I've always tried to live by the philosophy that you should never burn bridges, but my god some recruiters make it very difficult. I've had a handful of occasions where I've had to type out a nasty email to a recruiter and then just not send it after I realized I wouldn't want it getting around/you never know who they known.

The latest incident where I did this was with a recruiter who emailed me 3 times within a week. But my issue wasn't with the amount of emails or even the fact that he was shopping me frontend positions despite my resume clearly stating I'm a backend dev/data engineer.

My issue was... THE GUY FUCKING REFERRED TO HIMSELF AS "BATMAN". That's right - an adult human being so desperate to get the attention of developers that he set his email name to "Batman", signs his emails "Full name - A.K.A. Batman", and lists his phone number like "BatPhone: xxx.xxx.xxxx"

If I didn't find him so pretentious and he actually sent me a kind of relevant position, what would I do? Pick up the phone and call him and say "hey Batman." Jesus fucking Christ. What an absurd gimmick. Maybe I'm overreacting but it seems so childish.

And you know what, if the guy read my resume and sent me relevant stuff I probably would have said "meh, he's doing good work, if he wants to stand out/be silly whatever." But no, he didn't even look at my skills. Instead he thought 3 shitty emails where he called himself Batman would convince me to write back to him.

I was close to sending him a ridiculous response and signing it "Robin", but decided it wasn't worth it.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

I'm signing up for steam for playing a specific game.

Entered a freaking difficult/long password: "Choose a less commonly used password"

Yeah right, what in the actual fuck.

Writing code for a startup without signing a contract first...

I finally built a new PC with 8GB memory, i7 4790K and SSD for OS.

My old system was a core2duo with 2GB memory. Android studio used to take 20mins for gradle sync and another 20min for signing apks. "Live preview" and "emulator" was a thing of the future for me. Never used it.

But now things have changed. This thing boots up in less than 5 sec and studio gradle takes less than 30sec. I'm so happy right now! Its like a dream come true! *cries in happiness*

1. Move to new house
2. Setup electricity account to auto-pay every month
3. Wait
4. Receive "disconnect" notice from electric provder
5. WTF
6. Call. Oh, yeah, our website doesn't tell you that you have to pay your first month's bill before you can setup auto-pay. It's in the fine print.

Okay people, here's my rant - if you manage a website that supports auto-pay and you're not PREVENTING your customers from signing up for auto-pay until there is a $0 balance in the account, then you're doing something wrong. Don't let your customers think they're about to loose their electric service because of a frontend guardrails issue.

Mac: Hello welcome please sign in

Dev: Fair enough

Mac: Oh you haven’t signed in in awhile please get get verification from other device

Dev: kk

Mac: Oh you don’t have a dev account, please sign in on this website

Dev: Hm.

Mac: In order to sign up for a dev account you need to download this app

Dev: ???

Mac: Are you sure you want to open this app you just downloaded?

Dev: Sigh.

Mac: In order to sign up for a dev account on this app you need to sign into it

Dev: For the love of god

Mac: Ok now you can build with Xcode.

Xcode: No you can’t. You have to sign in

Dev: fuck sakes.

Mac: Are you sure you want Xcode to access files on your computer?

Dev: …Yup

Xcode: Signing in isn’t enough you have to select the fact you are signed in a dropdown nested 3 menus deep.

Dev: God damn.

Xcode: Build failed please sign in to phone as well.

Phone: New sign in detected, please verify with alternative device.

Dev: Jesus.

Xcode: Build success! Pushing to iPhone.

Dev: Finally.

Xcode: Unknown error occurred. Please go to support.apple.com for help. :)

Dev: …

“ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 10 ”

(Microsoft and Apple signing)

I was signing up on Twitch...
I was in a hurry...
Goddamn that CAPTCHA...
After fucktillion attempts...
I came to terms with the fact that I am a robot...

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Problems when selecting my country when signing up in websites

It is one of the following, and you should search it.

Republic of Korea
Korea, Republic of
South Korea
Korea, South
Korea
대한민국
남한

And some extraordinary names I saw
Korea, the good side
Korea, the below one
Chosun a.k.a. 조선 (the dynasty in korea that disappeared years and years ago)

Best wishes to me.

If the time comes when the traditional signing in with email dies out, I don't know how long I'm gonna last to the Internet anymore. I never liked the idea of having my accounts associated with these giants especially with Facebook.

Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.

When you get so excited you burst out signing "🎶MY CODE IS ON FIRE🎶"(Alicia keys "this girl is on fire" reference) forgetting your in a room with your fellow developers.....

5 minutes later there still laughing

Four meetings today.

Legal was not involved in legal agreement changes until I refused to make them without Legal signing off. Legal changed several things, leading to:

Project scope changed size from large to minuscule to small to medium.

Details changed at every step.

Despite being incredibly structured and process-heavy, people at this company are so disorganized. 😕

Trash, trash, trash.
Who the fuck writes this shit?

Who the fuck lets these trash should-be-junior devs roll their own crypto? and then approves it?

The garbage heap of a feature (signing for all apis) doesn't follow Ruby standards, doesn't follow codebase conventions, has `// this is bridge` style comments (and no documentation), and it requires consumer devs to do unnecessary work to integrate it, and on top of all this: it leaks end-user data. on all apis. in plaintext.

Fucking hell.

Every single fucking time:

Developers: Maybe we'll do something nice for the users, like signing in with Facebook account?
Business: Nah, nobody is gonna pay for that and it sounds useless. We're good with current solutions. Just do your job!

half a year later:

Business: Hey, I just came up with the idea that we could have logging in with Facebook.
Also business: Wow, great idea!
Management: Here's your bonus for a great idea!
Developers: ...

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

I Quit,
Finally I quit.

This feels good after the countless red flags I raised to management and wishful thinking that this time things will be different. For the past year!

This time I lost the optimistic approach and got myself a couple of interviews, thinking, I'm in this for the long haul, could be 6 months could be a year, evantually I will succeed. and what do you know? It works, I can still pass those.

Then I set down with myself and thought, should I come to managment before signing the contract? Giving another chance for a real change? The answer was a resounding Hell No!

So, yea, if you are in a tough position. Don't give up, think long term, and who knows that "long term" might just be a month.

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

I was told that my granny was having trouble signing into Facebook, so I go to help her and this is what happens.

Me: try and open Facebook.
Granny: *looks confused*
Granny: oh I know!
Granny: *opens up Gmail*
Me: *wtf is she doing?*
Granny: *opens an email from Facebook*
Granny: ok, I'm in Facebook.

Not sure whether to cringe or laugh 😅

The gym I go to has an app for user's to scan a QR code when they arrive and it has multiple HUGE issues.

This app shows the credit card info used for the direct debit without anything being redacted.

When the gym is signing up someone they give them a password so they can login, not too bad except the password is always the person's first name with the first letter capitalised.

This gets worse when you figure out that their is no way to change the password given to you AT ALL.

And just to top it all off, when you click the "Forgot Password" link on the login screen, the app just sends you an email with your password (your first name) in plain text.

The app also doesn't log you out or notify you if your login is used on a different device.

So I have tested this with 2 of my friends that go to the same gym and, with only knowing their email and first name (which I could have gotten from their email if I didn't know them), I can get into their app and see their credit card info without them being any the wiser.

It was a normal school day. I was at the computer and I needed to print some stuff out. Now this computer is special, it's hooked up onto a different network for students that signed up to use them. How you get to use these computers is by signing up using their forms online.

Unfortunately, for me on that day I needed to print something out and the computer I was working on was not letting me sign in. I called IT real quick and they said I needed to renew my membership. They send me the form, and I quickly fill it out. I hit the submit button and I'm greeted by a single line error written in php.

Someone had forgotten to turn off the debug mode to the server.
Upon examination of the error message, it was a syntax error at line 29 in directory such and such. This directory, i thought to myself, I know where this is. I quickly started my ftp client and was able to find the actual file in the directory that the error mentioned. What I didn't know, was that I'd find a mountain of passwords inside their php files, because they were automating all of the authentications.

Curious as I was, I followed the link database that was in the php file. UfFortunately, someone in IT hadn't thought far enough to make the actual link unseeable. I was greeted by the full database. There was nothing of real value from what I could see. Mostly forms that had been filled out by students.

Not only this, but I was displeased with the bad passwords. These passwords were maybe of 5 characters long, super simple words and a couple number tacked onto the end.

That day, I sent in a ticket to IT and told them about the issue. They quickly remedied it by turning off debug mode on the servers. However, they never did shut down access to the database and the php files...

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

The day I discovered Schrödinger's lesser known paradox of simultaneously being fired and not fired.

This isn't really much of a dev story, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

About two minutes into signing into all my stuff, I suddenly was kicked out of everything. I tried logging in a few more times, and then suddenly started getting the error, "Your account has been disabled for security reasons." I couldn't sign into chat, and co-workers confirmed that I was missing from the company directory. My manager didn't come in for another two hours, and we couldn't get anyone else to answer what the hell was going on. So I was kinda panicking.

Eventually, we found out from one of our coordinators that someone else with the same name as me was leaving the company, and they had deactivated the wrong person.

It ended up getting a lot better. They told me that it could take up to 48 hours to restore my access (it took longer), so I found stuff to do so I could maintain my paycheck. One of those things was assisting someone with data collection and processing, where I eventually said, "Dude, I could totally automate this," and now that's what I'm getting paid to do.

Great ... after management got our system destroyed by some external idiots, pledged to never do this again, they now hired externals again to do a whole project by themselves.

Last time we lost all but one senior dev (that would be me) ... this time they'll lose the last one as well. Don't care of this whole department goes tits up anymore, I'm out. If everything goes well, I'm signing a new contract in a few days, making me free in 3-4 months (yes, German labour laws have long periods when you quit ;) ).

Dear management, have fun managing a bunch of rookies with no contacts in the company.

My biggest hurdle:
Having to install Windows because some old application only runs on Windows.
No, i do not want to sign in.
I AM SURE

Installer: How about signing in?

Edit: Now it asks me about privacy options. As if i even had a choice..

WHAT IS THAT!!! Not signing this contract 😂😂😂

Tried signing up for Postman with Google.

What would you do?

2 job offers...

Job #1 a big sports betting company as a junior software developer with a salary of 22k plus a yearly bonus of 10%

Also uncapped holidays

Or

Job #2
A small IT company with 2 other developers with a salary of 19.5k working on multiple projects and being instantly promoted to mid level developer, also a signing bonus after 3 months of a high end surface laptop.

Ooohhh I feel GDPR is seriously kicking in. And frankly I like it :)
just minutes ago a spanish photographer asked me if he could take a photo of me and use it in his expo. The photo thing took like half a minute, but we spend another 10 minutes on explanations, documentations and signing of aggreements.

Poor photographer. But I love that I know what exactly is going to happen with my portrait and my email :)

go GDPR!

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

Guys! For every 300 ++s @dfox sends out a signed envelope and a free stress ball! It's like the best deal ever!

Thanks to @bigus-dickus and @duckWit I remembered how a client during an interview once asked me to change all globes on his webpage (imagine something like attached, just with globes all over the place) to a green palette, because according to him "blue" means being gay in russian and that was the cause for people not hitting the landing page and not signing up anymore.

Worst: I lost development contract - probably due to covid - after 4 years of work. I got email when I was at bank seconds before signing mortgage for my first apartment.
I signed it anyways as a technically unemployed person without income looking at the world collapsing.

Best: I gained new contract with 40% money raise. Fuck yeah !

DHL? More like, "Du Hurensohn Lieferst ned!"
Seriously! Fuck DHL so fucking hard! Why the FUCK can you deliver 2 FUCKING PACKAGES, WHICH REQUIRE SIGNING, INFRONT OF MY FUCKING ENTRANCE!! But not, A FUCKING 3rd one! LIKE SERIOUSLY! I WAS AT FUCKING HOME THE ENTIRE FUCKING DAY! THEN I RECIEVE AN EMAIL THAT THE FUCKING PACKAGE "couldnt be delivered because I wasnt at home" YEAH FUCK YOU! 2 INFRONT OF MY FUCKING DOOR! and then... I see him... that fucking DHL guy, with my package, going INTO HIS FUCKING SHITASS DHL CAR, AND DRIVING OFF!
I literally just wanted to open the window and scream "HEY DHL, MEIN SCHEISS PACKET! WO ISSET!?" but I didnt...

FUCK THESE COCKSUCKERS FROM DHL! I HAVE A FUCKING LOUD DOORBELL! RING THAT THING! THERES A BUTTON WITH MY NAME NEXT TO IT!

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

In the next 40 years devRant will be non-existential because developers wont be there anymore, you know why?
AI takes over the world.. writes its own code and build new products.
Suck it.
Signing off
- Elon Musk

(personally, I love this guy)

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

Client have this amazing idea about a website that they wanted to convert into reality by using our service. Me and my friend started working on it.

After a month later when it's almost ready, they informed they are not investing into the idea anymore. They would like to discard the project and will pay half of it.

I am eventually realising why signing a contract is really important

A question for the people who say Macs are superior...

WHAT THE FUCK

I'm wrestling this iOS signing issue for the fourth day. How the fuck do people manage to build anything using tools broken by design and sold to them for the price of their mother.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

When you're signing up for an account on a government site not to be named in this rant and they limit your password to 6 alphanumeric characters and no special characters... Smh

Just finished signing my first ever professional contract. Shortly after I was given a conpany sheet where I had to give part of my personal info and answer some fun questions, one of which was what super power would you want to have?
My answer was obviously: The ability to always find the missing ';' 😂😂😂

Tries to use SoundCloud API for a client

Docs say you need a client key

Wants to create one by signing up clients application

Signup-Form says:applicazion registration currently not available

Goes to soundcloud dev forums

Raging devs rage about that soundcloud has terminated their api registration for about 13 months now

Me thinking: That's probably the best way to make a conpany grow!

That moment you go to the office thinking it's a Thursday and find out it's a Friday while signing in....! 🤠💃🏼💃🏼

So i quit my job today, after signing my contract termination things i asked them if i could check for some personal stuff in my work laptop. and on getting there i quickly went to terminal and did a "rm -rf /"

first time i ever did that willingly, had just been reading stories. i have to say it felt awesome to tell them its now dead, that they cant check what was on it. best feeling in a long time

I had my last day today, after signing an severance package deal some weeks ago. It has been eight long years in this news media company as a sole web developer.

Leaving it behind feels awesome.

There was cake. There was a greeting written with a marker on the cardboard box the cake was delivered in. There were no speeches.

But my by now X coworkers seemed happy to get cake.

I am so excited to start fresh next year as a developer in a small design firm where there is a lot of care and love and nerdiness.

I don't think signing up to LinkedIn has ever resulted in anything but being stalked by recruiters.

There’s a bug in production, where a user account is vulnerable to simple bruteforcing 15 minutes after signing up. I’m the only one who knows. To fix or not to fix 🤔

So the development team are being sent very angry emails from a customer.

Reason being that we can't send a release to them because we are waiting for the signing of a document our managment has known about for five months...

While mangement just keeps passing around responsibility and just throws poop. I'm seriously starting to question why middle managers are allowed to exist in a company structure.

I'm two days away from personally calling the CEO then someone gets fired. It's me or one of these middle manager clowns.

Not directly programming related, but damn if I'm not going to start signing off all my emails with "consider it and perform" from now on.

!rant

I promised myself I wouldnt cry but ... nah I wont.

So I got the job and today was my first day of work, well not precisely work but introduction to the cultuure of the place, signing tons of paper, I probably sold my soul but who cares?, and I met my team, so far everything seems cool, except tthat I will be using windows and wont be able to use any streaming websites or services (yt, spotify, deezer, etc) yes I know, there are ways around it, but come on guys I dont wanna start screwing my first week of work, anyway everything is cool, even the food is tasty there iis only one thing left, my workspace Im an extremely bad decorator so I need ur help, (and yes I know i have to have a duck and a devrant stressball) but apart from that guys and gals, any ideas? So far ive thought about a debugging body, a lava lamp and an extra monitor.

So apparently I can't test my apps on my own device without paying my Apple Developer Certificate.

I knew it is needed to pay for it if you want to publish/distribute your app but c'mon... This is ridiculous.

My app was literally a fresh app creation, a fucking white screen one page fucking app and when I tried to run in on my iPhone, then I ended up having this problem:

dyld: Library not loaded: @rpath/libswiftCore.dylib
Referenced from: /var/containers/Bundle/Application/BCD48EAA-82C2-46F6-ADEE-45C740C3B66D/HWorld.app/HWorld
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/BCD48EAA-82C2-46F6-ADEE-45C740C3B66D/HWorld.app/Frameworks/libswiftCore.dylib: code signing blocked mmap() of '/private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/BCD48EAA-82C2-46F6-ADEE-45C740C3B66D/HWorld.app/Frameworks/libswiftCore.dylib'
(lldb)

If any of you guys know how to solve it without paying (even more) PLEASE let me know

THANKS

Apple app signing and certificates: how do people even circumvent/hack these things? I'm hardly able to do it legit.

#include <rant>
Using angry standard;

Int main()
{
cout << "So my mom recently started "exploring the web". I'm sure you already know where this is going; she ended up signing up for a free trail of some diet pills with her credit card on some sketchy website. The website never sent any product but attempted to charge her card over $300 multiple times. My mom's bank noticed and froze the account. She has now opened an investigation with the banks fraud department and is awaiting response. I took the liberty of running a whois look up and found the companies website is held by GoDaddy and is hiding behind Domains by Proxy (GoDaddy's sysadmin hider). I'm angry that she's in this situation but I have no idea of how to uncover the real company behind the diet pills site." << endl;

Return 0;
}

Sign in with Apple...

* Nobody tells you that a app group can consist of a maximum of 6 apps.
* Nobody tells you that suddenly a key id is needed for constructing the signing key for signing the client_secret when other keys are added in the dev portal.
* Apple gives you email and name only (and i mean only) the first time a customer uses Sign In With Apple.
* You have no chance to reset your user during development in a way to try a fresh auth. So either create separate app ids or separate apple ids.

Sounds like fun, right?

*Outsourcing DevOps Company*

> HR got a call from a customer
> Got my contract terminated immediately
> HR and my boss trying to explain to me about the situation
> The customer is one of BIG GIANT conglomerate in my country and high expectations AF
> My boss wants me in the team
> HR denied due to headcount and limited budget from investors
> CEO pay me for the whole 2 months in salary in compensation including unused vacation under the national labour law right away after signing an acknowledge form
> HR told me if I go to the new company, don't forget to tell them about referring

This all happens under 30 minutes after a normal working friday

What a shock

PS. It's a nice DevOps outsourcing company in both working culture and technical TBH

What could be more annoying than signing out of all accounts to add a new one because I've reached the threshold. This logic is shit!

Definetly signing in and out of my companies time tracking system.
It only works in internet explorer 8 and is a real pain -.-

Happiness is getting free T-shirt from a start up from different country for just signing up their product...
My best wishes to the company..
And thanks for sending it..

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

When you're trying to publish your first Cordova app and the PlayStore release including signatures and stuff takes you 2.5 hours, while the AppStore release takes you 5 days (including getting a huge Mac on your desk, signing up a D.U.N.S. for your company, figuring out the signing/provisioning process and fixing CSS/JS exclusively for iOS).

Just my luck.

I was supposed to sign a new contract last week and get paid 2x more than now + get a lot of benefits. The day before, obviously, they just HAD to stop signing contracts with new people because of COVID.

Also my engineers exam is postponed indefinitely. They are thinking about making it online, which would be awesome, but again - it was supposed to be last week. A lot of stress and time wasted.

I know, those problems are really miniscule when compared to other, but it still is annoying as fuck.

Thank for listening to my Ted talk.

!Rant
Got a job offer as an Android Dev, signed the contract, while signing employer asked me if i am a mac or pc user. A day before my joining date got an email from him asking me to bring my mac with me on my first day. Turns out he won't be providing me with a machine to work on :).

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

Stuck in tutorial hell....
I have a list of ideas for applications I want to create but I always feel like I never know enough to start them. So I end up signing up for another tutorial from most of the popular sites to only skip pass all 50-60%. Has anyone ever experienced this? I'm open for suggestions to get pass this!!

"you realize that any user can gain admin access by signing in with their own creds and switching out the word "user" or "client" in the url for "admin"

"Yeah, I don't care. <sr dev> is under a lot of pressure"

I have a big problem guys. I am so stressed out that i have been crying for the past few hours. I joined this company as a fresher 2 years back by signing a bond that i'll have to pay them if I leave the company. The bond is going to be over on 25th Nov,2023. They extended the bond by 3 months. I was a desperate kid back then who had pressure from family. Now the situation is that i have performed well throughout my working period. They are heavily underpaying me. Now i have 2.5 years of experience but freshers are earning more than me now. They had been giving me work every now and then. Now they have made me the lead of a new team where i have to build the world's most useless framework that does not even make any sense. The most suitable developer who was also my senior refused to join the team because he knew how useless the work is and is going to take the troll on him. Now I have to do it.
My manager said that you are going to do this and the deadline is 3 months. Which is not even feasible. This is utterly stupid. It's a waste of time. I am so fucking stressed out because of this and how much freshers(interns whom i trained) are earning more than me.
I have a notice period of 3 months. No companies are willing to hire because of this notice period.
If I resign now, i have to pay them 75k rupees and plus I have to eventually work for 3 months. I can't do this. What to do in this situation.
I am trapped.

Arghhhhhhhh! What the hell is becoming of today's world?

So I have registration form that relates to parents signing up for a service and asking for ages of their children. Children are never older than 5 years old.

So, for each child the user specified the child's sex/gender (Boy or girl) and their age.

I'm still in disbelief over my client's request, that is marked "urgent".

I basically need to add to the list of options, as "boy" and "girl" are no enough and the question is now "too limiting".

I apparently need to add several more options including: "prefer not to specify", "geneder neutral", "bigender" and "genderfluid".

I mean how can a child aged 5 or less identify as "gender neutral" or "bigender" - how on earth are they able to decide.

Fine, if you're an adult and signing up to something like Facebook, have your 80 odd options. But for children under 5 how have no idea wtf any of this means, stuff like this really annoys me.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

Client: I want a fixed timescale and cost on this project.

Me: OK, what do you need?

Client: We need to integrate our website with our CRM system, which we're in the middle of rebuilding and don't know what data will be available from it. We also want sophisticated Google maps integration, online sale, digital agreement signing and a customer login section that works as a social network for our clients. And we want it in six months time. And an app. And we want you to pitch for free with some initial design concepts. And we want details of you project management strategy.

Me: Ok... Do you know what you want your app to do?

Client: Yes, it's an app! So how much will this cost me?

Me: D':

Tarball of source code from a big manufacturer served on their open src page...
They forgot to delete the .git subdir!
Private keys and signing tools for everybody!!!!

P.S It's fixed by now, don't get your hopes up :P

The Javascript build/bundling eco system is killing me every time I try to get into it.

Me: oh vite, a nice and fast bundle that supports hmr
Me: works like a charm

Well until I discovered that exporting a self contained bundle with Inlined dependencies is not a thing and you have to pray that your framework provides such plugins

The world of js/jsx/tsx bundling, building, tree shaking, transpiling, Inlining, transforming is such a wild west and that on top of an already very unstable layer of different frameworks that work so fundamentally different that you cannot apply a single principle to even 2 of then (from a building/ssr/bundling perspective)

Standards signing off when it comes to building node apps

Spending 2 days trying to figure out why code signing wasn’t working when deployment is started from teamcity. Every time I tried manually it worked, but through teamcity it just kept telling me that no certificate could be found.

I finally twigged what the problem was, my code signing certificate is smart card based and you can’t access it if is requested from a RDP session. I had launched the teamcity build agent from an RDP session a few days back without thinking…

Rebooted and started the buildagent via VirtIO VNC and low and behold it started working again.

YIL (Yesterday, I learned) that, in Austria, digital signatures on documents (using a signature you can only get by verifying your identity, which can be done in person, or online but no I'm not making pics with my passport, ever) have the same value as handwritten signatures.

If someone provides you a PDF and tells you to print it out and sign it, you can just sign it on your PC and send the PDF back, and unless they explicitly told you not to do so (it can't be put in terms and conditions), they can't reject a signature provided in this way.

I am currently signing up for a college and need to accept some rules. First of all I have to accept some rules concerning some IT stuff. These rules should be found on their website. But they are nowhere to be found. At least they have a search function. Using this function I was able to find some old websites that did not even include the terms I searched for.
One search result pointed to a PDF viewer with the error message 'Failed to load PDF document.'. Assuming that the actual pdf document is somewhere referenced in the source, I open up the DevTools and search for 'pdf'. Quickly I found a fucked up URL ending in 'pdf'. Somehow the domain name repeated twice. This probably caused the prior mentioned error message. After copying and fixing the link I can finally read the (7 years old) rules.

Maybe this is a requirement to find these rules to be able to sign up.?

Signing the contract with a new agency as their new dev in 3 hrs. Will quit my current Job on Aug. 18. Looking forward to that day. Boss will explode...

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

- assignment is to display a paragraph fit within a rectangle
- takes maybe 10 minutes to write
- 1 error preventing Xamarin Forms solution from building
- googles error and seems to be a version issue with a single package
- upgrade that single package
- 43 errors preventing solution from building
- reverts back to previous package version
- 76 errors preventing solution from building
- angrily turns off laptop and packs away things into laptop case
- talks shit about xamarin and all the annoying nuisances ive dealt with for this stupid mobile app class
- takes laptop back out because deadline is tomorrow and i have to make the solution build even though i want nothing to do with it
- laptop takes 2 hours and 14 minutes to load up Windows (no update or anything. Just me signing in like every other normal day)
- code builds first try without errors
- wait what the fuck
- concludes that i need only verbally intimidate electronics into submission from now on

I had to do a double take... Needless to say I can't sign in for shit, fucknows what mental finger dance I did on the shift key when signing up to these guys...

Also: forgotten password is "please type your email, if there's an account associated to this email address we'll fucking email it with password reset instructions"...

Fucking arsehole fucks, I just wanna pay my fucking energy bill.

New twist on an old favorite.

Background:
- TeamA provides a service internal to the company.
- That service is made accessible to a cloud environment, also has a requirement to be made available to machines on the local network so you can develop against it.
- Company is too cheap/stupid to get a s2s vpn to their cloud provider.
- Company also only hosts production in the cloud, so all other dev is done locally, or on production non-similar infra, local dev is podman.
- They accomplish service connectivity by use of an inordinately complicated edge gateway/router/firewall/message translator/ouija board/julienne fry maker, also controlled by said service team.

Scenario:
Me: "Hey, we're cool with signing requests using an x509 cert. That said, doing so requires different code than connecting to an unsecured endpoint. Please make this service accessible to developer machines and lower environments on the internal network so we can, you know, develop."
TeamA: "The service should be accessible to [cloud ip range]"
Me: "Yes, that's a production range. We need to be able to test the signing code without testing in production"
TeamA: "Can you mock the data?"
Me: "The code we are testing is relating to auth, not business logic"
TeamA: "What are you trying to do?"
Me: "We are trying to test the code that uses the x509 you provide to connect to the service"
TeamA: "Can you deploy to the cloud"
Me: "Again, no, the cloud is only production per policy, all lower environments are in the local data center"
TeamA: "can you try connecting to the gateway?"
Me: "Yes, we have, it's not accessible, it only has public DNS, and only allows [cloud ip range]"
TeamA: "it work when we try it"
Me: "Can you please supply repro steps so we can adjust our process"
TeamA: "Yes, log into the gateway and try issuing the call from there"
Me: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

tl;dr: Works on my server

Developing and deploying in Xcode is some Requiem for a Dream level bullshit.

I literally just de selected everything for managing automatic signing, and re-selected the EXACT SAME GODDAMN THING. And it worked. It’s literally some fucking shit you do when you are first learning how to code or learning a language and you keep flipping something but you don’t get exactly how it works.

But this is YOUR FUCKING FLAGSHIP development product. I shouldn’t have to check my goddamn inception totem to see if I’m dreaming or not because this kind of bullshit can’t be real life.

That being fucking said your bullshit forced shutdown also FUCKED MY ANDROID STUDIO INSTALLATION AND FUCKED MY $PATH. Thanks. Now NOTHING WORKS. Fuck you Apple. Between slowing my phone and the cluster or problems your shit is causing that are just random as hell and are plenty common because thank god people smarter than me have fixed them in SO by now, I am SO READY TO LEAVE THE APPLE ECO SYSTEM. If I didn’t have to use one of the boxes to push iPhone app updates I doubt I would touch one again.

Apple stuff looks good but at this point that’s about it.

When all the n00bs start signing up to devRant that have 0 idea what development and/or rants are!!

I have a domain with mailgun and a catch all statment, I don't remember signing up for this but I was apparently mad

I once wanted to participate in a free activity that requires signing up for a crappy website.
Unfortunately all spots for the activity I wanted were filled, so I gave it a few minutes and it turned out that the registration is done by sending an HTTP request to a domain with all of the details. So I changed the activity details and selected the hours I wanted and boom - "Thanks for signing up with our site, did you like it ?" Yes.😈

I am at the meeting and I keep hearing bird signing, wind humming, sounds of spring. It seems boss is in a forest's cabin right now while every other dev is in a cubicle...

WTF is going on with twitter?!

- Yesterday I've Installed the app and tried to signup
- I've entered my birthday
- Entered phone number
- Wait for SMS...no SMS
- Tap resend...no SMS
- Wait half an hour...no SMS
- Tried few times...Started getting error: This number cannot be registered..

- Today I've tried again
- Phone number accepted
- Wait for SMS...no SMS
- Tried adding my number to a friend's twitter account...Received SMS code..
- Tried again signing up with my phone number, got error: This number cannot be registered..
- Tried from web, getting error: You reached your SMS limit try again in 24h...

How can I reach my f***** limit when I haven't even received a mail!

I've been trying to signup to twitter for 2 f**** days now with no luck, wtf is happening? it's a major social network for f*** sake.

And what's worse there is no way to send support mail, their "Contact US" page only has options for existing users..

From your experience, what's the most inefficient (IT-wise) industry you encountered?

I'd vote for IT in hospitals (at least here in Germany), it is really a PAIN to watch. My wife and I needed to give our data to three different departments when signing in, because nothing is shared across the stations. And when they did a (fully digital) ultrasound of our little baby, they had to freaking PRINT the images and re-enter the results on a PC in another room, because there is no connection. What the heck?!

Technical meeting

We were at technical meeting a while ago, they discussed our infrastructure implementation, all was good.

Then some motherfucker of our technicians, suggested that we should move to bitbucket, I fought fiercely to don't even think about leaving bitbucket.

Suddenly the cock swallowers bosses agreed to bitbucket, they submit their changes.

10 min after the meeting i broke into the biggest boss room, gave him my resignation letter, I just told him, signing your acceptance to move to bitbucket, you should sign this too.

Boom, assholes.
I'm free now.

God damn it! I have multiple exams that I need to study for, but can't because of my headache that I have had for two weeks now... My mom finally forced me to the doctor, and apparently I have gotten a severe case of migraine... no devices, no books and no lights allowed until it gets better.

Worst part? The exams are next week, and I havent been able to study, not even one page out of hundreds...

Guess who's retaking them this summer... döda mig 😞

Signing off from all tech now until it gets better..

Somebody, anybody, tell me what I'm missing here that makes this get mass-produced.

I've always been a bit if a pyro, and ive certainly made random, pointless texh for no valid reason beyond "why not?'. I also have dealt in international OEM sourcing and manufacturing. I even missed the selfie stick boom back before anyone knew they existed... muktille faxriries I've done signing business with were selling them(dead stock) below cost due to lack... silly me thought they were too ridiculous; one of my hudiness cards literally says ".Really cool stuff you almost alwats want... but never need". Most nonsense novelty is the majority of one if my businesses

...but seriously... who thinks a rechargeable battery, compact soeakers, and lit gas canister is a good idea??

I think I may need to re-rank my mental list of most asinine things I've encountered this week... wsl GUI capability built-in with default images and the reminder of pointoess features like passwords for groups, seem less worthy now.

Task: Deploy MinIO in k8s cluster
Me: deploys the first docker image found on google: bitnami/minio
MinIO: starts

Me: log in
MinIO: Fuck you! There's a cryptic error: Expected element type <Error> but have <HTML>

Me: spends half a day trying out different vendors, different versions, different environments (works on local BTW)

Me: got tired, restored the manifest to what it was at the beginning. Gave it the last try before signing off

MinIO: works 100%

wtf... So switching it back and forth fixed the problem, whatever it was. Oh well, yet another day.

So in the last 2 hours I felt both frustrating and happiness, because of Xcode and code signing.

So what I did yesterday was removed all the Xcode certificates on my keychain because I had major issues getting the newest version of the certificates despite have auto signing enabled.

Without much notice until going to send the iOS app today through Fabric I came across an error while uploading the newest build :/

Googling it I found the same issue on stack overflow with only two answers one being fastlane, which just automated the process to the same error LOL

So anyways I found the solution and was quite happy about it :D I had to go to the apple developer website and download the right certificate DESPITE the auto signing ...

Anyways uploaded and done!

Also added a stack overflow answer in regards to it, I hope it helps someone out.

Oh and I emailed fabric to ask for help and 30 mins later emailed them basically saying NVM fixed it! Lol

Fuck you Xcode lol

Yeah, handouts create lazy people I'm not impressed with
You want something in life, then why don't you go and get it?
Actions speak louder than words do, it's pretty quiet, isn't it?
Look at the world we live in, defined by comment sections
Surround yourself with people that challenge how you think
Not people that nod their head and act like they agree
Those people will cut you open just to watch you bleed
Always be yourself, not the person that you pretend to be, no!
These people gon' tell you that you will never make it
Then when you do, they gon' say they knew you were goin' places
That's just how it works, next thing you know you'll be overrated
Hearing people say they miss the "old you, " it's crazy, ain't it?
And perfect people don't exist, so don't pretend to be one
I don't need pats on the back from people for my achievements
When I die I wanna know that I lived for a reason
Anyone can take your life, but not what you believe in, no

Just remember this

Yeah, don't take opinions from people that won't listen to yours
If money's where you find happiness, you'll always be poor
If you don't like the job you have, then what do you do it for?
The cure to pain isn't something you buy at liquor stores, nah
The real you is not defined by the size of your office
The real you is who you are when ain't nobody watchin'
You spend your whole life worried about what's in your wallet
For what? That money won't show up in your coffin, woo!
Yeah, anger's a liar, he ain't got no respect
I fell in love with my pain and I slept with my regrets
Happiness saw it happen, maybe that's why she up and left
Joy called me a cheater, said she ain't coming back
I've always had a problem with relationships
But that's what happens when you see the world through a broken lens
Mistakes can make you grow, that doesn't mean you're friends
Who you are is up to you, don't leave it up to them, no

Just remember this

Yeah, they say you got into music, you signed up to be hated
That's kinda weird cause I don't remember signing my name up
Coming from people that give advice but never take none
I like my privacy, but, lately, I feel it's invaded
I heard that life's too short, don't let it pass you by
We waste a lot of time crying over wasted time
It's not about what people think, it's how you feel inside
My biggest failures in life are knowing I never tried, woo!
I look at the world from a different angle
People change, even Satan used to be an angel
Think twice before you're bitin' on the hand that made you
Don't believe what you believe just 'cause that's how they raised you
Think your own thoughts, don't let them do it for you
Say you want a drink, don't wait for people to pour it on you
Cut out the liars, stay close to the people you know are loyal
Grab your own glass and fill it, don't let your fear destroy you, woo!

Just made my mom signup for DevRant telling her it's the new "Facebook" haha she wasn't too happy after signing up to realize the platforms purpose.

Can somebody explain to me why the fuck creating apps on windows sucks so much ASS!!!! Not only the Electron app that I'm creating is a complete MESS, but on top of that, you need it EV signed, or it will be detected as malware. The fucking Digicert people charge $664/year for it!!!! I only wanted to do a stupid productivity app, and It was going to be free, now I don’t know what to do with it. FUCK

I am officially crying because of xcode, all I want to do is sign the fucking version and get on with my life, arghhhh WHY APPLE???? WHYYYYYYYYYU??@?#!@?#!@??@@

NDAs for me are a good predictor for a bad client or client relationship.

Doesn't work so well for larger cos, and it's not unusual for them to require one anyway.

I charge a fairly high flat fee for signing one. The people who won't pay probably don't need the NDA anyway and were going to be problematic.

Storing private keys for code signing on SVN.

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

API provider: include a signature based on these fields in this order. DO NOT ENCODE IT!

Implementation works a while, then..

*a wild apostrophe appears*

Signature no longer works.

API Provider: "oh, yeah we escape those."

Arrghhghghghhhghvhxmchsoxnsoxnwl

Not only is it a poor design for signing payloads, the documentation is shockingly poor in it.
Even the implementation example (which is supposedly from their code) doesn't account for any type of escaping or encoding.

Before anyone asks, I can't into details about the implementation.

My do-over would be going to a different coding bootcamp. I wonder if I could be making more money if I went to a better school.

The one I did go to was a big scam. They were more obsessed with teaching you to pretend rather than teaching how to code. They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—the students, the volunteers, the donors, the community. They were very cult-like with mantras like “trust the process.”

I spent 9 months there, but I felt I was a year behind. I am not misspeaking. I would have to relearn basic concepts the right way because they taught them half assed or not at all. I didn’t realize I was behind until I went to interviews and bombed. Seriously, I learned more in a 40 hour free library coding class than I learned in 9 months at the school. Most of the interviews I was getting were for unpaid internships. The school was telling me to go for mid level roles.

I found out recently that they’re breaking the law by operating without a license. In my state code schools do need a license. There are screenshots going around of a letter from the education department. They’re defense is “they’re not a school.” They’re still open. I think ppl should be warned away, but there’s only so much I can do. And I know ppl will give this place the benefit of the doubt before taking any student accusations seriously.

The biggest red flag is they want students to pay up to 70k and bind them to payments for 8 years. I say it’s a red flag because this place is operating as a nonprofit. Shouldn’t a nonprofit not be charging 3-4x more than competitors? They’re definitely not going to give you 70k worth of services.

They really just exploit the poor and POC by signing them up for debt and knowing those ppl would not be able to pay even with a 100k job. They have a very poor understanding about how poverty works.

It had MLM/pyramid scheme vibes when they started making recruiting students a game. They give out tickets to their annual fundraiser or promote you on social media if you refer the most students to them.

I’m one of the lucky ones who was studying coding before I started at the school. Also, job searching is mostly luck, so I was lucky at that too. But I still had to take a job that paid below market. I still wonder what would happen if I went someplace else.

I don’t even put this place on my resume or LinkedIn. Even without these problems, it’s not like anyone would have heard of the place anyway.

No this place isn’t Lambda or Holberton school.

We were in the process of signing up an enterprise company. We sent them a spreadsheet requesting a list of all of their staff so that we can create user accounts for all of them. That dumb shit at the company printed out the spreadsheet and then filled out the printouts using her pen and then took a photograph of it and emailed it back to us.

End of my rant about 35 day recruitment process for anyone interested to hear the ending.

Just got rejected by a company (name Swenson He) for a remote Android Engineer SWE role after wasting 35 days for the recruitment process.

First intro interview went good, then I did an assignment that had 72 hours deadline (asked for couple days longer to do this task, did it in around 40 hours, it was purely an assignment not free work, I could have done it in a day but I choose to overeenginer it so I could use the project as a portfolio piece, no regrets there and I learned some new things). After that It took them 2 weeks just to organize the technical interview.

2 days after the technical interview I received an offer from a second company with 1 week to decide. I immediately informed the Swenson He about it and politely asked whether they could speed up their decision process.

Now I know that I could just sign with the second company and if the big Swenson He would decide to bless me with and offer I could jump ship. But out of principle I never did that for 7 years of my career. If Im in a situation with multiple offers I always inform all parties (it's kinda a test for them so I could see which one is more serious and wants me to work for them more). Swenson He didnt pass the test.

6 days of silence. I pinged the techlead I interviewed with on LinkedIn about my situation, he assured me that he'l ask his hiring team to get back to me with feedback that day.

2 days of silence. I had to decide to sign or not to sign with a second company. I pinged the techlead again regarding their decision and 10min after received a rejection letter. There was no feedback.

I guess they got pissed off or something. Idk what were they thinking, maybe something along the lines of "Candidate trying to force our 35day recruitment process to go faster? Pinging us so much? Has another offer? What an asshole! ".

Didnt even receive any feedback in the end. Pinged their techlead regarding that but no response. Anyways fuck them. I felt during entire process that they are disrespecting me, I just wanted do see how it ends. Techlead was cool and knowledgeable but recruitment team was incompetent and couldn't even stay in touch properly during entire process. Had I didn't force their hand I bet they would have just ghosted me like they did with others according to their Glassdoor reviews.

Glad I continued to interview for other places, tomorrow Im signing an offer. Fuck Swenson He.

P.S. From my experience as a remote B2B contractor if a company is serious the entire process shouldn't take longer than max 2 weeks. Anything outside of that is pure incompetence. Even more serious companies can organize the required 2-3 meetings in a week if they have to and if they are interested. Hiring process shouldnt take longer than MAX 3 weeks unless you are applying for some fancy slow picky corporate company or a FAANG, which is out of topic for this post.

Future01

Click, click, click, click.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

I’m tired of living on popularity driven planet among animals, where number of clicks on likes, subscriptions and links are worth more than iq, education and experience.

Let’s face it - AI is showing us traffic driven recommendations that sucks. If you’re hooked up to social network and can’t disconnect from it you’re half way to matrix. You probably also disagree with me cause you’re serotonin junkie. You can’t stop like you can’t stop eating for a day. Bubble have you in your hands and whatever you do you probably won’t wake up. To be honest most of us won’t. It’s already to late.

I’m waiting for meta so they can put you in virtual world where you can have what you want and at the same time own nothing. They will put you in some small empty space and give you something to eat how many times you want so you can feel safe and click, tap, swipe, scroll more so they can own this planet.

You will be living only to deliver corporate metadata and you will be happy, cause they will make you happy with giving you emotions that you want to feel at exact moment.
If you get out, you won’t be able to interact cause you won’t know how to behave, you will become wild animal.

By going out you will break the law, cause outside world will be long gone. To move to bar or visit family you will travel with autonomous vehicle that have screens instead of windows.

Eventually you stop going to bar cause it’s unhealthy, you stop going outside cause there’s deadly virus and you can die.

They will take you last thing later with birth control so you can have baby whenever you want and with who you want as long as both parties agree by signing baby nft contract, you don’t have to take care of your baby and be pregnant cause it will be robotized, you will see your baby in meta. You will think you feel it using robot hands.
You will never meet your baby in person.
That’s how matrix will start. We’re half way.

So I still have my very first email account, a hotmail account as a secondary, kinda spam account.

i signed up around 2000 i guess.

someone tried to get in, i got loads of mails of failed login attempts so i wanned to go and change my pw. But because of that bastard i cant login with just pw anymore, i need my phone. THAT ACCOUNT IS 20 FUCKING YEARS OLD. I never even provided a phone.
spent the last 20 minutes providing personal details to microsoft which are probably not the ones i used for signing up anyway.

you know how careful we were whem signing up for something online back them? I probably signed up as Thomas anderson from zion...

anyway, done now and bow it will take 24h for them to review it..

all of this only to reset my forgotten pw for my epic games account for with i signed up with that mail..,

holy guacamole.. I should start to trust password managers...

Got the GitHub student developer pack in 10th grade (highschool)

I recently made an application for GitHub student developer pack which got accepted .
If you don't know what this pack is all about , let me tell you this pack gives you free access to various tools that world-class developers use. The pack currently contains 23 tools ranging from Data Science, Gaming, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, APIs, Integrated Development Environments, Version Control Systems, Cloud Hosting Platforms, Code tutorials, Bootcamps, integration platforms, payment platforms and lots more.

I thought my application wouldn't qualify because after reading the documentation , I thought that It was oriented more towards college and university students but nonetheless I applied and my application got accepted . Turns out all you need is a school -issued verifiable email address or proof of you current academic status (marksheets etc.)

After few minutes of the application I got the "pro" tag on my GitHub profile although I didn't receive any emails .

I tested it out and claimed the Canva Pro subscription for free after signing up with my GitHub account.

I definitely recommend , if you are currently enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study such as a high school, secondary school, college, university, homeschool, or similar educational institution
and have a verifiable school-issued email address or documents that prove your current student status, have a GitHub user account
and are at least 13 years old , PLEASE APPLY FOR THE PROGRAM .

Checkout the GitHub docs for more info..

Thanks !

My GitHub GitHub Username :
satvikDesktop

PS. I would have posted links to some sites and documentations for further reading but I can't post url's in a rant yet :(

To all websites requiring at least one upper case, one lower case, one number, one special character, 25 emoji and 49 unicorns in the password when signing up.

If you say something is required, then your regex BETTER be checking ONLY for those things. You should not have hidden requirements for passwords that users are supposed to dream about and know. Especially if it's a super time-sensitive thing that they should have opened 2 Fridays ago.

I had to pull my hair out for 20 minutes (that felt like an hour) before looking at their code and reading their regex. The regex was different from what the page said the requirements actually were. What were they even thinking? 😑

The rest of everything related to this organization uses an SSO system, why can't they just use it? Isn't the whole point of SSO to avoid a different login for every tiny part of the system?

I wonder what the other less technically inclined people using the system are doing right now. Sadly, I have no way of letting them know.

I sincerely hope the dev that made that website faces the same thing while picking a password for creating an account somewhere else and realizes what he/she did.

I really needed to let it out.
I feel much better now.

Time to take out the stress ball :)

happy new year! what do yall have planned for this year? I'm thinking about writing me up a miniature jarvis to automate my Web Development business, nothing really special just automated invoices, website installs, calendar, contract signing, etc. where all I have to do is type up a requirement list and code

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

So I started this morning with 22 emails from an automated system at my university thanking me for signing up for every single fitness class being offered this semester and asking me to fill out a health information form and waiver. (22 emails, one for each course.) Because the semester started last week, and I had added a class (after some drama with the system not behaving correctly at first), I spent a few minutes making sure I had not accidentally signed up for something I had not intended to.

Later in the day, the school sent out an email apologizing for their script which had sent an email for each class to every student on campus. (So each of several thousand students got 22 emails this morning, most of them unnecessary.) To compound the problem (at least in my opinion) they asked the students who should have gotten the message to treat the email barrage as their legitimate notification, and everyone else to ignore the messages. (They should have invalidated all the messages and re-sent the legitimate ones. Never treat erroneous messages as a legitimate notice. Separate the two and do things properly.)

I normally don't get to see my school's IT side looking this incompetent, so my morning was quite amusing.

Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.

This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:

1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.

2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...

3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.

FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.

Finally got round to signing up to a VPN for my devices and my sons. After a lot of research decided on surfshark, signed up for 3 years with great discounts. BUT, it doesn’t work on iPhone ( tried everything in the help) still bollox. Cancelled it and went for my second choice which was Nord. The software is great. Worked without issue, same on m1 mac. Thousands of servers worldwide. For me this is great and fast. So if you are looking for a fast reliable VPN Nord is the one. PS not affiliated or work for Nord, just an opinion and hopefully save someone else some grief.

So there is this place I have been interning for a while. It's a health related project funded by an international organisation.

The first part was last year, June to Dec which was ok. The problem started this year, Feb to July. Despite signing a contract, I (along with other interns) have not received our pay which was supposed to be monthly.

It's unprofessional and frustrating. Moreso, some of my bosses are my lecturers. So guys, ask before you trust.

So I went for a "special" interview to a company whose slogan is "experience certainty" (fresher, was hoping to get a role in cyber security/Linux sysadmin). Got shown what the "real" hiring process of an indian consultancy company is...

We were called because we cleared a rank of the coding competition which the company holds on a yearly basis, so its understood that we know how to code.
3 rounds; technical, managerial and HR...

Technical is where I knew that I was signing up for complete bullshit. The interviewer asks me to write and algo to generate a "number pyramid". Finished it in 7 minutes, 6-ish lines of (pseudo) code (which resembled python). As I explained the logic to the guy, he kept giving me this bewildered look, so I asked him what happened. He asks me about the simplest part of the logic, and proceeds to ask even dumber questions...
Ultimately I managed to get through his thick skull and answer some other nontechnical questions. He then asks if I have anything to ask him...
I ask him about what he does.
Him - " I am currently working on a project wherein the client is a big American bank as the technical lead "

Me (interest is cybersec) - "oh, then you must be knowing about the data protection and other security mechanisms (encryption, SSL, etc.)"

Him (bewildered look on face) - "no, I mostly handle the connectivity between the portal and data and the interface."

Me (disappointed) - "so, mostly DB, stuff?"

Him (smug and proud) - "yeup"

Gave him a link to my Github repo. Left the cabin. Proceeded to managerial interview (the stereotypical PM asshats)

Never did I think I'd be happy to not get a job offer...

Okay I'm guessing everyone here has experienced something like this but...

I dev for Company A and we have various other companies and clients utilize our service. Now, a client from Company B comes to us and says that they are having problems signing in. Apparently the page just tells them "Can't sign in".

"That's odd," I think to myself, "because our failed sign-in messages aren't that terse and usually tell you why."

I look on the system, client is registered under Company B and has verified their email address. All good there. My guess? Trying to sign in to the wrong site (we have a jobs site too) because that sometimes comes up first on the googs.

We get an email from client just now: "Hi, still can't sign in. Please see screenshot below."

I shit you not, she was trying to sign in to her own company's website that clearly had "Company B" written above the sign in box.

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

"No matching provisioning profiles found: No provisioning profiles matching an applicable signing identity were found."

FUCK YOU APPLE!!!!! I've update it a thousand times mother fucker!!

I'm about to submit an app to the App Store. I took some time to make sure signing in/out of different social media accounts worked properly in my app.

I've been locked out of my Facebook developer account since yesterday due to "suspicious activity" and was asked to upload a photo of myself to verify my identity. I'm not too confident my account will be unlocked as I don't use Facebook regularly and therefore never felt the need to upload a profile picture.

Fantastic.

We have been waiting for Apple to drop a new beta for 2 weeks! They better get us a new seed on Monday or I am going to lose my shit.

BT "We'll give you BT Virus Protect, which protects against viruses, phishing and other online attacks."

Or... For a start, let your users provide a good secure password when signing up? More than 8 characters is a bit ambiguous. 20 minutes later and several attempts to find out it can't be longer than 20 characters, only upper and lower case letter and numbers aaaand must start with a letter is a bit s**t. Not to mention LatPass doesn't like it as you can't copy and paste.

My university sent me a signed paper. The signature was the ugliest, handwritten, version of a name. It was like a child signing their name for the very first time.

I am so happy, I am not alone with that problem. Thank you, university administrator, for sharing my plight.

Ffs. I thought I never had to touch development for ios devices anymore but I was wrong.

The god damn piece of shit hybrid app build in apache cordova works perfectly fine on android but guess what, after signing that pile of crap with xcode it won't work on ios because somehow that retarded os forgets to listen for click events on a simple fucking button which is used to activate the app.

Had to create a virtual machine with osx and wait for xcode to instal, sign that app only to figure out it won't work..

Even after seaching google for 3 FUCKING HOURS there are still no FUCKING RESULTS.

I'm done with the entirety of apple and all their products.

Started signing my internal emails:
<Name>
<Department>
Systemsomethingsomethingdarkside (title)
<Contact info>

Day 8 and noone has noticed.
I've been accepted into the mail herd.

Vultr!

I first used them because digitalocean didn't have servers in a particular location and they turned out to be pretty good. Billed hourly and you can spin up an instance quickly and destroy it when you're done without signing up for a lifetime. Support is pretty good too.

tools people REALLY wanna use are written like garbage

and also very active, in terms of tickets and pull requests
but the code is overly complex for no reason and a mess, turns out

I looked at the codebase and I have no clue what's going on
then found the API it's calling and I'm sitting here going "Jesus fuck I could've just wrote my own"

it's actually really strange, I see this pattern often of tools tons of people rely on and want to use but they're coded horribly, tons of bugs, and the code is entirely incomprehensible. though all the low effort pull requests is a new one I guess, generally there's no activity or the maintainer is just gone (maybe it's AI?)

anyway then I looked at the API it's wrapping and I'm confused why this library has such shit usability, and furthermore why the hell the code was like that cuz I read that first for about an hour and just kept going in circles. bruh what

guess I'll find out tomorrow if I'm signing up for unanticipated complexity or these people really did mess this up

rant !dev

The other day I signed up for a 12 months gym membership. Things have gone wrong.

First, they managed to trick me into signing up at all because in the shitty handwriting I have mistaken a 9 for a 1, so the actual price was a bit higher than I thought it was (+15%).
Second, a day after signing up I get a medical diagnosis with unclear prognosis. I write them a nice letter with an added note from the Dr, explaining that I will not be able to go to the gym for an unforeseen time and asking to nullify the contract. Of course they respond me with an email saying "we need details about the illness, the one you sent us is not enough" or in short "fuck you, you're trapped".

I hate gyms (the business side). They have no ethics whatsoever.

Now I feel just as angry at myself for not double checking the price on the contract and for signing up at all.

The concept and execution of inter-cluster SSL along with keystores, truststores, signing, and similar just clicked in my head today. I feel the burden of undiagnosable https errors just melt off my shoulders. Any other environment tips I should know for kubernetes?

Just in time, I'm signing my contract tomorrow 😁

Got recommended by my internship mentor (who happened to be a colonel) to the company.

They set up interviews with HR and the PM. Think the latter liked me, the interview took 3 hours

Starting next Monday, wish me luck \o/

Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.

Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.

Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.

Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.

Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

OK. Why the hell is Chrome automatically signing me in after signing in to gmail or other services. What the fuck...

What a delight to have to work on macOS. Not.
Took me two days to notarize our app bundle. The ultimate issue was a dead symlink inside the bundle which would make the codesign verify (with strict option!) fail, while verification of signing operation itself passed.
Notarization would just give generic error: not properly signes.

Spent days to setup a newer-Android version with reverse-proxy-HTTPS certificate in its CA store + one that'd support Google Play and signing in (old school man-in-the-middle).
FINALLY got the API calls of this 1 app whose unofficial client I wanted to make coz their main sucks ass. Just to get stuck on the phone-number-based OTP that they use for their login (:

They send a unique token for each OTP request, I assumed they're using some hard-coded string based function, which they decrypt on their backend to verify.
Downloaded their APK and decompiled. Went through dozens of weird-ass-named classes (coz decompiled). For the 2nd time I thought I had it!

But no -.- they call Google's Firebase messaging for the phone-num OTP n that function simply called firebase, looked into that service n ofc it's very tightly coupled with the calling API's backend

It was fun while it lasted I guess~~~

Storing ToS in Database.
So, all my life I've built custom software for businesses that do no intent to be used by public.
Now I am developing an online store and the user has to agree to ToS before signing up. I was wondering, if the users agrees to ToS should I store it in database that he accepted? If yes, will it be just a boolean or a text.
P.S. Living in U.S.A.

I hate relatable/anxiety/cringe posts, but I need to talk about this.

Sometimes when I try to sign and focus on hitting notes and making it sound good, I get a sudden flashback to something weird I did in the past.

It's either something extremely cringey/embarassing or just plain out asshole'y, mostly from when i was a teen.

It's weird how sudden and vivid the memory of these actions get. One second I'm singing, the other I'm clenching my stomach thinking "oh god why did I do that?"

I also make the signing turn into making weird fucking noises and going very off pitch.

Some people find it easy to let go of the past. Not this guy.

Finally some real vacation. Heavily needed. Can't stand that type of remote work any more. Our dailies and pull requests have become mere dick-measuring contests. Morally puffed statements about THE RIGHT way to do agile and clean code, and architecture. Endless vacuous, monologues, which they only endure so they can start our own - but shit just does not get done.

And then they don't want to invest only a day or some hours to get some integration tests running on more machines, which could save the one overworked tester we have a lot of work. But whatever. I've lost all motivation and hope. Shall they deal with their own shit. Maybe I just need more sleep or some antidepressants, because I'm really fed up with it.

Makes we wonder why I even fought this battle of the last two weeks, when thanks to Apple's changes in macOS's codesigning our new binary wouldn't run on any "real" machine. But according to them packaging and signing is only a trivial issue, nothing to do with code. Yeah, well, then they should do that shit themselves next time.

Bossman called me up the other day, asked if I had looked at courses and told me I should think about signing up in September.

Thing is, I don't have a degree or anything beyond a high school diploma, since I'm self taught and got hired because of my ability to learn fast and my portfolio, and I told them I'd consider looking at a two year program.

But I don't want to have to be doing coursework after work, and besides, if I do a course, I want to do so because I wanted it... Sad thing is, yearly review is coming up in a month and I worry my salary is gonna stay where it started... Which is not great :S

Any thoughts?

To ship a package of two USB cables from one US city to another. What could be easier for a large company? Well, hold on a little.

I ordered two fucking cables from fucking Nomad at 15TH OF FUCKING JULY, and they are still not shipped. Here's how their customer support works: you send them an email, they reply in like a day or two, and that's it, that email thread is abandoned. They won't visit it again. You should write a whole new message where you say "hey, the previous time you said me X, so I want you to do Y then", and the message title should be different, otherwise they'll ignore it.

My roof is under construction now. When it was raining and there was a rain both inside and outside my apartment, I filmed it and an article about the situation was in my local newspaper in like 20 minutes. Russian government organizations are notorious for ignoring people's requests, shutting down their telephones and doing other shit like that, but in one day I managed to collect the foundation of overhaul, my utilities provider, the foreman of the organization responsible for roof repair, his supervisor and the actual guy that did that job. That same day, they all was at my doorstep, collecting the evidence, signing papers, apologizing, threatening to sue each other and collectively signing a document that states that they owe me either a full financial compensation or an overhaul. I managed to do it in the country where you throw an empty plastic cup at a cop and go to jail for it for five years.

Nomad, tell me, what exactly is stopping me from going full Jackson Pollock with a .45 on your company all over the social media (props to @SortOfTested)? You think I can't handle a mediocre iPhone case manufacturer?

Think again.

Add-on signing is censorship in disguise.

Imagine Google could remotely delete YouTube videos you downloaded, to "keep you safe" from the "bad content". Well, Google and Mozilla can remotely disable extensions you installed using their pre-installed trojan horse called "add-on signing".

Always remember, whenever a corporation cites "for your protection", consider it synonymous with "so we can control you more".

Being a developer is about signing up on things yu hve no idea how to do
It feels like taking a deep dive into the deep dark unknown

And reassure the client that you will complete the project and satisfy them

!rant

Saw a few guys having some issues picking up on angular 2. There's currently a really good course on angular 2 that's about a week and a half old, so pretty up to date, on pluralsight. Just search for angular 2 and order by date.

For those who don't wanna/can't pay, you can get 3 months for free on it by signing up on Microsoft devtools. If anyone wants direct link just say it(not sure if allowed).

Btw, I'm not affiliated what so ever with pluralsight, although I really like it. Just passing some information specially regarding angular 2 which is a pain to learn due to legacy code.

so, i tried following @ghost on daily.dev but there was no follow button so i did some reverse engineering and api fckery, all in 10 minutes. then got a whole ass undocumented api error code just for mr @ghost saying I can’t follow it. Then, the one follower before me: a daily.dev employee who probably admin abused and went into the database and followed to flex. when we all know, they suck. and they put such low effort into following such a rare account, then furthermore restricting others from doing it so he can be the only one. crazy. I wish I could do this: The exact opposite of what he did. Instead of denying following to one single account on daily.dev, allow anti-following (and deny following) one single account on daily.dev, which account to do that to? The employee who did this and their daily dev account… Anti-following in my idea is basically publicly saying “I hate you with a passion” on daily.dev. So, there. And since he made a custom api code restricting following the @ghost account, I’ll make a custom API code when trying to anti-follow another account or follow his: 3714957 (translating to “f…you” from old telephone language, if you’re confused, take each letter from the original word, get the number in the alphabet from the start it’s in. then divide it by 3. you’ll get a result close to each letter I made in that api code.) So yeah, nice day today. F. ck graphql and overprivileged employees. Ever heard of principle of the least privilege daily.dev CEO? I bet you give interns root. I regret signing up there. Peace :]

!Rant. My previous job hunting experience was great. I joined a platform that focuses not only on getting the best candidate for the company, but also the right fit for the candidate. After my coding test, I recieved a T-shirt and a book as a welcome gift. I also got partnered with a talent advisor. I received multiple interview requests on my first weekend and found my dream job by the following Wednesday. I then got a signing bonus in my first week and a expensive bottle of champagne from them to say good luck. The only problem I have is that they found me such a great job with huge amount of future growth opportunities that I will not be using them in the future. Shout out to OfferZen.com for looking out for devs and making the pain of finding a job feel more like a Dungeon and Dragons quest.

Nothing prepares you for Windows deciding your program as a virus for all your thousands of users and having no idea why.

It wasn’t virus related at all. It needed a new signing with an updated certificate. Did the error say anything like that? Hell no .

I was signing up for a new account on Magic. I wasn't paying attention so I accidentally didn't change my date of birth, so it didn't let me create an account because they thought I was just born today. I changed that field but nope, it remembered I had told it I was 1 day old and it didn't let me change my mind. Delete cookies, nothing. Reload page, nothing. So I go into Postman and re-create the request and BOOM! I even got an access token for their API. This is why I love being a dev.

I can't use DeepSeek without signing up. Someone tell me what's behind this thin wall separating us?

So I changed the language and keyboard layout on my windows machine and now it is stuck for 5 minutes after signing in, waiting for... something, before you can use it as usual. It's like I'm back in 1995. But at least I can use my new keyboard properly I guess.

For all the iOS developers in here, Xcode 8.2.1 has a bug, when trying to sign an archive for store deployment, you will get an unexplained error saying "code signing fail", after for hours of frustration, tears and trial and error, I ended up signing it with xcode 7. I hope this helps

If you are reading Coding for dummies book to learn software you are doing it alllll wrong lol ... Please while I appreciate your effort and willingness to try but no.. just no.. put the book down that book won’t teach you shit.

Same thing if you are one of those folks who got conned into believe “you can land a programming gig by signing up and paying for this 6 week course!!” Bullshit.. I like your initiative but there’s soooooo much more than that and it won’t even touch the surface. You will end up believing a false reality that you think you know what your doing but you don’t know how much you really don’t know. But like it doesn’t even scratch the surface don’t even attempt Get a job after those courses or coding for dummies book. You will be laughed at..

In fact I almost want to buy the coding for dummies book to have it in my collection of software books to not read. Which I will say is very small. There’s more really good books than really bad.. and obviously plenty of average. But the bell curve lands above the better half.

I'm in need of advice. I reckon this is no stack overflow but that's probably for the best as I wouldn't feel as comfortable posting there as I am doing it here. So, back to the question: I'm currently working with legacy code, written in .NET 2.0. This code is responsible for calling upon PEC services in order to finally create personal smart cards. I was tasked with the job of creating a repository system that would allow the program to call on the old legacy services or the new ones without any distinction. We are talking about SOAP services in both cases. The issues is: the new service definition is comprised of soap policies. This wouldn't be a problem per se, with more modern version of the framework, but with .NET 2.0? Yes, it is. It doesn't support policies and signing the body with a certificate right out of the box. How can I manage this? I feel like the only way would be letting the proxy class do its thing up until the very last moment: intercept the SOAP request before its sent and modify it according to the specifications. But I reckon this is very bad practice. Is there any other way out of this?

Thanks for anyone that would like to help. 🙂

How would you approach choosing a fairly short but meaningful domain name? Common words are obviously going to be taken.

I have a handful of domain names used for different things, but my main one is 17 characters long and made up of 2 words and not particularly interesting (my surname + another word). It's relatively easy to read out to people over the phone, but inputting it in a phone handset or on a device without a keyboard (e.g. setting the hostname + domain of a media centre with a remote control) is a bit tiresome.

Doesn't even have to be something I can say easily as I mainly want it just for "infrastructure" purposes rather than to host a website etc.

I'd probably use it for sign-up e-mails to reduce the amount of spam/newsletter mail (I do generate a separate address for signing up to most services) but other than that wouldn't be using it regularly for e-mail.

But I don't want something meaningless like abcxyz.

I know I haven't been productive lately but after two years of slowly build an upgrade to my app, I lost keys, signing certs and keystores :(

macOS - just nothing makes sense.

You try to go away from the deprecated stuff, use the new shinier API to stop and start services with launchctl (bootstrap/bootout vs. load/unload). And how does this stellar OS thank you for that? By crashing your service. Thanks for nothing.

From developer perspective this whole OS is just such a nightmarish clusterfuck. If you want to set up code signing with some special entitlements and you try to use the provisioning profiles as advertised, it's like pulling the one-armed bandit. It will plunder your coins and sanity. You try to compile it, it fails or the executable will be killed - you enable and disable the automatic codesigning in Xcode, or delete and download you old code signing cert and suddenly it works. It's just random - and you have to perform random walks on the Xcode project settings to make it run. So Apple turned us into Xcode clicking monkeys...

When signing and completing the contract for a freelance gig requires much more effort then the actual work/code involved. Sorry I mean “independent contractor agreement”. 🙈