!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

When I was at my lowest, my buddy and me sat in front of the screen, and learned how to code from Bucky Roberts. A few years later, I finally got a proper programming gig, but never stopped freelancing. My buddy on the other hand, studied Computer Science and stopped coding for a while after graduating. 5 years later, today we sat in front of the screen and learned how to code together again. I think he has no idea what he has led me to. If he had not made me code, I would have remained the same boy from the streets. But it is not about me, I have heard so many incredible stories. The more codes you write, the more errors you'll encounter. The more errors you try to solve, the bigger the community grows. It's nice to know, there is a group of people out there, who will spend rest of their lives writing, thinking and interacting. Also, trying to figure out how to centre that piece of shit of a div with CSS! I mean wtf!

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

New job, started two months ago. Forced to use a MacBook. First time using iShit in my life.

- Laptop reboots randomly every three weeks or so "because of an error" (thanks, very informative error message).

- Sometimes if I use two screens and I lock my laptop, only one screen gets locked.

- The most simple tasks require a fucking large number of clicks. There are almost no keyboard shortcuts. My hand hurts because of this, and after two months the pain is getting worse and worse.

- Yes, I know there are apps that give you extra keyboard shortcuts, but those don't help much. I never used a mouse in 10 years.

- Window management sucks. It's so broken and poor in so many ways, I don't know where to start.

- Random errors and pop-ups are the norm.

- I have only four fucking USB Type C ports. I can somehow understand having only Type C because it looks cool, but fuck at least give me 6 of them, or 8. Do you really have to force me to use a USB hub, in addition to a shitload of adapters?

- Multiple monitors don't work unless the laptop is connected to the power adapter.

- The above point means, in practice, that I have exactly zero USB Type C ports available to me: one is used for the power adapter, two are for the two monitors, and one for the USB hub. Whenever I have to connect something that has Type C, I have to choose between monitors and going fuck myself.

- I don't want to comment on performance, cooling system or battery life. This would be a waste of time. Let's just say that it's shit.

Now, dear Apple fangirls and fanboys, please downvote this rant. I want your downvotes, so please don't hesitate to press that (--) button. But please let me say that these products are shit, pure shit. Fuck Apple and their overpriced products.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

dream job? being a bug developer, i'm already really good at it

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

We need this done quickly!!! Don't worry about testing!!!

....

Why are there so many errors!?

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

It fucking staggers me how many backend/devops-y people don't understand what a client side "request timeout" is, versus a server side one.

What does it mean:

The client was fed up with the servers bullshit, and decided to piss off and not wait around for the server to take forever to respond, because life's too short.

How not to solve/debug this issue:

- "I've checked the API request in tool xyz, and it works fine for me"

Congratulations, you've figured out how to call an API once, in isolation to the rest of the application, and without any excessive load. And using a different client to me, with a different configuration. Lets get back to actually looking at the issue shall we?

- "I only see HTTP 200's in the logs"

Yep, you probably will in most circumstances, because its the client complaining about it taking too long, not the server. If the server was telepathetic and knew what the client was thinking/doing at all times, we wouldn't have half of the errors we do.

- "Ah ok, I understand ... so how do I solve this?"

Your asking me? I don't fucking know, I didn't build the server! Put better logging in place and figure out why sometimes it takes forever.

Jesus fucking christ

I finally got Redux-Form’s `initialValues` to work! Wooooo~!

/giphy confetti cheering

It turns out I haven’t actually been doing anything wrong for the past week. I mean, I've been working on other things during that week, too, but I've been trying to solve this the entire time.

The cause? ReduxForm made a breaking change awhile ago (v5; we’re using v7) that prevents the `initialValues` prop from working if you decorate your form component in the wrong order. Many examples online are incorrect because of this.

Basically, the decorators `reduxForm` and `connect` do not commute:

Incorrect:
`reduxForm(...)( connect(..., {...})(form) )`

vs Correct:
`connect(..., {...})( reduxForm(...)(form) )`

But what really pisses me off is that the fucking documentation specifically fucking states that you may decorate your component IN ANY [FUCKING] ORDER.

/giphy that is [fucking] false

So, I've been following example after [fucking] example that either list these in the wrong order, or I just don't notice the different order because it doesn't matter. AND because of that NONE OF THE [...] EXAMPLES WORK.

ARGH.

I've been pacing around the office trying to figure this out for days. I've rewritten my code three times to try to solve this. I've written two workarounds for it only to rip them out and try again because they both broke some other part of the UX. (e.g. causing false validation errors after rerender)

just. hafhsldkjhgjkhagklwhsdjfkahslf. 😡

/giphy angry hades

You know how I discovered this?
I found it in a github ticket. One solitary, untagged ticket from October of last year. Not a single goddamn post anywhere else mentioned this. And the [...] documentation specifically [...] states the [...] opposite!

Bloody [...] hell.

but it finally works.
as;kgjhaekl;gahgjkdflssdafh.

I could scream.

!rant

Yesterday I got a pretty straight-forward task of fixing SASS linting errors from our project. I thought, "How many errors could there be?" Turns out there were just around 2000 errors across 109 files!

I was almost like, "Man, this is going to take a lot of my time!"

So, I started fixing the errors one-by-one with my headphones on and switching music genres after every 2 hours.

After almost 6 hours of continuous bug-fixing, my mind kind of became repellant to the possibility of the outer world and my fingers automatically fell on the right keys in almost no time. My brain was functioning like a computer itself.

And after the end of 7 hours, I reduced the number to less than 1000 errors.

Today, I continued the task and found out that there were some scoping errors I made yesterday (web developers would know this pain of '&').

And after working for almost 6 hours today, I got the number down to 500.

Not a rant, but I felt extremely content with what I did today.

I guess every day is not just about programming, sometimes, it's also about making your code better.

Thanks for reading! :)

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

Hate being forced to jump back and forth between mutiple projects that use different languages, syntax, and IDEs. Feels like I'm juggling chainsaws and kittens.

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

A PCB I designed on the job over the last weeks shipped today! A benefit of hardware is the haptic element you have at the end of the design process - you made something touchable. (I am proud.)
Also, errors made earlier in the design process are permanent now. But other than on my software my design got reviewed, so I'm optimistic it'll not contain many if any.

I'm on vacation right now for moving stuff but I'm looking forward to do the "pick'n place" on monday. Soldering manually is quite relaxing for me, you should try it, too! ;)

In other news, I'm no longer sleeping on the floor in my home-office while the paint is drying in other rooms.
I already moved the most of my stuff - books and tech equipment are the worst - and I moved my furniture yesterday.
My new roommates are considerably quieter and my sleeping rhythm is slowly shifting back to normal.

The new guy:

- I'm a big fan of effectiveness and efficiency. The faster can you do the task - the better.

- naah, typing in the terminal is soo inefficient. Typing, remembering commands, parameters, paths... That's such a drag! Such a lag! Having a button I could click to do the job is far better!

- OSS is the root of all the evil!

- I'd like to try linux once again. I like it, hopefully I won't need to spend another couple of weeks setting up dual-gpu power management and searches for an Intel wifi's dual-antennae driver.

- I need a bluetooth mouse for my laptop. Using trackpoint or a touchpad is a nonsense [I agree abt the trackpoint]. Using a keyboard/typing for navigation?!? That's utter nonsense!

- I'd like to try i3wm, it looks effective and efficient

it's happened within the last month and I'm still trying to compile all this input into his preferences. So far I'm getting too many conflicting errors

It's been posted by a child in a forum so I shouldn't be evil, but it made me laugh 😂

The question was "why so many errors?"

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Omg so I've been stuck on this function I'm writing that checks if a certain array value is so many characters long and well, it just wasnt returning false when outside the conditions..

I tried taking it step by step, echoing out every line and it all made sense to me and there were no syntax errors.

Time goes by and inside the configuration file I was testing.. I was changing the value of a DIFFERENT array property than what I was using in my condition. They looked really similar.. fml xD

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

So I was talking to the support engineer at PayTM regarding their integration in my app. Idiots!

Many users in my app want PayTM as the payment option. I am using their API and after trying for a few hours, when it was just not working even though I followed their guide and docs, I decide to call the support. After I described him the errors I was getting, he asked me to follow the docs which, being a developer myself, I already did. When I told him that I have done everything exactly as mentioned in the docs, he asked me to hold the phone. Came back after 1 minute and said, "Sir, I discussed the issue with my TL and he says that our API does not work in PostMan."

I hung up.

I managed to make it work by trying evening I could possibly do. But I am amazed what kind of people are running such a giant company. PostMan is made to test APIs. Idiots!

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

—————

tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

Working on my Google Foo Bar level 4 challenge.

9 days past figuring out how to solve this problem..

And finally reached on a working solution. When started compiling my solution.

And then i Find out, the fucking Google tool is facing some bug and not allowing compilation. Tried hard to do everything but still getting errors...
And after searching on Google just found I'm fucked up.. It's on Google's end and they are not fixing it since so many days..

Just 5 days left to complete.. And i have no idea what should i do...

4 month work just fucked up

Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.

Lets learn bubble sort!
Type the following code to Visual C++ 1998 and compile it. Then run it. Write the output to the paper i just gave it to you.

Reality:
• Takes 5 mins to compile and run
• Too many errors in the given code so obscure output
• Teacher thinks we are so smart that we can understand c by typing and looking at the output.

The worst part:
• Different output per compiler
- Correctly compiles in the compiler in VC++ 98.
- Differs in GNU GCC, compiles wrong
- sends out obscure dummy output in VS2015~2017
- Works well in tutorialspoint.com compiler

WTF is this, guys?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Oh, and i have gone off topic...
Why does he think we are smart that we can understand bubble sort, and 4 more by only typing the code and looking at the output without knowing how does this algo work?

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Answer to weekly question.
The teacher said to understand sorting algos by typing the code and looking at the output which differs per compiler.

FUCKING FUCK ANGULAR!!!!
LIKE FUCK IT IN THE ARSE AND BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER WHILE LAUNCHING A MISSILE ON IT TO BE SURE!

(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸━┸

So I am making something on angular and I got everything running in ng serve(development environment) , after handling all issues and showing it to my boss man he approves and asked to put it up on prod for a demo , doesn’t sound like an issue , I make the prod build on cli and BAM! 16 errors ? No issues right?, I’ll just google the issue. Googles.... there aren’t no clear solutions to it as the angular version keeps changing and nobody knows what broke it, I mean people have the issue,but like 100 reasons that can cause it,
HOLY LORD RELEASE A NEWER VERSION AFTER MENDING THE OLD ONE
But nooooooo!

Angular Dev:We fucked this one, lol what should we do boss man?
Angular boss man: lol just leave it, we need to build the new version with newer bugs,

P.S. I like angular, but it’s like a underdeveloped framework, too many issues and too many changes

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

IT'S CAPS RANT TIME!
MYSQL ERRORS ARE SO USELESS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

I JUST WANT TO ADD A FOREIGN KEY BUT 'Cannot add foreign key constraint' KEEPS COMING UP, AND THE STACK OVERFLOW ANSWERS INDICATE THAT IT COULD BE -LITERALLY- ANYTHING!

THIS IS OF COURSE, AFTER PHPMYADMIN GIVES ITS OWN ERRORS FOR TRYING TO USE THE DESIGNER TO ADD THE RELATION. IT ONLY WANTS UNIQUE FOREIGN KEYS, DESPITE ONE OF THE MAIN USES OF FOREIGN KEYS BEING MANY-TO-MANY AND ONE-TO-MANY RELATIONS!

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

Amazon mturk. Job was to rate grammatical corrections.

First of all, it's surprising how often people forget commas. That's like, the #1 error with these things.

People just keep going on and on and on and on and on and never break their sentence even if there was supposed to be a comma and it really makes the voice in my head fell like it's running out of breath but it can't stop because the sentence is still going and [...]

The corrections are generally okay. I took many more college-level English classes than I think I needed to, so my English is fairly decent. For this reason, I might be a bit more of a stickler than I need to be for this job.

But this one threw me for a loop, because it's just such a bad correction. Not only does it miss the obvious errors but creates a new, equally obvious error.

This is one of the reasons mturk is interesting to me. Sure, I don't make.... practically anything. But you come into such a variety of work that it's almost addicting in a sense.

Why I hate typescript. Bored during quarantine so thought I rant a little more about this.
1. Compilation time, typescript increases project compilation time from 1 second to 3-4 seconds, which is basically triple or quadruple the time if you don't know math.
2. You write a minimum of 30% more code.
3. Many libraries are not written in TS by default, which means you end up having to manually install a fuckton of @types/(pckg name) manually which is incredibly shit.
4. Typescript is an absolute pain in the ass when using dynamic libraries. Plus when it works, it usually ends up finding maybe 1-2 errors in your code MAX, completely not worth it.
5.JSDoc is 100 times better. (Still don't use it though).
6. I actually enjoy loosely typed languages, having your compiler being smart enough to tell what the type of your input is is much better than it assuming you're a fucking retard so it forces you to manually type everything.

P.S if you hate loosely typed languages, kindly resort to Angular, C#, Java or whatever and leave JS alone, cunt.

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

Just installed Keras, theano, PyTorch and Tensorflow on Windows 10 with GPU and CUDA working...
Took me 2 days to do it on my PC, and then another two days of cryptic compiler errors to do it on my laptop. It takes an hour or so on Linux... But now all of my devices are ready to train some Deep Deep Learning models )
I don't think even here many people will understand the pain I had to go through, but I just had to share it somewhere since I am now overcome with peace and joy.

Fuck this I need to ventilate.

Thinking about job change because maintaining and extending 3 years old codebase (flask project) is FUCKIN exhausting. It was badly written since start by someone who obviously didn't know much about python. (Going by commit history.)

Examples:
- if var != None / if var == None
- if var is not None / if var is None (well..)
- Returning self-parsed obscure JSONs from dict variable
- Serializing dictionaries into database by str() (both sqlalchemy and mysql support JSON format) - THEY ARE ALMOST UNUSABLE OTHER WAY AROUND (luckily, python can deal even with that)
- celery tasks, the way they are called they BLOCK the whole flask (not bad in itself, but if connection breaks there are no errors, nothing it just hangs)
- obscure generator/yielding that contains return of flask's response in itself
- creating fifteen thousands of variables one by one where they would look so nicely as dict keys, and hey they are then both MANUALLY SERIALIZED into returning dict by "%s" (string formatting) [okey, some of them are objecst like datetime but MATE WTF]
- many, many more, PEP lint shall not pass

I would rather deal with fresh startup owners wanting me to program unicorns in one week then trying to extend and manage zombie-like projects.

Nothing personal against the firm I actually like the place.

Am I the only developer in existence who's ever dealt with Git on Windows? What a colossal train wreck.

1. Authentication. Since there is no ssh key/git url support on Windows, you have to retype your git credentials Every Stinking Time you push. I thought Git Credential Manager was supposed to save your credentials? And this was impossible over SSH (see below). The previous developer had used an http git URL with his username and password baked in for authentication. I thought that was a horrific idea so I eventually figured out how to use a Bitbucket App password.

2. Permissions errors
In order to commit and push updates, I have to run Git for Windows as Administrator.

3. No SSH for easy git access
Here's where I confess that this is a Windows Server machine running as some form of production. Please don't slaughter me! I am not the server admin.
So, I convinced the server guy to find and install some sort of ssh service for Windows just for the off times we have to make a hot fix in production. (Don't ask, but more common than it should be.)
Sadly, this ssh access is totally useless as the git colors are all messed up, the line wrap length and window size are just weird (seems about 60 characters wide by 25 lines tall) and worse of all I can't commit/push in git via ssh because Permissions. Extremely aggravating.

4. Git on Windows hangs open and locks the index file
Finally, we manage to have Git for Windows hang quite frequently and lock the git index file, meaning that we can't do anything in git (commit, push, pull) without manually quitting these processes from task manager, then browsing to the directory and deleting the .git/index.lock file.

Putting this all together, here's the process for a pull on this production server:
Launch a VNC session to the server. Close multiple popups from different services. Ask Windows to please not "restart to install updates". Launch git for Windows. Run a git pull. If the commits to be pulled involve deleting files, the pull will fail with a permissions error. Realize you forgot to launch as Administrator. Depending on how many files were deleted in the last update, you may need to quit the application and force close the process rather than answer "n" for every "would you like to try again?" file. Relaunch Git as Administrator. Run Git pull. Finally everything works.

At this point, I'd be grateful for any tips, appreciate any sympathy, and understand any hatred. Windows Server is bad. Git on Windows is bad.

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.

Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}

Range of excuses

- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.

On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..

"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."

I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.

Pissed
Won't compile
So many errors
What am I doing
Coding

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

My team and I are working on a huge project that's been in development for years.

First deadline was in the fall last year. We were never going to make that.

Then we were supposed to be ready just after the summer holidays (months ago). We didn't make that either.

Then we were supposed to launch last week. Didn't happen, still too many critical errors and unfinished, untested features.

Now we are having daily meetings to discuss whether we'll be ready to release... that day!

Meanwhile, stability issues and other critical errors keep popping up. The product is barely finished and has not been through rigorous testing with all the latest features and bug fixes. Not to mention that we don't really have a deployment pipeline either.

And here's the kicker: The customers don't know this is coming. It's highly anticipated, but only internally. It is a replacement for an existing product, which strives towards not changing the frontend too much.

Why do we rush it so? I get that a deadline can help motivate you to reach your goal, but how motivated will we be if the launch fails and we get buried in bugs and missing features?
Would it not be better to launch it with at least the confidence of knowing that we've tried to test it properly?

my 4TB Seagate HDD is failing in a very strange way:

I noticed an issue where my PC would just outright hang for a minute or two occasionally when swapping to the 4TB HDD. When I look at logs, when it hangs, the 4TB HDD times out but then on a retry IMMEDIATELY reads whatever sector just fine. In fact, it reads fine constantly for a few days until the same sector has an issue. So, the timeout is a remap, then? No, as the spare sector and bad sector counts in the SMART info don't change. It doesn't even change how many read errors or anything it's had. Strange, but let's test it with Seatools to be sure.

Tests go as follows:

- Short: pass
- Short: pass
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. Reopening seatools, it pulled a serial of all zeroes... okay....?
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. Seatools gets the right serial on reopen.
- Long: pass
- Long: fail
- Long: pass
- Long: seatools immediately crashes. All zero serial again.

i have no idea what's happening

VirusTotal's API could do with a make over.

Though it is quite nice actually, you're able to provide them with a hash of a file and (provided they've scanned it) VT is able to tell you what up to 60 different virus scanners thinks about the file (and how many scanners that has an opinion about it). Now if there's an error, like the file not having been scanned or the hash being incomplete, it give you some JSON back where there will be an error message that tells you the error and an error code of 0.. wait wh

Although since it's an API they also need give us plebs whose only got access to an API key that limits us to 4 requests pr minutes. Naturally when you try to do another request within a minute of your limit the response you get is absolutely nothing what so ever. "" Naturally.

And of course the same response should be given when the API key you provide isn't valid. Who needs errors amiright?

No wonder JSON.parse kept throwing exceptions

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

Okay... I need to confess.
I actually like the idea of counting arrays from 1 like it is in some languages.
It makes code cleaner.
Think about it.
You would never need to subtract 1 from count/size/length or add 1 for things like the month in javascript because the first item would be at index 1 and many many errors wouldn't be happening because we don't need to force our minds to think another way. I learned counting from 1 after I learned to walk so it's the most natural thing to do. Just because the software/hardware below our language works that way doesn't mean we can not abstract this behavior away. What's your opinion about this? Am I wrong?

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Once, when I was trying to learn Ruby on Rails I declared a variable called 'public'.... I got so many errors, that I had to start the project from scratch again. #fml hahaha

So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.

For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.

Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.

Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".

Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.

That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.

And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.

The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.

Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.

The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.

Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used.

Currently grading some tests for my C++ professor. I feel like a complier.

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

VSCode is doing really strange things to my language server, in such variety that I'm starting to suspect that it's simply incorrect because it's very unlikely that I'd misunderstand so many distinct things at once.

- The trace level is verbose, yet VSCode absolutely spams the LS with trace: off requests

- the capability update request I used to set file watchers never gets a response even though the standard clearly states that all requests must get responses or progress reports quickly, and I'm not getting file updates even after vscode responds to a file system change. By the way, if file watching is a capability, why can't I set it in the protocol handshake with all the other capabilities?

- my semantic token provider (used for syntax highlighting) is simply ignored, no requests, no errors

- the debug console is spamming editor internal errors

We are having a history lesson updating a system that was built around 1985.

It's a custom built sales and customer tracker, programmed in Clipper, which is a superset of xBase, that is a language that appears to be data orientated. DosBox and Dosemu have both failed to run it, the programs loads and indexes just fine, but when it gets to the program dashboard it shows the options and doesn't seem to accept any input, though it appears to be running as the time updates (any ideas?)

Tried compiling the source using harbour, compilation fails, something about "time" having too many arguments and other obscure errors. Urgh.

Dbf files are easily converted and opened but really we want to view the working program to see the relations so we can translate the data models.

It's both fascinating and infuriating at the same time.

Had to be appcelerators titanium (weirdly I think this app was built with it).

I used it in the early days, before they had the foresight to add a date-time picker for Android.

It was a horrible unforgiving place, bugs on top of bugs, horrible documentation, incorrect instructions, and hacky workarounds posted as official installation instructions.

I'm not sure if it's gotten any better now, but I did give it a go again 2 years to update an app for someone. They made so many breaking changes, which is fine, but the new outcome offered less features and required more boilerplate code. I then spent (literally) 3 hours trying to get the Android simulator to run the app. Titanium just kept timing out and throwing incomprehensible errors. I eventually gave up and told my friend I updated it, it compiles but I can't test it.

Will never touch it again, and will never be used in any team I work for. Just awful.

Tldr:
Can't fucking figure out why I'm the only one who can't solve a DP problem in code, when me and friends use the same idea and no one knows why only mine doesn't work...

We are given a task to solve a problem using DP. My friends write their code with the same idea as a solution. Copying the code is not allowed. I follow the same idea but my code won't work. Others look into it, in case they find errors. They can't find any.

The problem (for reference):
Given a fixed list of int's a = (a_1,a_2,...,a_n) and b = (b_1,b_2,...,b_n), a_i and b_i >= 0, a.length == b.length
We want to maximize the sum of a_i's chosen. Every a_i is connected with the b_i at the same index. b_i tells us how many indexes of a we have to skip if choosing the corresponding a_i, so list index of b_i + b_i's value + 1 would be the position of the next a_i available.

The idea:
Create a new list c with same length as a (or b).
Begin at the end of c and save a_n at the same position in c. Iterate backwards through c and at each position add the max value of all previously saved values of c (with regards to the b_i-restriction) with the current a_i, else a_i + 0 if the b_i-resctriction goes beyond the list.
Return the max value of c.

How does that not work for me but for the others?? Funny enough, a few given samples work with my code. I'm questioning my coding ability...

So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).

So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).

Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.

Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).

So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.

So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.

So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:

var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:

function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.

No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.

I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.

Bro I fucking hate Flutter and android studio. I have just started android development and oh my god the bunch of errors i’m getting is crazy af. Like I don’t get one point, flutter was created by google and android studio was also created by google… then why tf they don’t focus on normalizing the development process. Why so many errors ???????? And no easy fix for it like whyyyyyyyyyyy?????

Anyways sorry for the rant but there’s more to it. I just built a fuckin app which was running fine in my AVD and then when I sent it to my friend he was seeing a grayed out screen and then I searched for the error and then I was like bruh, I was sitting for sooo long building the first app of my life and here we are. My app can’t even run on someone else’s phone because of a fuckin gray screen error (i’ll fix it tomorrow)

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

Kinda often, the ecosystem around C/C++ kinda sucks

Compilers will give you hieroglyphs instead of readable errors.
Including a separate library, or a code generator, into your project is generally hell on earth to set up.
The language server often needs several seconds to come up with suggestions, some of which are complete nonsense.
The language itself lacks many basic features. C++20 will give us so many fancy things but we still can't convert an enum to a string.

I've programmed in C# and lately in Rust, and damn the developer experience there is just so much nicer overall.

Soooo I am an apprentice who just started his third year. Everybody in my team (3 ppl) left for better jobs.
I am now basically front and backend lead, teaching four new employees our restapi, web and javafx frontend.
At the same time I fix errors happening in production and develop new features.
I guess there are many great rants to come, so stay tuned :D
Going to write about things like tests that got disabled months ago after migrating to gradle, no documentation, finding out how to set up new development workstations with an outdated script missing important steps, management, print debugging in production and much more :)
Oh and it is not that bad, I learned more in the last month than in the two years before. (not saying my team was bad)

I hate Windows! BSOD and many other *famous* errors waste my time resolving them.

This happens to me every 6 months and it is so fucking annoying !

The system repairs are so fucking futile! They take so much time *attempting repairs* and in the end give me a failure message.

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

the code from a school colleague. So written that you must load the index page and are redirected to a second. if you try to load the second page you get errors. Many errors.

I have to write my IoT coursework in an Ubuntu VM running on Linux 3.2. VBox Guest Additions doesn't support this Ubuntu version, neither does anything else. Contiki, the operating system we're coding for has been abandoned for many years, the devs moved to a new project called Contiki NG. If I try to compile with any standard above ANSI C it fails with cryptic errors deep inside the OS. The docs for the old Contiki are paginated with JS so I can't use the browser's fulltext search, but they also don't have proper bulitin search.

This cannot be legal. They are violating every accessibility guideline in existence. I just need the text to be slightly larger and even I have to go through hell. I imagine blind, deaf or dyslexic students just give up.

added a sixth point to "core principles" of the os/language i'm designing:

6. hard crash on as many errors as possible because programmers are retarded pieces of shit and fuck them from both sides at once with three baseball bats in each hole at the same time. either fucking write your program right or go fucking fuck yourself you fucking lobotomized incompetent pieces of shit.

because fuck this fucking bullshit. your lobotomy will either make the whole system crash or you'll learn to not be lobotomized you fucking retarded pieces of shit.

oh, and the error message is gonna be "OH NO! THE CREATOR OF [program name] IS A RETARDED LOBOTOMIZED MORON WHO CAN'T WRITE CODE FOR SHIT, so now he fucked up your whole system by his utter incompetence... Restarting..."

Upgraded our internal samba fileshare. Was getting too old. So updating the apt sources list and push the dist-upgrade: what could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
Somehow the locale went astray, updating the manpages gave too many errors and now finally everything's fucked up, because it somehow deleted the sudo binary and root is locked or we don't have password.
We noobs.
But samba was updated and it's still serving our files.

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

Ah, I have so many memories.

I was lab instructor at the local institute(it was more like tuition) where I had to train students for programming (C, C++, Core Java).
And my debugging skills got enhanced too, It was like I had to just look at the program and I could tell all the errors, it happens to everybody I think because our brain just find patterns un-consciously and it later becomes like one superpower.

No doubt there were a lot of bright students even brighter than me. Actually, that was my starting point where I broke out of my shell and started playing with coding a lot.

Dear Diary,
Today is October 31st, ‘Halloween’ according to ancient pagan tradition. I can’t help but wonder if those pagans of yore felt as I do now in their attempts to yoke unruly bands of spirits. I sit wearily at my desk in painful and tiresome reckoning with those new hellcats we call node dependencies. Many an hour I have toiled, maestro of a cacophonous orchestra akin to that tucked in later pages of Bulgakov’s magnum opus, pleading with the band to follow my wand. And to no avail. In the wee hours of the morn I can scarcely tell who is conducting who. My sleep laden eyes blink on each execution of yarn install, my fingers knowingly re-execute with an up-arrow enter when that instruction is returned with gnarled, gruesome errors. And I ask again: “who is conducting who?!“. Will this great devil of machinery eventually meet me with an error so fearsome that I myself lay asunder? It is a battle, make no mistake. It is the “trial of a thousand years”! And who shall come out victorious I know not, but rest shall not come until I either lay myself down into the jaws of dependency hell or emerge victorious.

Dear Diary,
Today is November 1st. Compiled on the first try, no additional changes FML

how can this fucktard make so many errors in his fucking 50 lines of code.
i need a motherfucking punching bag or im getting some health issues maintaining this code any longer. DO REVIEWS GUYS!!!! IM TELLLING YOU!!!!

This is just me throwing out my thoughts from the past few weeks.

edit: this is long

> Working on a C# project. its going well Its teaching me a lot about SQLite and file IO. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even the debugging as much I want to slam my head on the wall but I'm not asking for help so far and I'm very proud of myself because it feels so much better. like I don't mind asking for help but its so much more rewarding and I learn more from it.

> I need portfolio of software I can show off to employers and the current project I'm working on is the first programs in the portfolio. The place I want to apply to uses C#, but I still wanted a few other programs in other languages such as Python or JS just to show what I'm capable of.

> I was looking at what ASP.NET Core offers and it impresses the fuck out of me, and confuses me. The parts that confuse me, like for example the normal asp webapp is a very impressive hello world app. and it has so many different files and such but how or what do they expect me to add? how am I supposed to work with it? and if I delete any files I don't need (the premade js, bootstrap, jquery, html, and css) it produces errors because of the project files are pointing to those. and i know I can use the empty project (I do) but does that question my ability as a dev since I don't want to use it for my projects?

> On that note I love using Intellisense and debuggers and auto complete and I can go without them I just don't want to rely on them. idk I've just been a little more stressed these past few weeks.

Having not touched my cordova/phonegap project for so long, so many updates... removing and adding of plugins... Ohhh the pain! Errors, errors everywhere!

I went to do the "transport-tracker" Google Codelabs that uses JS/Firebase/Maps, and I didn't pick up on how really outdated it was lol... it took me about an hour of ehat seemed like an endless climb out of a shit factory....but I passed my NPM "massive errors" trial by fire with flying colors, got everything working mint, and managed to get most of everything (minus the docs) updated/cleaned up. Holy fuck that was crazy, it's amazing how many things change in such little time!!!

Anyways, the main reason I'm here is.... should I push the used-to-be-old-and-fucked-up codelabs I fixed up and made current to Google?? They are pretty important concepts that cover a lot of ground, so I feel like labs/tutorials should be refreshed by up and comers every so often but I don't know if there's a reason why we leave em to just rot and die haha

Decided to try Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of running a Linux VM instead. It works so far except installing stuff like sshuttle. So many errors man...

I need to tell you the story of my MOAB (Mother of all bugs).
I need to write some stuff in C (which i am fairly used to) and have a function that allocates memory for a Matrix on the heap. The matrix has a rows and columns property and an associated data array, so it looks like this
struct Matrix{
uint8_t rows;
uint8_t columns;
uint8_t data[];
}
I allocate rows*columns + 2 bytes of memory for it.
I also have a function to zero it out which does something like this
for(int i=0; i < rows*columns;i++){
data[i]=0;}

Let‘s come to the problem:
On my Mac the whole stuff works and passes all tests. We tried the code on a Linux machine and suddenly the code crashed in various places, sometimes a realloc got an invalid pointer, sometimes free got an invalid pointer and basically the code crashed at arbitrary points randomly.
I was confused af because did i really make THAT many errors?

I found out that all errors occured when testing my matrices so i looked more into it and observed it through the debugger.

Eventually i came to the function that zeroes out my matrix and it went unusually high and wondered if my matrix really was that big.
Then i saw it
The matrix wasn‘t initialised yet
It had arbitrary data that was previously in the heap.
It zeroed out a huge chunk of the heap space.
It literally wrote a zero to a shitload of addresses which invalidated many pointer.

You can imagine my facepalm

Trail and error... So many errors.

Also watching videos to learn how code fits together, as well as looking for other people's example code to reverse engineer it, modify it to see what changed.

Story of getting an error :
We thought of an idea and starts to implement it on any language to make the idea work BUT according to the universal law, first code is all about errors.
We tend to solve all those but some errors remains there.
After trying for some time, we pause there and got busy in other stuffs.
After a day or two, when we are busy in something
Suddenly our mind stuck with the solution of that error and we proceed to build rest of the code.
If that error doesn't showed up, what would happen
> Time saved
> Code completed
BUT after in process of solving that error we goes through so many things that actually we learned so many things apart from that error.

SO THANKS TO THE ERROR FOR TEACHING SO MANY THINGS :)

Why are so many websites' TLS certs broken? This month I've come across at least four different websites with cert errors that I've tried to email the webmasters about. "Tried" - the fourth has only twitter as a contact point and "can't be messaged". None of the other three have been corrected, although I received responses from two claiming they'd look into it.

And that's not even counting the ones I've seen that I didn't care about enough to contact the webmaster.

So, I really tried .. again ... to use intellij. And i simply really don't get it. Why do so many devs like it? For me it feels like swimming in the dark not knowing if my java code will actually build because there is no fucking actual build feedback provided in real time.
I can build the whole project and get a build log, a fucking text log! I want my eclipse problems view, that auto-updates with erronious code as I type ... as I FUCKING TYPE!
Ok so there are various "hacks" to enable auto-build, even while having a running debug session, (in the registry ..., remind me of old windows days *sigh*).
And still, all looks good and I start the program an baaammm, compile time errors on start What the actual fuck?
Also why the heck does it allow to setup/move/resize the panels when i resets them every fucking time I restart intellij???
The UI is so cluttered and illogical, like the debugging view that has three tool/tabbars on it's own, on various hierarchies, even a vertical one. It alls looks so ... in a lack of a better word I would say "hingspieben" [austrian for "puked out"]
The only real nice thing is the "settings sync" to github. Everything else is mediocre or even really really bad.
So intellij users, please tell me, what do you guys really like about it, that is so good that no other IDE has is?

Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.

While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.

Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?

To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...

The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).

But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.

The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.

Today checked my learning time tracker. I have spent already 80 hours for learning angularjs. And I still am not able to write unit test without errors. What the fuck. How many hours more do I need to finnaly be able to write unit tests without any problem?
Like today getting

An error was thrown in afterAll\nSyntaxError: Unexpected token 'export'

and I do not even use afterAll() funciton so they give error somewhere from the inside of libraries. Why they do that? why cannto they give easy to understand error?

Everytime I sit to write unit test for learning, all the time I feel I will not understand. And I am right everytime. Damn. That makes me need to force motivate myself. I want to see results, not sit at the same place so many time.

Just started to get the hang of python (PyQt6). Surprisingly I couldn't find a switch-case syntax. I then saw some blogs with using match-case. Added the code but my ide showed errors: Python version 3.9 does not support match statements. Wtf! Then in S/O there are so many stuff about a "council".HUH?!?

I'm doing the recommended math tasks. Since I can't trust the prof's solutions (he does errors here and there), I watch YouTube videos, Khan Academy videos, compare the results of the prof with the results of online step calculators such as wolfram alpha and find new rules I've never heard of before.

The prof doesn't really comment every step about why he's doing what. He just provides the solution and I have to reverse engineer from his solution up to the original state of the equation. Repeating the same procedure for the online calculator results as well.

I have to say that "Oh, boy, did I learn so many valuable things..." Stuff that I should have learned when I was at least doing my A levels (Abitur).

It is as if I am opening the gates to a new world. Not even exaggerating. Ok, maybe a bit. Ok, maybe a bit more, but no bit more than that.

Just recently used docker, for some reason i keep getting so many errors, fix one error then another, then another one anxiety is killing me.

Guys, i am having a tough time in work. So, i am sharing the story and questions here-

Initially, i was doing well with new projects and other existing projects where implemented new features.

But recently, i am assigned to a old project created by clients and some senior developer worked on it .

Ps: I was also assigned to this project 8 months earlier but was reassigned to other projects.

Now, Our senior developer who worked on it resigned because of the messy project and a lot of pressure from boss.
my colleague also resigned because of this.

Due to this, all this pressure thrown upon me. I am working on it relentlessly but i am soo burned out that i am actually feeling sick and constantly having headache.

And main thing is that the project has so many errors which iam getting during testing and i have to fix all of the error.
And yes they have documentation but shitty unreadable documentation . My manager also rebuking me why i dont remember things said to me 8 months earlier. (That time i just joined the company)

I don't know what will happen to me if i cant tackle this project.
And what should i do in such cases as my mental health is deteriorating day by day.

It's so frustrating to explain rxjs pitfalls to the manager.

To avoid the diamond problems and glitches caused by combineLatest and debounceTime(0), I decided to use single stream with nested reactivity.

Then the manager asked me to use withLatestFrom instead of combineLatest.

Sure withLatestFrom makes sense to the original author, when the original author is able to remember the reactive graph and put proper dependencies to combineLasted/withLatestFrom accordingly, but anyone else who touches the component later needs to retrace the reactive graph to avoid the glitch. Sometimes it's just impossible when many dependencies are derived from combineLatest+debounceTime(0). When no one is trained to code reactively, I don't expect people to know where to put a dependency. After many trials and errors, the only way to avoid the diamond problem is to use nested reactivity where child streams are created within root stream each time root stream emits.

The mentioned manager put all sorts of side effects in observable chains. The manager keeps saying the stream is too large when their subscription functions (sometimes nested) are way worse with litered mutations everywhere. Anything in observable can be traced by go to definition but tracing side effects usually requires global searches.

Recently, he put startWith to the end of a synced stream to fix a bug where button would collapse when there is no content (initial null emission). Rather than fixing the default height, he thinks using startWith(defaultLabel) is a good idea. Of course, he doesn't know that a synced stream should only emit 1 value on new subscription and that extra emitted value will cause rxjs glich down the pipe.

I hate corporate jobs

Ok so that's my plan, find a kernel with HUGE amout of drivers and , high version.

I built a small os based on linux
-- kernel version 5.0.2 from Plop Linux,
many libraries added 'by hand' -- packages from apts of Debian&Ubuntu, and unpacked packages into system with ArchiveManager,
has GUI but it's called xfree86 ( looks strange when a very old app running on Kernel5 )
So, without compiling, i can make a os.

But i found that Plop didn't compile rtl8188eu module which makes linux support some specific network cards.

I have no professional compiler but a tiny C/Cpp compiler called TinyCC (aka. tcc), but for my pc ( CPU freq = 800MHz ), it seems not possible to compile the module by myself.

And then i downloaded a 5.2 kernel with modules from kernel.ubuntu.com, but when i tried to mount my disk ( part. vfat ), i got some errors like IO charset not found, and then i replaced it with Xanmod kernel but also reported an error said Invalid Arguments, but i checked /proc/filesystems, it supports.

So what can i do? Are there any pre-compiled kernel & modules with 'full common supports'?

I tried kernel 4.4 ( from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ) just now but the driver crashed when wpa_supplicant tried to initialize the device.

Why so many damn installations and errors!!! I just want to code!!

Welcome to my new series "shit I have to deal with as a developer hat was forced to become an TYPO3 integrator". I don't know how often I will post or how many parts there will be. To be true, I just need this series to vent about this shit.

10 months ago I started my training as a developer. Before that point I worked as an PHP developer in a student job. I was already experienced as a dev so I was looking forward to deal with great and interesting topics in the agency where my training would take place.
After a few weeks I was introduced to TYPO3 due to a support project that needed some tickets to be done. Also a new client bought many websites for most of his brands. So for the next 10 months or so until this day I mostly (around 95% of the time) worked on TYPO3 Projects and most of the time for this one client. I quickly became the "TYPO3 dude" and got tasks to integrate Fluid Templates, fix errors in templates, edit templates, sometimes even work on some smaller businesses logic.

We currently have 3 sites live, one waiting for a final customer approval and one WIP. The whole client project is setup on a single(!) TYPO3 instance with reusability of templates and other things in mind. Spoiler warning: it absolutely didn't work!

So be prepared for the next rant in this series where I vent about this piece of shit.

Cant open a fucking support ticket with openshift bc they have so many Drupal errors im going to fucking kill myself.

Pip wont fucking work anynore. So i xant install fuckj g anythj g tuat i ne ejsjdheheh kiok me zujd