So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved." - Mark Gibbs

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

So this is Reddit with a slick design specifically for complaining about how life as a programmer is annoying some of the time? I'm in.

Visual Studio Code. I went in expecting to hate it, but gave it a chance due to good reviews. Been hooked for months now.

Surprised to see Microsoft create such a slick Dev tool.

Until today, I haven’t worked on a react app or front end project in about 5 months.

Hoooo boy. What a fucking rollercoaster ride. One minute you’re doing some slick shit you learned how to do from working on backend projects, the next you’re screaming at your linter and pissing on your keyboard.

2/5 stars do not recommend.

I’m out.

*ascends into the cloud*

Got bored and threw a wrapper for devRant together and god damn it chromeOS why do you have to add a line to separate the window bar from the main content, would have looked slick!

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

Received stickers today. Awesome 😁 My laptop is slick 😎

Aww Yeh. Got them stickers. Thanks @dfox, @trogus. And to you guys for getting my post to 20++. XPS 15 looking slick.

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

"Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray."

Yup, that's how we work ^_^

!rant
Love the new look of Windows with the Insider Program!
Slick!

I'm a big fan of 'as' keyword in Python. It makes importing packages in the beginning of the code so slick.

Instead of doing:
> import what
> what.does.the.fox.say()

You can neatly do:
> from what import does.the.fox as fox
> fox.say()

Ternary operator in Java, because damn it looks so slick

An entire slick customer facing statistics dashboard... in a product that was discontinued a week after the dashboard was finished.

Rant from a previous gig I just remembered that reignited my fury lol

Suddenly, CSV exports became massively critical to our product's success. "They were always part of the plan, if we don't have them the product is a failure". Plot twist, they were NOT always part of the plan. And our backend is not at all designed for querying the combinations of data you're asking for.

Nevermind we've been entirely focused these last few months on making the new user experience as slick as possible because "our customers want cake, not meat and potatoes". Forget the fact that, in order to meet the deadlines, my team coupled the backend a little too much with the needs of the frontend because otherwise integrations took too long. We NEED fucking CSV exports of everything you can fucking imagine.

No. Fuck you. If you want it, it's gonna take at least 2 engineers and a month, and according to you we only have a few weeks of runway. No, I'm not compromising jack shit, this is the reality we live in. This is going to go nuclear in production if we don't do it right. Either give us the month and bankrupt the company, or fucking drop it.

Or...you could go cry to the frontend team for solutions. And convince them to page through ALL of the data and generate CSVs in the fucking browser. Sure, it sort of works in QA with the miniscule amount of data we have there, but how'd that work out for you in prod?

Jesus fucking christ why are you people such incompetent morons, and how the fuck did you become executives??

Writing a new tool, and it's looking pretty slick so far.

This is much better than meetings upon meetings. Maybe I should ask for a demotion so I can be writing code more often?

Client wanted me to implement a "fix" for the site beeing to large on mobile. He had to scroll too long. I implemented a quick fix and turned the biggest list into a carousel with slick slider (awesome 5-minute-fix btw.)

But it depends on jQuery. I feel so dirty now. The sites amount of JavaScript is three times bigger now, too. Please, don't judge me. 😩

There are a couple of things I like to do before sitting down to code for the first time on a project. Throughout all of this I'm (sometimes unconsciously) planning out the project.

- Clean the house;
- Buy groceries;
- Buy/prepare food & eat;
- Arrange everything on my desk so that everything looks slick as fuck;
- Actually sit down to do something;
- Realize it's past midnight;
- Go to sleep.

Sometimes I wonder if I have OCD...

Never understood plastering a laptop in stickers. I do have one devRant one though because without the icon, I think it looks slick.

If the website layout is all broken and looks bad - it’s your fault. You can’t claim “I’m not a visual designer.” No one cares about how slick your MVC style is.

when you cant be arsed to do icons so you just use emojis for button icons.

btn.textContent = "🗑️"

because icon sets now have their own apis (like what ever happened to icon fonts?), and documents explaining what scripts and commands to run to *install fucking plugins* on software written to *supplement* doc servers. plugins and software whos host site returns an SSL error. nice.

to use web icons. downloaded only on request. from other sites.

seems kind of eh, tower-of-baylon to me. like a bird landing on the electrical lines near your house might cause a blip and break one or two icons on your slick 2020 web app.

idk just seems unnecessary, like if you're small, your gonna want to embed your fonts on the webpage instead of overcooking things and hosting *a fucking server* just to serve an api for fucking *icons*. and if you're large you're gonna reduce those requests anyway

Was driving home last night when I noticed that my car was slowly drifting side to side. It felt weird like when a tire is low/flat. So I gradually slowed down from 50mph to 40mph. Note, I did this carefully and slowly. My antilock brakes kicked in. Like holy hell how slick does a road have to be for a small deceleration like that to kick in antilocks?

So it made me think of a math question:
If a typically sized sedan (weighing 2 tons) decelerates from 50mph to 40mph and the antilock brakes kick in, what it the frictional coefficient of the surface of the road? Also assuming typical non-bald all season tires.
Multiple choice:
a) slick
b) really slick
c) REALLY FUCKING SLICK!

Dear Xcode,

You are a lovely IDE. Especially when an app crashes and the crash stops once I restart you. I am your friend forever.

Yours always,

Slick mouth/Pissed Off Developer

1000 yard stare? Excuse me, what? It’s called “being slick”.

Do devRanters try to replicate themselves when creating an avatar or create a slick version of how they would want to look like or portray themselves as?

1) Read the ticket.
2) Create a branch with ticket number in name.
3) Move ticket to Working now section.
4) Make some changes according to the ticket.
5) Commit changes to branch. Than pull it.
6) Create pull request and submit it.
7) Move ticket into In review section.
8) Move to another ticket.

Tickets:
#7 - Change background size in product item.
#8 - Add icon to info flash message.
#9 - Add adaptiveHeight parameter to the slick slider.

Done, now another 30 tickets...
Yep, this is my workflow i'm forced to now.

How long has GitHub been rendering Jupyter notebook files? That's slick.

In our company most of the PMs do the development. Surprisingly it does with pretty well.

But this PM just asked "how to get rid of spaces in a string"...

Built a pretty slick chat bot for my company’s conferences that used Google’s Dialogflow for natural language processing and conversation state

It worked from a web chat or SMS. Allowed manual responding by agents as well as the chat bot. Pulled dynamic answers through a 3rd party API integration

Most common questions “what is the wifi password” and “tell me a joke”

Project was killed after 2 conferences - thankfully it only took me a few weeks to build

Is anybody looking forward to the new No Man's Sky update? I haven't played it in a while, but damn, it's starting to look pretty slick. 👽

So you got new sdd and you want to try someone new slick distro. So you google slick distro and you find a blog.
You download 4 to 5 iso. Now you want to make a bootable pendrive, but you don't have pendrive. So you use your 1TB HDD. And you accidentally format the whole HDD. Now you install one by one all iso. You don't like single os you revert back to the original OS. And you have wasted your whole day.

List of distro I installed:
1) Deepin OS
2) Solus OS
3) Nitrux
4) Ubuntu 17.10
5) Pop OS (Orignal OS)

Any craft CMS users out there? Seems pretty slick...starting my 1st project using it tonight

Sticker post!! Recently got to play with Stackbit, a slick way to spin up JAMStack sites and being a super early beta adopter netted me some sweet stickers.

As a dev stickers always make me giddy like a little kid. So dumb but I love it.

What's your fav dev sticker you've ever Recieved and what's the story behind it??

Am I the only one, who wants his macbook back clean and slick without these annoying stickers? NO STICKERS ON MY MACBOOK!

Every once in a while it helps to remind the 100 people that have jobs because of you that you could leave at any time.

Anyone use slick for carousel navigation? Have you had to deal with slow building of the carousels? How did you deal with it?