A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Recently started a new job and had a fellow employee find a 27" monitor for me. The monitor did not have an hdmi or usb3 cable to hook it up. I make a request to help desk for a new one where their response is:

HDMI cables are not standard equipment and must be approved by your manager.

Okay, I forwarded it to my manager and it still isn't approved. So it is day three of having this nice but blank monitor on my desk! Fuck it, ordering from Amazon.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

#include <rant>
Using angry standard;

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

Return 0;
}

Walked past one of my employees as he was talking on the phone. He says something along the lines of "oh no that was totally my fault" to which I just blurt out "haha dumbass"

And he just goes O.o and then to the phone "oh, yes, no sorry, yes that was my manager" to where someone just roars out laughing on the other line.

Him: "apparently the director of X department found it hilarious that your standard automatic response was that out of nowhere"

Before I get called an asshole or whatever, my dudes regularly leave notes on my office with messages such as "die", "eat shit" etc. Its good fun lads, don't lose yer heads over it.

My standard response for any stupid questions. If you haven't tried it already then don't bother me.

Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit

Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.

I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.

I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:

- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10

uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.

So here's where the story becomes a rant.

In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.

And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.

So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.

The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?

gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3

(:

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

Wanna know about hacks? I'll tell you. There is a peace of software called SugarCRM. It has OAuth2 provider implementation. I was assigned to write OAuth2 consumer for it.
It turned out they just failed to make it right.
The list of hacks:
* Hack on standard Authentication header. They use custom.
* Hack on "scope". They send null which is standard violation. So it is replaced to empty string before response processing starts.
* This is my favorite. Refresh token simply doesn't work. So we need to store user's credentials in memory to be able to reauthenticate user transparently.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

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

Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?

Magento Debugging Horror!
Changing lots of things in magento with no problem. Continuing development for quite sometime. Suddenly decide to clear cache to see affect of a change on a template in frontent. Suddenly magento crashes! There's no error message. No exception log. No log in any file anywhere on the disk. All that happens is that magento suddenly returns you to the home page!
Reverting all the changes to the template. Clear the cache. Nope! Still the same! Why? Because the problem has happened somewhere in your code. Magento just didn't face it, because it was using an older version of your code. How? Because magento 2 even caches code! Not the php opcache. Don't get me wrong. It has it's own cache for code, in a folder called generated. Now that you cleared all the caches including this folder, you just realized that, somewhere something is wrong. But there is no way for you to know where as there is absolutely no exception logged anywhere!
So you debug the code, from index.php, down to the deepest levels of hell. In a normal php code, once the exception happens, you should see the control jumps to an exception handler, there, you can see the exception object and its call stack in your debugger. But that's not the case with magento.
Your debugger suddenly jumps to a function named:
write_close();
That's all. No exception object. No call stack. No way to figure out why it failed. So you decide to debug into each and every step to figure out where it crashes. The way magento renders response to each request is that, it calls a plugin, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin, which calls a list of plugins, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin.....
And if in each step, just by accident, instead of step through, you use the step over command of your debugger, the crash happens suddenly and you end up with the same freaking write_close() function with no idea what went wrong and where the error happened! You spend a whole day, to figure out, that this is actually a bug in core of magento, they simply introduced after your recent update of magento core to the latest STABLE version!!! It was not your mistake. They ruined their own code for the thousandth of time. You just didn't notice it, because as I said, you didn't clear the `generated` folder, therefore using an older version of everything!
Now that after spending 7 hours figuring out what has failed with absolutely no standard way of debugging and within a spaghetti of GOTO commands (Magento calls them plugin), why not report it to github? So you report it with a pull request. This also takes 1 hour of your time. Just to next day get informed that your pull request is rejected because another person already fixed the bug and made the same pull request. It was just not on the latest stable version yet!
So you decide to avoid updating magento as much as possible. Because you know that the next Stable version will make your life and career unstable. But then the customer complains that the Admin Panel is warning him of using old Magento version which might pose SECURITY THREATS!

Man I'm annoyed!

TL;Dr what does it mean "we're trying to reduce options to a minimum", why don't you go closed source!? why don't you remove themes!?

For anyone who uses rofi, they would know that a few months ago an update made it more compliant with the free-desktop spec, that it only uses the first .desktop file for the given Name tag.

I only found out about this recently as I was only able to update Manjaro recently, and it really annoyed me, cause it took me a while to figure out why tons of my desktop entries disappeared.

Turns out someone made an issue about this, and the given answer was: "that's against the spec". Ok, fine. But when I asked if they could add an option to still ignore that aspect of the spec (i.e. --show-duplicated), the response I got was: "going against the spec is a no-go". WHAT!?

There are so many things that have behavior that goes against the spec (ex. gnu-utils), why can't they add an option to do this!? An OPTION!?

When I decided to try (I don't know C yet) and make a PR, the first and last (it got locked afterwards!) comment I got was:
" As explained on #941, this is a no-go. We want to reduce the number of options to the minimum, and non-compliance to a well-defined and widely implemented spec is definitely not something we want."

Why are you so closed minded!? Yes compliance is amazing, but it's not a safety standard, it's okay if you *give an option* to go against the spec!!!!

WHAT THE HECK!?!?!? WHY!?!?!?

Why is a open source project closed to new features that are part if the scope of the project, and require minimal maintenance!?

Sigh. I don't like the methods of first line helpdeskers. Computer problem? Restart it, or.. re-image it. The hell..

I know these are standard practices but I don't like them at all. Just because there's a small issue with a device, you're going to throw everything away? No troubleshooting at all? I don't call that troubleshooting nor helping.

My friend works as first line helpdesk and I told him: "Hey, WhatsApp isn't giving me double checkmarks anymore for my messages to you since last night. It's odd." and his response is: "Restart your phone". My god.. how much more technically ignorant could he be? Everything network-related on my phone is working, including WhatsApp, but no.. "restart your phone". Anyway.