My wife wouldn't stop asking me to help her with FB. As a joke I told her if she didn't quit, I'd delete it (Tech stuff goes over her head like a 747). Well, she kept on so I opened up the Dev tools. I started by adding just some non sense to one of the divs. She saw it pop up on screen and was like "Wait...you can really do that?" then I highlighted the body tag and hit backspace. The whole thing disappeared, it was great. She legit freaked out for a minute and begged me to fix it. I popped up the console and started typing random things. Created an array with some mumbo-jumbo, a couple of quick, meaningless functions and snuck hitting Ctrl+R in there, refreshing the page. She was so happy that Facebook worked again, that she stopped asking me how to do whatever it was

The last software I worked on in my previous company (a few months back), was a temporary replacement because they were switching techs. It was meant to be replaced within 2 years.

So, before I left, I added a kill. 2 years and 2 months into the future. First it spams the devs with emails "how is the tech upgrade going?" with no further clues. 6 months later it will start throwing random exceptions at random intervals. 6 months after that it just terminates the application immediately upon startup. Snuck it in between large commits, and since they stopped code reviews when I left, doubt they found it.

There is a setting in configuration with an obscure name to disable it all.

I marked the dates in my calendar. Would love to be a fly on the wall then.

AHHHHHH. I KNEW I'D SEE YOU, YOU LITTLE BALL OF HAIR, CUM, AND PISS. GO DIE IN HELL.

It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.

The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.

Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.

What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.

It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.

Then, I got an idea.

Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!

So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.

It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!

Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

What the fucking fuck. Arquillian you piece of shit.
I have a service that needs to go to production soon, it contains Arquillian tests. The tests work locally but not when going through our new Jenkins pipeline. The error message simply says: "Could not start Arquillian container".
Well fuck you too.
After 3 fucking days of rewriting configs, changing up things and I dont know what else I did, I stubled upon the most hidden error message in the history of error messages, a small little line that says "Could not find or load main class ".
Those 2 spaces are intentional btw, because the fucking error was that when starting arquillian and reading the config there was A FUCKING SPACE too much in my JVM arguments. This piece of shit iterpreted it as my FUCKING MAIN CLASS. Whhhhyyyyy, whhhyyyy. Who the fuck... AAAAAAAAAHHH

Btw I snuck myself on devrant a few weeks back and managed to get my 100++ today. Really love this place 😊