personal preference.

I'll make sure to share it with you guys when I have everything built and functional. I've had a lot of interruptions while doing this. My personal life tends to get in the way of shit I try to do, because I let it get to me.

Anyways I'm just rambling at this point. I fucking love you guys

Webex works great in firefox on linux now. That was the last thing I was using windows to do. So my siloed-off VM for webex can run linux now, and people will ask me WTF operating system I'm using when I share my screen.

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

I'm not real big on asking for help but I'm kinda nervous about applying for my first real programming gig. And I was hoping someone here would be willing to conduct a mock interview with me because I think it would help to get over my jitters and iron out where I might need to practice.

I'm applying for junior python and SQL based positions and I'd really appreciate if anyone would help me practice for an interview.

I'm available most hours Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and if you're willing you can contact me here or at email to setup a phone, screen share, or web interview.

My email is wisecrackdoesathing@protonmail.com

I've been running Linux on my laptop natively for five months (since the 2nd week I got here). My boss and everyone on my team is okay with this. I've used Linux at the last three companies I've been at since 2012.

All I asked for was a Windows VM so I could use WebEx (which I did at my last job; used Win10 in Virtual box just to share my screen via x11vnc and reset my password occasionally). At my last job, they said Linux users were on their own, but they at least gave us a Windows ISO, license and ability to connect it to the domain. It was a west coast company, with 500 people in IT and several Linux users. The IT team at my current shop has known I've been running Linux for months.

Now the word has come down that I can't have Linux on my laptop and I need to put macos back on it (it's actually on there; just dual booting) for security or some shit. We have a massive deadline and project due in like two months and it would throw me off for several days if I needed to bring in and setup a personal laptop.

Fuck asking our worthless IT department for anything. I told the lead engineer I'd bring in my personal laptop before going back to Mac.

Need UX opinion.

I need to make a menu which is a single point for everything. Hierarchical menus is the default nowdays, but they get tedious as the entries' list grows and clicks-to-goal can become high af very quickly.

By "single point for everything" I mean that there's only one menu, as tiny (screen-space-wise) as possible, containing hierarchy of options.

What are other options?

What's your opinion on radial menus? I often see them in games and various eye-candies. Radials would solve the overflowed-list problem with classic menus (as radials can have multiple layers of items around the core) and they seem tiny. And I can easily imagine them in touch-enabled devices. How bad are they irl? Are they used in web or just in native apps? What are the trends?

I did my share of research but there's surprisingly little info covering this tool :)

I just moved into a new house that I share with some people and these people have a cat. I was quietly watching videos when the cat decided she wanted to be petted, so, logically, she stepped into my keyboard and trackpad and somehow managed to mute the video, restart it and exit full screen.

I must remember to close the door when I'm doing anything important.

Anyone know of a free screen sharing application for Windows for mirroring my Android device. Vysor is ok but I don't want to pay for anything. Ive tried wireless mirroring but that is slow, so I prefer USB connection. I am looking for a free, no ad, program that is fast.

I want to play some games in my free time, what would be the best option for me ?

choice 1 : ps5 or xbox?
choice 2 : monitor or 4k tv
choice 3 : above choices or simply buy a windows laptop?

context :

1. i have never been a hardcore gamer. i don't dig multiplayer global kinda games like pubg, or other fps. I rather like offline story games like takken or NFS most wanted 2005

2. my current laptop is a macbook. i started development with windows laptop years ago, and at that time i was free enough to complete most wanted 2005 and max payne 1/2 (with cheats) i liked gta vice city / sanandreas as well, but i could not pass its missions and would rather end up roaming around

3. i recently played it takes 2 , some bmx bike racing and some archery game with my friend on his PS5 and damn i liked that crispy super fast and detailed graphical games. might be a good investment for relaxation and weekend time pass

4. i am shifting homes and in need of a personal tv/display as I don't want to share family tv anymore. i don't really watch any cable tv shows apart from news channels and mainly consume ott content (netflix ,prime Hotstar etc) i am wondering if a display could also be mounted on wall and could be able to run otts vis some firestick, jio stick or google cast etc.

5. as i mentioned that i never had a taste for gaming, i wonder if all above would be a bad choice and if i should simply buy a good windows laptop

( whatever that technology is , all i want is to control that screen content with a remote, like we do in tv)

So what's best for me?

People who do remote work, what's your stance on making calls to get together to do things?

In my case, I have this tech lead boss now who's always available to start calls so I can share my screen and point at what problems I'm having, and I really appreciate that.

Other people at my job are really hard to get into contact with, they're never available when you need them, so if there's some conversation by the nature of which there needs to be a lot of back and forth exchange to get both parties on the same page, more than a day or more can be spent before work based on that conversation can be done.

I'm not talking about distribution of tasks, but rather "person with access to X, I need you to do Y". I invite them to have a call so we can explore how to do Y together, because neither of us know it too well, but they just do whatever, ask how it went, and it turns out wrong. In this particular case, I've got a marketing guy who has access to the company's business account in a social media platform. I need them to add me there as a developer, and make sure I and another developer have all privileges necessary to create and configure an application which will use the social media platform's APIs. Marketing guy just takes hours to respond and generally acts like we're not worth his time, but can't do the things we asked and dedicate the time to see with us if things are working before he sets out to do other work.

This isn't an isolated case, we've got other people who don't look at their messages and are just generally unavailable. Not sure if I have incorrect expectations. Everyone in the company works remote, but we're all in the same time zone.

You know, that small program, Mouse without boarders is so niffty and good. But what makes me trip is how theses screen sharing programs all make the slightest pixel off monitor jump to the next monitor
If you gonna make a teleporter, at least make one one with a damn escape velocity

I hope screen share devs are listening

Can anyone recommend any good code/screen sharing tools?

My use case is that I have a Windows work laptop with a garbage keyboard and I want to share my editor with my personal MacBook without having to clone the repo there or actually share any files.

I tried Live Share on VS Code but the shared terminal barely ever works, and you can't stage files from the editor GUI. I imagine something like TeamViewer would be very slow for this?
I'm not sure if there's any tool that covers this use case or if I should just stick with Live Share and try to workaround its issues. :/

Protip: If you're using a tiling window manager, you can detach the file browser on the left of any Jetbrians IDE.

This way you can switch to it using the shortcuts you're used to from the WM, as well as resize it very easily.
Also this way if you are not using the integrated terminal of the IDE, you can have the file browser span the full height of your screen, while the terminal and the IDE share the hight on the right.

Disclaimer: I don't know if this is common knowledge, I'm sorry if it is, but I was completely shocked that I missed this feature for years.

Trying to prototype a credit card-sized handheld emulator with The RasPi Zero and a 1.5" screen. Getting real frustrated with the lack of Wifi on the Zero. 😅 Does anyone know of a good guide to share Internet between a computer and a RasPi Zero over USB?

Never post or trade personal pictures. Never reveal personal information, such as an address, phone number, or school name or location. Use only a screen name and don't share passwords (other than with parents).