Hehe right on point....glad I managed to take a screenshot :P

Me: so glad it's Friday!
Coworker: it's Wednesday...
Me: FUUUUCCKK. This is bullshit

Devs who argue that their favourite language is the best and other are not good enough for anything. Different tools for different jobs dammit!

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

Worst interview is the one that actually got me where I am today.

Its been 15 years ago, but I remember very well. Since it was a startup back then they didn't really have any job titles yet or what so ever. I applied for the role of network engineer, heck I didn't care I needed a paycheck.

5 minutes into the interview the smalltalk left the room and they started asking me questions, mainly about me as a person. Eventually it was my turn. After my first question I facepalmed so hard.. Do you guys have any SLA or documentation around here? Heard of ITIL? How is your load balancing?

They stared at me as if I was some kind of alien that had just invaded their little safe planet.. it was hilarious.

An hour later they called me to come back in and sign a contract.. from there on I kind of multi tasked my way around the first year.. bit of network support & design, customer support, sending and packaging orders after 5PM.. god we had long but awesome days.. hence, we were just the 5 of us. Nowadays we've got 150 developers out of 1019 total staff currently.. We also improved interview questions and processes ;)

Fuck you java for forcing me to catch an exception which will never occur -.-

Anyone else get a little freaked out when someone tells you a website works BEST on IE?

Guy I just met: so what do you do?

Me: I'm a developer

Guy: no way! I work for a software company so... (goes on to talk for 10 minutes trying to show off his knowledge of software)

Me: so what do you do there?

Guy: sales

Me: oh...

Just because you work for a software company does not mean you know shit about software. Don't try to build some erroneous common ground with me because you walked by a developer's desk one time, looked at his or her screen, and magically thought you could understand code.

Supervisor: so you're going to write a perl script that will compile a jar that will be used to invoke a web service
Me: okay. What does the web service do?...
Supervisor: I'm not sure how it works. It'll just return a success or error code
Me: so I'm just going to invoke a black box?
Supervisor: that's a good way to think of it
Me: so how does the qa process work with this black box/how can we debug?
Supervisor: we don't have qa for it and we can't debug

What the fuck?!?!? You expect me to call a literal fucking black fucking box?!?! This isn't lambda calc you jabroni.

Dev lead on another team: Ok we can build that API for the mobile apps, we'll generate everything, generate printable images for the labels, persist it all and do all the relevant lookups and checks. Do you need an SLA?

Director: Yes, 9ms

*silence*

Lead: Sorry .... 9ms?

Director: yeah, its a must have

Lead: ... the speed of light wouldn't even let us transmit it that fast

Me:
Totally riffing to my new playlist....
the ideas are just flowing.....
Code flying...
changing in my brain....
I think I've got I might have it.....
...... RING RING ITS THE MOTHERFUCKING BOSS,
Boss:
Why is the whole website down?

Me: WTF, looks fine here, all logs are clear.

Boss: I just got an email saying the whole thing is fucked. Stop everything and fix it now.

Me: but we just agreed dev is taking priority over any support issues within sla and I've checked from everywhere there are no issues, just data issues probably from user error.

Boss: Just get it back and figure it out!!!!! Why are you being difficult?

Me: okay whatever, let's patch each of these shits.

COULDVE SENT THIS ANYWHERE BUT NOW MY IDEA IS GOOOONEEE!!!!!! NULL FUCKING DATA FIELD ON A SINGLE FUCKING EMAIL....FRAAAAACKKK THIS

Gather around folks, I'll paint you a nice picture based on a true story, back from my sysadmin days. Listen up.
It's about HP and their Solaris 5.4/6 support.

- Yet another Prod Solaris dinosaur crashed
- Connected to console, found a dead system disk; for some reason it was not booting on the remaining redundant disk...
- Logged an HP vendor case. Sev1. SLA for response is 30 minutes, SLA for a fix is <24 hours
- It took them 2 days to respond to our Prod server outage due to failed system disks (responses "we are looking into this" do not count)
- it took another day for them to find an engineer who could attend the server in the DC
- The field engineer came to the DC 4 hours before the agreed time, so he had to wait (DC was 4-5 hours of driving away from HP centre)
- Turns out, he came to the wrong datacentre and was not let in even when the time came

- We had to reschedule for two days later. Prod is still down
- The engg came to the DC on time. He confirmed he had the FRU on him. Looks promising
- He entered the Hall
- He replaced the disk on the Solaris server
- It was the wrong disk he replaced. So now the server is beyond rebuild. It has to be built anew... but only after he comes back and replaces the actually faulty disk.
- He replaced that disk on the wrong Solaris server

This had me laughing out loud this morning, my wife just looked at me funny as I tried to explain it to her.

What the user says and what they mean are rarely the same thing.

Supervisor has me making a web app in this badass new stack called the LAP (linux, apache, php) stack because he would he would like the app to be "simple". He's spot on though.. having a three letter acronym saves so much time.... and then we don't need to worry about a database... or querying.... or efficiency.... or even the web app itself because clearly he expects the fucking code gods to come down and turn this piece of shit web app into a fucking masterpiece if he thinks this shit can be done based on a hacked together file management system. Please save me code gods

So first of all.. Fuck perl.. Actually, that's all I have to say

Fucking fuck you 'executive' sales director.

You come into my office when I'm not here, and then force people to prioritise your shitty fucking customer above a high priority one that I need to go to. I get phoned and told, "You will go there".

Basically, he just prioritised a shitty fucking issue of 3 users over a high priority SLA customer of 140 users.

Getting shat out as I speak about why the high priority is not being done (I need to do DR there, because their server crashed).

Basically said - I am fucked. I either choose to go to the SLA call and then the 'director' fucking loses his shit and hits me, or I go to the call and the MD loses his shit and fucks me up (again).

Fuck this.
Fuck.

Time to get to work!

Whiteboard interviews. Would say "my first whiteboard interviews", but I think they will always have the magic to make developers feel stupid.

It's 1:00( 1 am) here now...I wanted to get some coding done since 20:00(8 pm for the weird people ;P)
Got distracted by Dev rant all the time -.- and didn't write a single line of code...fml

It is fucking written in rules that SLA would be given post the discussion.

AFTER THE MOTHERFUCKING DISCUSSION.

Bitch can't read a simple English statement.

And in the SLA column, it is clearly mentioned that one must state the DATE. This idiot mentions the entire fucking Quarter.

How fucking dumb you can be to not read the basics mentioned for your own and others ease of functioning.

Indians are illiterate morons. I apologise to the entire world today on behalf of these fragmented cauliflowers.

To whoever this means, I am sorry that you have to deal with these retarded brains.

Also, the task was supposed to be done by others and not the blabbering bitch. She takes up random unwated shit and then cribs to our manager that she is overloaded and Floyd isn't helping.

When I help, she complains that I am overstepping.

Go fuck yourself you mongoose.

Is it just me or should devrant have codeblock syntax?

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

Dev: Hey infra guys, our backend time to first byte takes 8 seconds! Can you guys investigate?

Network team: Oh yeah that's normal, we don't investigate anything below 30s, that's our SLA 😎

😵

Spent hours troubleshooting an internal app that had zero logging today. It would just terminate, no exceptions, no feedback to the debugger, NOTHING.

Turned out to be the damn corporate virus scanner blocking "malicious" behaviour. Good thing my desk is so heavy or I woulda flipped it...

Started a new job on Monday. STILL DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO THE FUCKING SERVERS I NEED TO ANYTHING. Holy fucking shit I'm annoyed. Fuck you corporate bullshit. I already feel like quitting.

Programmers Bike

When I got X up and running at 1am for the first time on my first computer, 486 SX 25MHz with 8 MB or ram.

The program SuperProbe is probably depicted now, but it got me up and running back then.

I was copying data from a failing zfs drive with rsync and I noticed that it spent a long time on the file ~/.local/share/Baloo/index

du -h index showed a 500ish MB file which didn't seem large enough to take this long.

I recalled that du shows disk usage, not file size and since I was using zfs compression they could be quite different.

so I added -A for apparent size:

du -hA index and it comes back with 1.7E

The file was 1.7 exabytes...

Just earlier today I was looking at the hosting packages for a local hosting provider in my country (who shall remain unnamed as I want to work there and criticizing them might not be a very good idea right now) and they start at €250/month apparently. I thought - that's fucking ridiculous!

Like for real, I could literally buy a server for.. I dunno, €600 from the likes of bargainhardware.co.uk with some pretty darn good specs, put it in my home, get a business contract with my ISP for say around €100/month (and use it for my own purposes as well instead of my consumer contract, win-win!), and the server would pay for itself in no more than half a year, probably even less! And you're even getting the actual hardware with it!! And that is for the price of that hosting provider's starting option!!!

Now I know what you're thinking, sure there's more to servers than just the server itself, like redundant power, generators, SLA, multiple routers and switches, and all sorts of failover measures. And you are absolutely right. But does that really justify a rental cost of a server of €250/month?

Not only that, even their shared hosting.. shared hosting, the dreaded, shitty shared hosting! solution is starting at around €10/month. I'm paying about €5/month for 3 light-duty servers and a domain for Christ's sake!

So.. is this hosting provider just expensive as fuck or is this really the industry standard, particularly for the dedicated hosting part? And maybe that's why some services like.. say devRant which apparently gets around €600/month from 299 supporters at the time of writing, yet still has @dfox and @trogus pay from their own wallets for it (if at all possible, please let me know if that's still the case).. I wonder if those costs are all really justifiable?

It just strikes me as odd.. you can get *a lot* of server for a couple hundred bucks if you do it well.. no?

Now... I understand 2FA is to make things more secure, and I do appreciate it. BUT can we please work out a damn solution for people who work in an agency for other corporates which only have one shared account across the agency that bundles one phone number or mobile app.

What if people are on leave or sick? I need stupid 2FA to be able to login/work. uhhhhhhh.....

When systems throttles your bandwidth during load tests and doesn't tell you, and you waste an afternoon investigating

Thoughts on Apple making their own processors for Macs. Ready, go!

I'm logged into my box at home via ssh and coding in vim.... On the bus, using my phone.

I need more spare time, I get to sit down in front of my computer for maybe 1-2 hours a week.

Had my dev job described as a "computer, desk job" in a condescending tone yesterday by a guy trying to convince me to join his pyramid scheme....
// TODO: come up with awesome rant about this so I can look badass

That day when you need to restart your vsphere virtualizer after 2 and 1/2 years of uptime, just to find it won't boot in any possible way, and you rush to install it fresh on an USB drive 20 mins before your sla runs out... that day was today, fml!

Man, I hate project managers who demand a near 100% SLA, but want the project to run off of a single physical server. Like. Sure, buddy, and when a stick of ram dies, or there's a 10.0 CVE released of the kernel, then how do we keep the machine running.

Some people, ugh

3ds Max Python API Documentation.

No function has a single word explaining what it does.

The Documentation seems like it is completely auto generated and while writing the API they forgot to add Docstrings....

4am writing an assignment about the ethics of anonymity tools (TOR, VPNs, brown bags to put on your head)
I love the subject – I picked it – but these written assignments for peripheral classes are the most soul sucking part of studying software engineering

Met a client. He need some abc services. Client asked me what will be the sla uptime. I told him unintentionally that it will be 99% instead of 99.99% and he was like that's good. I mean seriously....?

Was he okay with the 3 days 15 hrs downtime?

It's done. Agile has taken over my life. The other day I looked outside and thought, "As a user, I can stand on my lawn without my feet disappearing." And that's how I decided to mow my lawn.

Programming. Where listening to music and ignoring collegues means you're hard at work.

Decision paralysis :(

Have you ever hit Ballmers Peak, only to fly past it but still keep coding? Sometimes it's an adventure looking at the code the next day. Three steps forward, one step back I say!

So a couple of months ago I had some stability issues which seems to have caused Baloo go crazy and create an 1.7 exabyte index file. It was apparently mainly empty as zfs compressed it down to 535MB

Today I spent some time trying to reproduce the "issue" and turns out that wasn't that hard.

So this little program running on FreeBSD with a compressed (lz4) zfs dataset creates an 1.9 Exabyte large file, nicely compressed down to 45KB :)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/limits.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
int fd = open("bigfile.lge", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0644);
for (int i = 0 ; i < 1000000000; i++) {
lseek(fd, INT_MAX, SEEK_CUR);
}
write(fd, " ",1);
close(fd);
}

Microservices in real life:
You have 4 different project opened in IDE simultaneously editing all of them to make something to work.
All projects share same db.
Basically this is monolith but splitter to different git repos.
Communicating one another via http calls or directly altering shared db tables.
Everyone is happy until solution goes to production then :
Solution doesn't scale because db is a bottleneck.
Services can be unavailable for 1-2s so some processes are left in unfinished state forever, because everyone assume 99,9% SLA means it always available and http calls will never fail.
Http calls take time.

We have "customer service" but others keep call it as "support".. Guess what, no SLA at all! Sucks

Anyone else add "!google" to every single dev-related DuckDuckGo search?

Is it just me or is python community's dependency management a bit unreliable?

I just can't seem to easily install any python programs without missing dependencies. Updates have caused libraries to become incompatible, which in turn causes the application that used to work to just produce a stack trace.

Is this the state of python or am I doing something wrong.

Reading the source of a message queue system I'm planning on extending.

I don't see myself as a rockstar programmer or anything but the construction of arrays from hash tables, sorting those arrays and then a nested for loop to find matches really irks me. Luckily not on the critical message processing path but the stats collection thread. There are mutexes in play though that would probably delay processing a little bit when stats are collected.

Starting my first dev job next week (except for freelance work) and I'm crazy nervous that I'm going to make some huge mistake and look really stupid. Did anyone else have these fears before their first dev job and, if so, how'd you stay at least a little confident?

Ugh, fuck the SSRS web service. Spent all week trying to consume the service with PowerShell, doesn't make it any easier when there are undocumented behaviours. TypeName property has to be Type, for instance, when creating a search condition, TOTALLY contrary to the documentation.

Want to change the data source for a report you uploaded? Gl;hf! Back to it next week, think I'm close to having a working deployment script...so close.

For those of you who DO use PHP, regardless of whether you like it or not, have you ever used something like PEAR? And what are your thoughts?
I'm writing a fairly basic internal web app for our PMs and I'm looking for something similar to npm to save me some time/effort. I should also mention that my supervisor insists it be in PHP...

Employees of companies that are so protective of their intellectual property that they don't allow any to be transfered outside of the workplace, how do you work from home?

For testing, I added an override environment variable in some C# code so I can set it in the projects debug properties when I run it.

Turns out that while it's possible to do this in C++ projects, MS decided that they don't want you to do that for C# projects as there are other ways that they want to do it.

So it's not possible to modify your environment for C# projects within visual studio.

*Bangs head against the wall and surrenders to the Microsoft way of doing things*

Has OSS Projects build systems become more complicated lately?

I took a stab at building concourse ci on FreeBSD. It being written in go, I expected it to be rather straight forward but no.

To "compile" the web UI assets, yarn (an alternative nodejs package manager apparently) was required. (Are js and CSS really compile targets now?)

Installed yarn and ran yarn build, it complained about lessc not being installed, so ran yarn install lessc which then told me that I was running an unsupported operating system.

I can compile the actual consourse binary just fine, but without yarn doing it's thing the assets required for the web UI does not get compiled in and therefore doesn't work properly.

Maybe I compile the web UI assets in Linux, and cross compile my FreeBSD binary...

I've gone from a "no early returns" guy to a "return as early as possible to maintain the happy path indented as much to the left as possible" guy.

Looks so much neater now.

Decision paralysis panic attack

!rant

How do you find a list of your favourited rants on the Android app? I can't for the life of me find it.