To whoever messed with my devrant-client tests by constantly downvoting the posts and them being hidden from the API, you're a cunt and I hope you break your neck falling out a 12 story building. :)

Here's the final test to verify shit works too: https://devrant.com/feed/recent

Edit: it works, get fucked you humid piece of shit.

Edit2: To give context to whoever might be subscribed to me and might or might not have been bombed with notifications:

Was working on the plugin system for the devrant client and async was giving me hell, the links I posted were to test the plugin that first has to execute a $.get and only then can return a linkified rant-text.

TLDR: crappy api + idiot ex client combo rant // devam si duška

I saw a lot of people bitching about APIs that don't return proper response codes and other stuff..

Well let me tell you a story. I used to work on a project where we had to do something like booking, but better..crossbreed with the Off&Away bidding site (which btw we had to rip off the .js stuff and reverse engineer the whole timer thingy), using free versions of everything..even though money wasn't an issue (what our client said). Same client decided to go with transhotel because it was sooooo gooood... OK? Why did noone heard of them then?

Anyhow, the api was xml based.. we had to send some xml that was validated against a schema, we received another that was supposed to be validated againts another schema.. and so on and so on..
...
...
supposed..
The API docs were nonexistent.. What was there, was broken English or Spanish.. Even had some comments like Add This & that to chapter xy.. Of course that chapter didn't even exist yet. :( And the last documentation they had, was really really old..more than a year, with visible gaps, we got the validation schemas not even listed in the docs, let alone described properly.
Yaaay! And that was not everything.. besides wrong and missing data, the API itself caused the 500 server error whenever you were no longer authenticated.
Of course it didn't tell you that your session was dead.. Just pooof! Unhandled crap everywhere!

And the best part?! We handled that login after inspecting what the hell happened, but sent the notification to the company anyways.. We had a conf call, and sent numerous emails explaining to them what a 'try catch' is and how they should handle the not authenticated error <= BTW they should have had a handled xml response for that, we got the schema for it! But they didn't. Anyhow, after two agonizing days talking back and forth they at least set up the server to be available again after the horrified 500 error. Before, it even stopped responding until reset (don't ask me how they managed to do that).
Oh yeah, did I mention this was a worldwide renown company?! Where everybody spoke/wrote English?! Yup, they have more than 700 people there, of course they speak English! <= another one of my ex clients fabulous statements... making me wanna strangle him with his tie.. I told him I am not talking to them because no-one there understood/spoke English and it would be a waste of my time.. Guess who spent almost 3 hours to talk to someone who sounded like a stereotypical Indian support tech guy with a flue speaking Italian?! // no offence please for the referenced parties!!

So yeah, sadly I don't have SS of the fucked up documentation..and I cannot post more details (not sure if the NDA still holds even though they canceled the project).. Not that I care really.. not after I saw how the client would treat his customers..

Anywayz I found on the interwebz some proof that this shitty api existed..
picture + link: https://programmableweb.com/api/...

SubRant: the client was an idiot! Probably still is, but no longer my client..
Wanted to store the credit card info + cvc and owner info etc.. in our database.. for easier second payment, like on paypal (which he wanted me to totally customize the payment page of paypal, and if that wasn't possible to collect user data on our personalized payment page and then just send it over to paypal api, if possible in plaintext, he just didn't care as long as he got his personalized payment page) or sth.... I told the company owner that they are fucking retards if they think they can pull this off & that they will lose all their (potential) clients if they figure that out.. or god forbid someone hacked us and stole the data.. I think this shit is also against the law..
I think it goes without saying what happened next.. called him ignorant stupid fucktard to his face and told him I ain't doing that since our company didn't even had a certificate to store the last 4 numbers.. They heard my voice over the whole firm.. we had fish-tank like offices, so they could all see me yelling at the director..
Guess who got laid off due to not being needed anymore the next day?! It was the best day of my life..so far!! Never have I been happier to lose my job!!

P.S. all that crap + test + the whole backand for analysis, the whole crm + campaign emails etc.. the client wanted done in 6 months.. O.o

P.P.S. almost shat my pants when devRant notified my I cannot post and wanted to copy the message and then everything disappeard.. thank god I have written this in the n++ xD

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

Episode 3 of this rant: https://devrant.io/rants/871827/...

Me: So I'm going an API call to Mastercard but they don't give us back CreditCard token to save.
Provider: Ya man you need to curl a request in your code to get the token...blahblahblah.... man you need to know these things they are not an easy things to be done, just paste curl code on MasterCard website into your code and it will work

Me: *ignores his shit talk and proceed to test*
*5 minutes later*
MasterCard Server: error.cause=INVALID_REQUEST&error.explanation=Invalid+credentials.&result=ERROR
Me: *calls provider and tell him*
Provider: Oh sorry, we need to enable this feature for your account.

devRant people please, give me one reason why I should not leave this field, and maybe also leave this life knowing there are this type of people alive.

Thank you :)

So I just spent the last few hours trying to get an intro of given Wikipedia articles into my Telegram bot. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an API! But unfortunately it's born as a retard.

First I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and almost thought that that was a Wikipedia article about API's. I almost skipped right over it on the search results (and it turns out that I should've). Upon opening and reading that, I found a shitload of endpoints that frankly I didn't give a shit about. Come on Wikipedia, just give me the fucking data to read out.

Ctrl-F in that page and I find a tiny little link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/... which is basically what I needed. There's an example that.. gets the data in XML form. Because JSON is clearly too much to ask for. Are you fucking braindead Wikipedia? If my application was able to parse XML/HTML/whatevers, that would be called a browser. With all due respect but I'm not gonna embed a fucking web browser in a bot. I'll leave that to the Electron "devs" that prefer raping my RAM instead.

OK so after that I found on third-party documentation (always a good sign when that's more useful, isn't it) that it does support JSON. Retardpedia just doesn't use it by default. In fact in the example query that was a parameter that wasn't even in there. Not including something crucial like that surely is a good way to let people know the feature is there. Massive kudos to you Wikipedia.. but not really. But a parameter that was in there - for fucking CORS - that was in there by default and broke the whole goddamn thing unless I REMOVED it. Yeah because CORS is so useful in a goddamn fucking API.

So I finally get to a functioning JSON response, now all that's left is parsing it. Again, I only care about the content on the page. So I curl the endpoint and trim off the bits I don't need with jq... I was left with this monstrosity.

curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php/...=*" | jq -r '.query.pages[0].revisions[0].slots.main.content'

Just how far can you nest your JSON Wikipedia? Are you trying to find the limits of jq or something here?!

And THEN.. as an icing on the cake, the result doesn't quite look like JSON, nor does it really look like XML, but it has elements of both. I had no idea what to make of this, especially before I had a chance to look at the exact structured output of that command above (if you just pipe into jq without arguments it's much less readable).

Then a friend of mine mentioned Wikitext. Turns out that Wikipedia's API is not only retarded, even the goddamn output is. What the fuck is Wikitext even? It's the Apple of wikis apparently. Only Wikipedia uses it.

And apparently I'm not the only one who found Wikipedia's API.. irritating to say the least. See e.g. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...

Needless to say, my bot will not be getting Wikipedia integration at this point. I've seen enough. How about you make your API not retarded first Wikipedia? And hopefully this rant saves someone else the time required to wade through this clusterfuck.

Working with atlassian products....

Possibility 1

You can either use exactly this one way and only with these specific instructions ...

Which will certainly not work for the project you have.

Possibility 2
There is an feature request which gets ignored for years, someone made a plugin...

But plugin was removed as inactive. :-)

Possibility 3

Atlassian provided in their endless graciousness a plugin.

After hours of deciphering Kotlin / Java code as the documentation is either useless or lacking details...

You did it. You got the REST shit working.

Well.

You just needed a script which wraps the underlying command, parses the commands well defined format like XML with specification.... To a completely gobbled up JSON, that looks like undecipherable shit.

I really hate Atlassian.

https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/...

I just wanted to add code coverage via the REST API by the way.

A really unnecessary and seldomly used future as it seems.

And yeah... The JSON contains a coverage element which contains a semicolon separated key value store, value being a comma separated list of line numbers....

Oh I have quite a few.
#1 a BASH script automating ~70% of all our team's work back in my sysadmin days. It was like a Swiss army knife. You could even do `ScriptName INC_number fix` to fix a handful of types of issues automagically! Or `ScriptName server_name healthcheck` to run HW and SW healthchecks. Or things like `ScriptName server_name hw fix` to run HW diags, discover faulty parts, schedule a maintenance timeframe, raise a change request to the appropriate DC and inform service owners by automatically chasing them for CHNG approvals. Not to mention you could `ScriptName -l "serv1 serv2 serv3 ..." doSomething` and similar shit. I am VERY proud of this util. Employee liked it as well and got me awarded. Bought a nice set of Swarowski earrings for my wife with that award :)

#2 a JAVA sort-of-lib - a ModelMapper - able to map two data structures with a single util method call. Defining datamodels like https://github.com/netikras/... (note the @ModelTransform anno) and mapping them to my DTOs like https://github.com/netikras/... .

#3 a @RestTemplate annptation processor / code generator. Basically this dummy class https://github.com/netikras/... will be a template for a REST endpoint. My anno processor will read that class at compile-time and build: a producer (a Controller with all the mappings, correct data types, etc.) and a consumer (a class with the same methods as the template, except when called these methods will actually make the required data transformations and make a REST call to the producer and return the API response object to the caller) as a .jar library. Sort of a custom swagger, just a lil different :)

I had #2 and #3 opensourced but accidentally pushed my nexus password to gitlab. Ever since my utils are a private repo :/

Follow up to: https://devrant.com/rants/5047721/....

1- The attacker just copy pasted its JWT session token and jammed requests on the buy gift cards route
2- The endpoint returns the gift card to continue the payment process, but the gift card is already valid
3- Clients wants only to force passwords to have strong combinations
4- Talk about a FIREWALL? Only next month
5- Reduce the token expiration from 3 HOURS to 10 minutes? Implement strong passwords first
6- And then start using refresh tokens

BONUS: Clearly someone from inside that worked for them, the API and database password are the same for years. And the route isn't used directly by the application, although it exists and has rules that the attacker kows. And multiple accounts from legit users are being used, so the person clearly has access to some internal shit

!rant

I will have almost 3 weeks of vacations coming up. For which I will TRY and understand the idea behind building a REST API using the Microsoft C++ cpprestsdk libraries.

The end goal? Be able to replicate a little project I got going in Node.js in order to compare how well it goes on C++, a language that I greatly fear on accord with how complex the syntax always looked to me :V The thing is, the first time I tried to learn programming was when I was about 17 and c++ was back then not the way to go for me. I sometimes wish I would have stuck to it, I k now enough to get by building and linking shit correctly, and of course the basic concepts are there, some advanced ideas are iffy but I should be able to get them going relatively well once I start working on the code.

I am using this tutorial as a basic guideline :D

https://medium.com/audelabs/...

Will be interesting to see. Always wanted to have something done with C or C++ that was bigger than any of my academic projects. Funny enough, I have a large collection of C++ books, but never really used them since they would bore me :V

Cheers putos!