A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

What. The. Fuck. Did. Just. Happen.

A random girl followed me on social media. She looked nice and intelligent so I followed her back.

Started to chat about some random stuff. She told me she works at the HR department of an international company and asked me what's my job. Told her I'm a software developer.

Right after that she sent me a selfie. Obviously I said she looks nice, she thanked it and asked some more about my job. After a short discussion I received another selfie but somewhere in between she lost the outer layer of her clothing.

She still looks nice but now I'm sitting here utterly confused and cant tell whether it was my sarcastic humour and moderately handsome facial features which charmed her or she just needs to recruit someone for a new project and willing to do everything to reach the quota.

I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

Started talking about Pi-Hole (still trying to install this fucker by the way) today with a collegue.

He had it installed and showed me around a little.

CW: Alright give me an example then I'll show you wildcard blocking.
Me: google.com 😅
CW: *enters and saves it. then tries to load anything related to google.com*

*no google.com domains load, all give a blocked error*

Me: Works great!
CW: Yup.
...
...
...
...
Me: Uhm so you aren't like surprised that I went with google.com as example and that I'd genuinely would block it?!
CW: No, why would I be?
Me: Well, most people consider me paranoid/crazy the second they find out I don't want to use google/google's services.
CW: well that's fucking retarded. why would anyone redicule you for not using something you don't want to use. You'll have your reasons.
Me: So if I'd say i do it for privacy reasons, you wouldn't find that redicilous?
CW: No, why would I? Not using google (and for that matter facebook etc) for privacy reasons is very logical really.

FUCKING. THANK. YOU.

Happened a few weeks ago but still awesome.

Me and a good friend have a website together but we don't monitor it too much.
He studied with me in the same class but went towards frontend/apps where I chose backend/servers/security. He knows how to do basic Linux stuff but that's about it.

We were at a party when he noticed that our site was offline. Walked over to me (because I manage the server) to notify me so I could look into it said I'd look into it (phone):
*visits site: nothing*
*online dig tool: got the server ip*
*remembered this one didn't have pubkey authentication - after three passwords attempts I'm in*

"service apache2 status"
*service doesn't exist*
*right, migrated this one from Apache to nginx....*
"history"
*ah, an nginx restart probably suffices...*
"service nginx restart"

BAM, site is reachable again.

*god damnit, lets encrypt cert expired...*
"history"
*sees command with certbot and our domain both in one*
"!892"
*20 seconds later: success message*
*service nginx reload*

BAM, site works securely again.

"Yo mate, check the site again"

Mate: 😶 w-w-what? *checks site and his watch* you started less than two minutes ago...?
Me: yeah..?
Mate: 😶 now this is why YOU manage our server and I don't 😐

His face was fucking gold. It wasn't that difficult for me (I do this daily) but to him, I was a God at that moment.

Awesome moment 😊

Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.

TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!

(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)

This one guy REALLY WANTED to work on the hardware (aka arduino in this case) part.

After hours of trying (with 8 guys) of get it to work on windows which just didn't happen, he still refused to even live boot into a Ubuntu machine.

At the end of the day one of the members went to sit down with him to talk about it and the guy finally gave in.

Two seconds into Ubuntu and arduino was successfully up and running!

Then, every day whenever he didn't get something, he'd just do nothing for the entire day while claiming to be working. The team leader sat down with him and I did too, offering him to sit next to me for a day to see how backend stuff went (I was the backender).

Did it but it just went back to the same old bullshit.

I honestly don't mind it if you find it difficult to ask for help but if you, after numerous chances and conversations, still don't do shit, sorry but fuck off.

He was a nice guy and blamed his autism for it but that's just not how it works.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Started being a Teaching Assistant for Intro to Programming at the uni I study at a while ago and, although it's not entirely my piece of cake, here are some "highlights":

* students were asked to use functions, so someone was ingenious (laughed my ass off for this one):
def all_lines(input):
all_lines =input
return all_lines

* "you need to use functions" part 2
*moves the whole code from main to a function*

* for Math-related coding assignments, someone was always reading the input as a string and parsing it, instead of reading it as numbers, and was incredibly surprised that he can do the latter "I always thought you can't read numbers! Technology has gone so far!"

* for an assignment requiring a class with 3 private variables, someone actually declared each variable needed as a vector and was handling all these 3 vectors as 3D matrices

* because the lecturer specified that the length of the program does not matter, as long as it does its job and is well-written, someone wrote a 100-lines program on one single line

* someone was spamming me with emails to tell me that the grade I gave them was unfair (on the reason that it was directly crashing when run), because it was running on their machine (they included pictures), but was not running on mine, because "my Python version was expired". They sent at least 20 emails in less than 2h

* "But if it works, why do I still have to make it look better and more understandable?"

* "can't we assume the input is always going to be correct? Who'd want to type in garbage?"

* *writes 10 if-statements that could be basically replaced by one for-loop*
"okay, here, you can use a for-loop"
*writes the for loop, includes all the if-statements from before, one for each of the 10 values the for-loop variable gets*

* this picture

N.B.: depending on how many others I remember, I may include them in the comments afterwards

How not to give support..

Me: Creates ticket on support site, letting them know their webservice returns "maintenance" page.
Support: "It works on our end."
Support: *closes ticket*

Euhm.. excuse me?

Me: Creates another ticket with a screenshot and the curl response information..
Support: Sends screenshot back that it works on their end. "Maybe check your firewall"
Support: *closes ticket*

I ain't playing these games..

Me: Creates new ticket with more curl responses from 4 different servers to prove it's not "firewall" related.
Support: ..

2 days later

Me: Sends *friendly* reminder.
Support: ..

6 days later

Me: Creates ticket again saying I'm still having issues.
Support: "I'm forwarding this to our technical support"
Support: *closes ticket*

10 minutes later.

Technical Support: "Here's the manual for our integration .pdf."

Excuse me, you say what now? I KNOW HOW IT WORKS, I'VE WRITTEN THE INTEGRATION ALREADY. THE SERVICE JUST SEEMS TO BE DOWN FFS.. pls..

Me: Sends mail to their project manager who manages the clients dossier with support history and such.
Him: "I'll check it out and let you know."

1 day later.

Support: "We had some issues this and that, wasn't publically availble, works now, .."

What a nice way to waste your time..

What a great way to start your day and begin your fucking 2018

The cat just pissed on my laptop (it’s a macbook air)

Wet af

Stink af

Dried the fucking wet stink af laptop

It still works

But the fans gone crazy and slow af

Trying to reset the smc stuff

Nothing changes, still retarded

I want to open the bottom case but i dont have the screw driver

With its fucking limited 128gb storage i store my shits in cloud storages like google drive, dropbox and mega and my projects are stored in bitbucket so nothing to lose

Me : 1 vs Cat : 1

To my beloved cat:
I work hard using this damn laptop to provide food and home for you and you just take a piss on it.

someone who thought me about computer when i was a child. someone who thought me machine code, and cobol. someone who thought me about the world. now he is, my dad, hospitalized again (12th times already this year) for cardiac arrest. and today, he is getting better and showing a lot of progress.

This situation thought me again about how life works and how hard can it be. my dad divorced with my mom since i am 3 months old and i've been living with my aunt since. and now he married again with a women with 2 child. i though he was gonna be happy. and apparently not. at the time of the cardiac arrest, his wife don't even want to bother and getting involved if her husband got anything emergency like this, every single thing is thrown at me (or my aunt), from calling the ambulance, paying the hospital and medical bills, accompany my dad, every minor perks, Everything and Always. Once, i reach the point and i'm very angry to her, but my dad always hold me back. and now i don't even want to bother, care, or whatever to his wife again. i just care for my father.

This will temper me more and more, for anyone who searching for your love of your life, please be careful. there is still alot of woman who doesnt have any heart.

Life is hard.

Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.

She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.

Asked her anyways:

Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.

Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!

There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.

Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Was struggling with depression and stress for an extended period. So, naturally, I had more sickdays than average.
However, I was still managing to overperform on my goals, so when it came time to discuss salary I was hopeful.

Didn't get a raise, not even a pat on the back. My manager told me he couldn't justify giving me the raise I had earned simply because I had had too many sick days. So my actual performance didn't count. Everybody else got raises though.

On a previous occasion he told me that I had to 'Learn what it means to have a job' and get my priorities straight. I told him I already had very little social life so I could spend what little energy I had on work. I tried to explain to him how depression works and he assured me he understood.

Yeah, right. My colleague with back problems, who suddenly couldn't walk, didn't get that treatment.

Depression is real. I'm so glad they ended up firing me so I could work for a place that cares.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

Yes I am a Linux user and yes I don't like windows and this is NOT a windows hate post but I've been a windows user intil the age of 15 and this is the one thing I still cannot wrap my head around. Fun fact is that I also talked about this with my examinator guy who is a 'hardcore' windows user and he fully agreed 😆

Whenever I was either at the start menu or within for example the downloads folder, when I'd put something in there or downloaded something and later on wanted to search for it through the start menu or the folder viewer itself, IT ALWAYS RETURNED AS 'NOT FOUND'.

Whenever I search for that fucking file, it always said that it couldn't find the damn fucking file.

AND THEN WHEN YOU SCROLL THROUGH THE FUCKING FOLDER IT IS RIGHT FUCKING THERE RIGHT IN FUCKING FRONT OF YOU.

I've used many linux distro's and even OSX for a very little and it always works perfectly on there but windows ALWAYS fucked this one up for me and appearantly (according to them though) I am not the only one who this doesn't work for!

I still find this one very weird.

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Hello, world!

Hey, it's me. It's been awhile. How have you been..? :3

For those of you who don't know/remember, I'm the lead developer of a Desktop and (to-be) Hacking Simulator Game. My project should still exist somewhere on here. I just thought I would hop on, and catch you guys up on my progress. ^~^

So far themes are a thing! You can add custom fonts, wallpapers(or just a desktop color) and set the color/opasity of everything in-game!

I have also implimented a modding API. It's under-documented, but it works very well! You can add apps, commands, or even redesign the entire interface using it. It executes modded functions on specific events, so you could really have it do anything.

As of yesterday, there is also a simulated FileSystem. You can navigate it using in-game terminal commands, and you can create and remove directories.

(in-game screenshots are also a thing, you can even set a timer - ps: this is a 100% mod! As are all apps and commands in the current unreleased version. PM me on Telegram @TheCyaniteproject to get a copy~)

WTF? I've been laid off more than a month ago, AND THIS EXTRA-STUPID ACCOUNTING BRAT TEXTS MY PERSONAL PHONE TO COMPLAIN THAT SOME REPORT IS BROKEN.
(she still works for my former company, if that wasn't clear)
Bitch, you fucks literally told me this shit wasn't my problem anymore. Seriously, where do they find those complete morons? Don't they know how "being sacked" works? Or how you cannot expect any work from someone who was sacked?!?
Especially some sheila that only has a job because it is literally illegal to use a pocket calculator instead of an "human" accountant.
Fuck, now I'm kinda happy I'm out of that nuthouse.

There are things that i wish i didn't see.

Yesterday, i went to a coffee shop to relax and reviewing my works. And suddenly a college friend of mine approach me and we started talking about work.

Me: So, What do you do at work? What's your stack?
Him: Not much of a new. Still working with wordpress, html,css and jquery.

So he started talking about how cool wordpress is and how he generates money doing sites.

Me: Can i see your sample works?
Him: Sure, *opens his shitty windows laptop with Web Tech stickers*. and handover his laptop to me.
Me: Woah. the design is so neat (I'm lying). But it's freaking slow man(REALLY FVCKING SLOW).

* I decided to open the devTools and inspected the source code. And I can't believe what i saw.

- 20+ images with 2~4mb file size
- 13 unminified javascript files with variable declarations that looks like minified.
- CDN's of bootstrap, foundation and semantic UI
- LOTS OF FVCKING PLUGINS

* I didn't told him what i saw. I just turn over the laptop to him and finish my coffee.

Him: My sites are cool right? I have a lot of pending projects right now. Easy money Bruh!
Me: Wow. *sips* coffee. and say goodbye to him and walkout.

I FEEL BAD FOR HIS CLIENTS!

Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?

Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!

Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?

No, MD5 hash is not a safe way to store our users' passwords. I don't care if its been written in the past and still works. I've demonstrated how easy it is to reverse engineer and rainbow attack. I've told you your own password for the site! Now please let me fix it before someone else forces you to. We're too busy with other projects right now? Oh, ok then, I'll just be quiet and ignore our poor security. Whilst I'm busy getting on with my other work, could you figure out what we're gonna do with the tatters of our client's business (in which our company owns a stake) in the aftermath of the attack?

Long story short, I'm unofficially the hacker at our office... Story time!

So I was hired three months ago to work for my current company, and after the three weeks of training I got assigned a project with an architect (who only works on the project very occasionally). I was tasked with revamping and implementing new features for an existing API, some of the code dated back to 2013. (important, keep this in mind)

So at one point I was testing the existing endpoints, because part of the project was automating tests using postman, and I saw something sketchy. So very sketchy. The method I was looking at took a POJO as an argument, extracted the ID of the user from it, looked the user up, and then updated the info of the looked up user with the POJO. So I tried sending a JSON with the info of my user, but the ID of another user. And voila, I overwrote his data.

Once I reported this (which took a while to be taken seriously because I was so new) I found out that this might be useful for sysadmins to have, so it wasn't completely horrible. However, the endpoint required no Auth to use. An anonymous curl request could overwrite any users data.

As this mess unfolded and we notified the higher ups, another architect jumped in to fix the mess and we found that you could also fetch the data of any user by knowing his ID, and overwrite his credit/debit cards. And well, the ID of the users were alphanumerical strings, which I thought would make it harder to abuse, but then realized all the IDs were sequentially generated... Again, these endpoints required no authentication.

So anyways. Panic ensued, systems people at HQ had to work that weekend, two hot fixes had to be delivered, and now they think I'm a hacker... I did go on to discover some other vulnerabilities, but nothing major.

It still amsues me they think I'm a hacker 😂😂 when I know about as much about hacking as the next guy at the office, but anyways, makes for a good story and I laugh every time I hear them call me a hacker. The whole thing was pretty amusing, they supposedly have security audits and QA, but for five years, these massive security holes went undetected... And our client is a massive company in my country... So, let's hope no one found it before I did.

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.

Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.

If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.

Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

tl;dr: Bossmang blaming my code for a database connection issue thrown from outside of my code. Bossmang doesn’t listen. Bossmang doesn’t want to believe it’s a connection issue.

———

Bossmang: The code you wrote is causing insane spec failures in the release branch! It’s hard to follow because it’s so insane, but the cause is your code not properly handling undefined settings! Look at this! <spec>

Me: Specs pass on my machine. I ran it with both a set and nil value. <screenshots>

Bossmang: It works when you set it to nil.

Me: But a setting that doesn’t exist returns nil? <screenshot>

Bossmang: Not seeming to.... So this is the spec failure from the release: “No connection pool with id primary found. <stacktrace that starts outside of my code>”

Me: ... That’s a DB connection error. It’s also being thrown outside of my code, and from a `super` call to Rails.

Bossmang: But <unrelated> and <unrelated> and <other spec> is failing, and if I set the version, it has <other failure> instead! That calls your code first.

Me: It’s a database error. Also: <explains probable, unrelated cause of other failures, like someone didn’t mock a fucking external api call>

Bossmang: But if I restore a DB backup, it fails again.

Me: Restoring uses a dB connection, which could be exhausting the pool depending on the daemons you have running.

Bossmang: perhaps.

...

Bossmang: I still think it’s related to spec ordering.

🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️
This is tiring.

I think this is so far one of the most priceless WTF moments I encountered at my current work:

A coworker of mine came up to me explaining the problem he had with russian characters in the filename. He explained in detail that everything works ok (the other part of the code he was fixing) if he changes the name of the file to test1.xlsx for example which doesn't use russian characters. OK great.

Then he goes on to show me how he fixed the other stuff and of course everything blows up. The file he used for demonstration was of course the original file our cusotomer provided, he just deleted the obvious russian chars and left the rest.

МТС != MTC

I cracked up: but you still have russian chars in the name.
The guy: no way, I deleted them all.
Me: but what about that МТС in the name?! Guy: what about it?
Me: did you actually typed that in or you left it there?! Those are russian chars that are fucking things up for you.
Guy: no way, it's MTC.
Me: checked the logs, you have ??? In the filename instead of МТС..don't you find that at least a little bit suspicious?!
Guy: but it looks the same. How does it (the computer) know it is in russian?!? //Why doesn't it understand?!

O.o I still can't believe it.. Is it just me & my high standards, or should it be normal for coders to know things such as character encoding & stuff?!?

I almost died of laughter, he and some other guy had problems finding customers in the software due to not being able to type the russian chars << happened more then once before, even after I told them about a quick hack on how to use google translate onboard keyboard & other stuff to make proper chars so they can get a match..

I think when they bury me, I'll still be facepalming and laughing over this incident. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:

Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"

Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".

*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.

Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.

Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".

Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"

*At this point he was really pissed

Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"

Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."

Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"

*Guy ironically laughs

When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

Okay so even at my advance 52 years of age, I still pull all nighters to handle emergency remediation projects, and clean up other peoples messes. I don't mind, I'm a geek, I get high on the challenge of fixing shit that is broken all to hell.

But tonight was different. Tonight has me raging.

I am tasked with renovating a website, and building a sister site to that main site as well. no bother, I haven't done any web dev in 15 years but I'll power through pulling 18 to 20 hours a day for a couple of weeks to get in the groove...

Little did I know... CSS is a pain in the ass to be sure, but FLEXBOX is total and complete bullshit.

I don't give to shits about all the fancy shit it can do, it can't do simple shit worth a damn. Fuck Flexbox, and anyone involved in producing that useless layout model.

The sheer number of idiots promoting that hunk of shit a solution that is to be applied to any task other than wiping my ass is astounding.

Fuck all you jerk offs out there posting your shitty mark up turds as if they are gold, when you know better than anyone it works, sometimes, then doesn't, and is so easy to break it may as well be called "Web Design Jenga".

I'm still tired as hell, and tomorrow I will go back to slogging through CSS as the layout method, but at least I feel a little better now.

Oh and before I forget FUCK YOU FLEXBOX you piece of shit.

#LongRant

I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!

Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.

The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)

2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)

3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)

5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)

As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!

Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.

PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

*desolders Ethernet, USB and GPIO rails from Raspberry Pi to decrease height*
(Desoldering that shit from a Pi fucking sucks btw, no idea what solder or pads they use but it's garbage)
*boots up Raspbian to see whether it still works and to set things up*
...
Oh shit.. I need keyboard and mouse for this :') fuck me I guess... Long live planning ahead. Does there exist a KVM over TCP/IP yet? 😅

Today someone was testing a website for me.

Tester: I've found a bug this button doesn't work
Me: It works. I tested it in Firefox and Chrome.
Tester: I'm using Edge
Me: Oh yeah. Forgot that was even still a thing...

Intern's CV says they have technical skills with MS Office, MySQL and JavaScript. Last month I let my manager know that this intern doesn't really know anything, so we let her do a Freecodecamp course, after which she still cannot build a basic HTML and CSS page and doesn't understand the relationship between HTML and CSS.

My manager bought her a Laravel course for beginners and today I discovered that she also doesn't understand databases, because she tried to enter an alphabetic character into a column that only accepts integers. She doesn't read/understand the error codes thrown by the application.

She tried to access a route which she created in her Laravel app by accessing it via the phpmyadmin dashboard and called me and wasted my time by asking me why her route isn't working. She literally does not understand how computers work, or how the HTTP protocol works, even less so how a file structure works. She cannot translate abstractions to practical solutions.

She either deliberately lied on her CV to get a job, or she's just really dumb and doesn't understand what the term "technical skills" mean.

I've told my manager multiple times how I think she's in the wrong job, but they keep pushing things beyond her capabilities onto her desk. I was told I'd get an intern to help me with my work load, but I got signed up into an experiment I did not consent to (manager's words, it's an experiment to help uplift people with bad degrees and a poor background). I am not a good teacher, I hate doing it.

!rant

So I am building a website and already finished it and ready to be deployed.
Got server access and found that there are many other websites files and folder.

Note : multiple copies of website that I am working on.

So I raise my concern with client about which folder is actually handling the website. She contact the old dev guy and got the webroot for that website. She told me to delete everything and clean it up and make tge current websites available.

I realize that there are many other websites may rely on those files and folder and inform about the consequences. And finally told her I will not touch any files except for the website I am working on.

So, I deployed the website and works good as expected. After 3 weeks clients comes back with an issue that one of her websites is notworking and trying to blame me for it.

Fyi : before my deploymemt she says that she will talk to hosting providers to clean their webspace. I am not sure on that yet.

So I tried to do auditing and found that after 2 days frm my deployment some has already wiped everything from those other websites.
I showed my audits and its someone did it.
You should contact your hosting provider or the other dev who she contacted for wiping.

From the begining I am telling that lady to take backups. She said no need.

The reason I didnt took it because I am not working on those website and obviously client isnt going to pay me for those back.

There is still more to go waiting for her resonses.

Is posting your setup still a thing on devRant? Because I finally have one of my own now - not too fancy but works well for me. My humble abode :)

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.

Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.

I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.

Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.

I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS.

How I spend my days at work working with legacy code:

* Writing tests before I do anything
* Noticing that i cannot write tests because of antipatterns. Lots of them.
* Refactoring to make at least a tiny bit testable.
* Then writing tests.
* More rewriting and refactoring
* Finally adding that one feature my boss asked me for
* Writing tests for that new feature (my do that before implementing)
* Explaining to my boss why it took me so long and agreeing on stopping writing tests.
* 2 days later: explaining why i still broke something.

But in the end my code works just fine.
my colleagues handle things differently. They just ignore problems as long as at least one feature works a bit.

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.

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

So this happened when i was developing the iOS app for the company I work in. I was given half boiled code written by the previous employee to work on. The app was laid around a webview. Now in iOS, there are 2 kind of webviews, the UIWebView that works on all iOS versions, and the WKWebview that works only on iOS 8+.
The app was coded using UIWebview, I brouht that up with my boss, and he asked me to continue using it, even after I repeatedly informed him that the javascript engine of this webview is subpar and we could be better off with WKWebview. Fast forward to 12 weeks later. The application is ready and is given to the boss for testing. He runs the app and plays around for a day. The next day, he comes up to me and says "The javascripts aren't working that well, can we switch to WKWebview instead?" In the inside of my mind, I have already murdered him three times, on his face, however I say, "We can look into it."
So, basically I rewrote the whole app with WKWebView, retargetting the app to iOS 8+.
The app is tested and launched. Everythings fine. AND NOW, he comes up to me and says, "Can we switch it back to UIWebView? We really need the app to be universally available on the app store and 6% of our customers, still use iOS7."
You know how I felt and what I had to do. Goes without saying, that the application is available on the AppStore, targetting iOS 7+.

TLDR, iOS Dev, given half boiled code with UIWebview, tells boss about WKWebview (iOS8+) and advantages. He asks me to continue UIWebView. App developed, 12 weeks. He comes up and points to problems and asks me to retarget with WKWebview. Developed and App launched.
He comes up and says, we need iOS7+, retarget the app to UIWebview. FML.

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

I absolutely hate software that throws error message boxes that look identical to their "please enter new password" message box.

User called and said they needed their password reset. I give them a temp pin and tell them to press ok to the prompt and then put new password in. She says it is still saying invalid pin. This goes on for 10 minutes. I hang up and try on my laptop. Works fine. Then it hits me.

The message boxes look the same. Have the same width and height and shitty little yellow triangle with ! In the middle. The only difference between them is the text in size 9 font.

Gotta read people...cause sometimes the people developing your software assume you can. And to all the software people out there....end users don't want to fucking read.

Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.

I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.

It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.

Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!

So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).

Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.

Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.

Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.

Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.

This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.

And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.

10/10 for incredible bullshit.

Everyone is posting about their amazing setups and I'm looking at my low-end laptop like

It works. It finally works!

After an 8 hour session I got my crawler to work and give me basically every anime op/ed I long for.
All that using Elixir even though I'm still fairly inexperienced with both elixir and functional programming

I'll try to create an API and eventually Maybe even a database tomorrow (or rather in a couple of hours)

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

Two months ago, I went to an interview that I thought I aced... Time passed and I heard nothing. Got bummed cause it's one of the rare positions that doesn't require industry experience, plus a friend works there so that would be fun.
Yesterday tho, i received a phone call from said friend saying that he finally got an update on a situation (since the whole thing was kinda in the dark even inside the company).
Apparently, the boss who directly interviewed me fought to the nail to hire me cause I was most qualified (even tho I'm very modest and generally nervous as fuck on interviews), but was denied funds for the new department at the moment.

Still bummed about the whole situation, but god damn it feels great to know that I'm still the first choice if/when they get funds

Tested out my first app and it worked beautifully. I’m a projectionist and I made this to give me a constant visual feed of projector communication connection. Still in development, not ready for deployment yet. But it works!
I’m posting here because although this site did not help me technically, it definitely helped me emotionally. ;)

Success to me is silence. No phone calls, no emails, no "why doesn't this work?"

It's when you made something that works in the background, almost invisibly, that others could take for granted but that they also don't bother you with because it is still working as designed.

TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.

A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:

WORKING WITH SAP.

When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.

If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!

And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.

Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.

So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.

BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!

ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!

I finaly managed to make a dark mode on slack desktop app! Still has some bugs (like scrollbar being white) but works well enough for me. If anyone is interested tell me in the comments 🙂

How i did it (Linux paths but should be the same process for Windows):

You can execute scripts in /usr/lib/slack/resources/app.asar.unpacked/src/static/index.js

Using that i figgured out that slack desktop is basically an actual webview to their website and some os hooks.

To edit the contents of the webview you can call `document.getElementsByClassName('WebViewContext')[0].executeJavaScript("alert(1)")`

Then i just simply packaged up some custom css to be loaded with JS.

Quite simple actually.

Using this method you can create all kinds of plugins for slack, so go wild!

"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"

There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.

One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?

If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?

Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.

How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?

What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"

The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?

I started attending this IoT class in some computer training school. During my first class, I was early because I had the raspberry pi class earlier in the day. A guy came up to me and started chatting to me, he was bragging about how he created some big projects, how he works in his dad's company which develops IoT products (he codes it). Later on in class he talked about how he hacked his school's server or something and changed his marks. Whenever he brags, he has a tendency to use a deeper voice (which is pretty annoying).

Anyways so I thought he is pretty good and maybe I can learn a thing or two from him. A few class later, I started having my doubts, why? Because he doesn't know how to debug code, he copies the lecturer's code and still copies it wrong, and he doesn't know what variables and constants are. He uses IE and doesn't know about GitHub.

Now he asks me or the guy in front for help in class. He makes the class more fun, it's funny listening to him brag. Love it.

How are these EU-Upload Filters even practical for anyone except google? This seems like the most unrealistic specification by non-tech bosses in history to me 😭 What do these people expect the upload filters should compare the uploads to? How the fuck should, say a blog website, ensure that none of the uploads are copyright inflicting? Are quotes copyright inflicting? Or only when I copy paste an entire book and write my name under that? How will that get detected? Do we have a database with all the copyrighted works somewhere, that every company has access to? This shit can basically only work for companies like google which have enough data to implement such filters and thats why they already had an upload filter on youtube anyways. This entire amendment is so fucking ridiculous that it basically has to fail, no doubt. In a few months still nobody is going to have upload filters, watch...

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

A month ago, I moved to Germany for work from Taiwan. People here are mostly nice and firendly. But if you don't speak German, there will still be lots of problems especially for official paper works.

But most importantly I got really cool and talented colleagues and a challenging job. Which makes me happy at least in work days.

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

What.. the actual... fuuuuuck?!

Browsing through changes on TFS (yeah, yeah boo me for using TFS instead of git if you like, I don't care, most people use/prefer TFS here, so I conform 'to the standards'..)

Anyhow, going through changes, looking for the one where some comment appeared..

'a wild comment appeared'.. tadaaah!

Checked the rest of changes.. Hm.. Someone did a validity check.. that returns the 'false' if not passed.
// OK, great! They are finally testing their shit and fixing stuff..
But apparently then they decided it is OK to do all the shit anyways.. so WTF?!
Why even bother validating it?! Oh yeah, forgot... cuz in case it returned false YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LET SOME STUFF HAPPEN!! But they weren't assigned with that exact task I guess..

TO DO:
- do the validation algo // fml, not going into how fucked up that was written..but it was horrible!
- do validity check where appropriate/needed
- test validity check and that it doesn't break functionality

+ check if the validation actually logically works?! nope, not on my to do list, not my job..

All done, better not actually do something that requires you to think.. :\

How the fuck that happened?! How can one person be assigned to check if something is stupid/wrong?! and when checking (&confirming) still lets the customer do that shit anyways?! What's the point?! O.O

User: "Why isn't this process updated? There's something wrong with your system."

Me: "Did you submit the request?"

User: "Uh yeah I'm sure I did..."

Me: "Go submit the request again." (they never did the first time)

User: "I don't know how. Will you show me?" *shows user how to do it* "Ok I did it now."

Me: "You did it wrong, you need to resubmit it."

User: "Ok I resubmitted it."

* a week later *

User: "The process still hasn't shown any progress."

Me: "You didn't resubmit it like you said you did."

User: "Will you show me how to do it again?"

* fuck me *

Me: "Sure..."

Process works as expected and everyone lives happily ever after, except the developer that knows it is just a matter of time till the next user blatantly lies, has no respect for anyone's time, and demonstrates a complete lack of desire to care about their job at all and just wants to bitch and complain like a typical lazy ass-hat.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Set up a mail server for our office using one of those all-in-one mail server installations. It would keep denying connections every few days, so me, being the inexperienced shit I was, setup a cron job to restart the server at midnight everyday. It worked and still, to this day, it still works.

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

!rant

Two years ago, I started to learn Ruby on Rails so I would at last know a server language even though it wasn't the almighty PHP. Two years ago minus a few months, I decided to put my first website online with Apache and Passenger. It took me a whole six hours with stress and cries for help until I finally saw my website's homepage displayed on my screen

Today, after a few more websites (and currently 3 more projects but still not released, dang it), I tried to update mySQL to 5.7 since I need it to be able to save arrays for a future project, but everything went full shitstorm with broken packages and lame-ass-shit tutorials that make you doubt your sanity.

So I decided to backup my database and my online websites and to reinstall the whole server and take advantage of it to update the current used gems (Rails 4.2 -> 5.1, not bad)

Not only it took me just a bit more than 2 hours to redeploy the websites, but I didn't felt at the edge of panicking once, and now everything works like a charm.

I feel fucking alpha now.

tired of my tor browser not letting me do my job (still configuring settings, but it's taking too long and i'm getting tired of it), and chrome doesn't show my mouse pointer (which works everywhere else on my machine).

Time to go back to firefox. downloading nightly this time, though. thoughts on it? any default settings I should change for security or to make it better in general?

Taking a database class, prof insists on using Microsoft Sql server 2014. "Okay cool" said the Microsoft surface fan boy inside me as I installed it. "Holy shit this is using 6 fucking GBs?? Eh it's okay I trust" again said my Microsoft fanboy self. Finished installing, makes queries and it works. Cool.

Go to run Sql server again next day and get an error (nothing displayed, just a box pop up and then a crash) I use some Google skills. Change a bunch of shit and still it persists. "Just uninstall it and reinstall again" says my prof. I do so except random errors during installation saying Sql already exists even though I just uninstalled it. "Maybe it's some registry keys messing with it!" do some digging, remove unneeded registry keys and try again. Installation finished but a whack of features say failed to install.

I sit and try to work this shit out for the next four hours (not paying attention to my class) and still can't get Sql to completely uninstall itself. I try iobit uninstaller, command line uninstalling, fucking everything but still not working. Slowly my fanboy side is wishing that the windows symbol on the back of my machine was an apple.

I ended up having to backup all my files and reinstalling windows to get it working properly. Holy sweet fuck. The worst part is when this class is done ill probably need to reinstall yet again to save the 6gb it's sucking up. So if you're not sure whether you need something as heavy as Microsoft Sql server or not for your application, don't use it! It's a fucking virus that is super difficult to remove.

Tldr: life long Microsoft fanboy becomes apple convert in a day of using Microsoft Sql server.

Not exactly dev stuff, but LaTeX low-key makes me nervous.

In writing my thesis it seems that through some keyboard-fuckery I managed to slip in some weird unicode bullshit character somewhere, so that it doesn't compile. Alright, I just do \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0301}{ASDF} so that it gets replaced by ASDF. Searching for ASDF in the output pdf file does not yield results, so I can't even find the location of the fuckery in the text. It seems that unicode character is somewhere in my .bib-file and I guess my citation style doesn't even render the part of the data that character is in after all. So the above hack works, but still there is some weird-ass character in my bibliography file that I can't find.

On another note: I get that modularity is cool and all, but who thought that it is a good idea to give people zero transparency over what macro stems from which included package? No namespaces etc. I end up including a whole lot of packages that are needed for exactly one macro. That bloats up the file and you have no way to trace back which macro came from which of the quazillion included packages.

...then again maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit whose google searches end before success and all of the above has some easy fix.

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

==========
What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.

My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.

I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.

That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.

I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."

If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.

Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

Working on a custom Chromium OS board at the moment

So boards in Chromium OS are specialized versions of Chromium OS built for a specific hardware while maintaining upstream compatibility.

I built a board specifically to be as near as CloudReady's compatibility table as possible, so this is what I have at the moment:

* Most hardware works (Libinput)

* Still working on supplying Nvidia drivers using nouveau (Google insists using OSS drivers, we can't use NVIDIA drivers)

* Still working on making Crostini GPU-enabled by default so I don't always terminate it via vmc

* ARC works as per the open sourced Android Runtime but I need help making the Play Store working

Overall its a bit stable but if anyone's down I'll replicate it on a GitHub repository and I'll let everyone contribute their changes. The aim of the custom board is to:

* Make it work on most hardware possible

* Add android support with APK installation (FydeOS has this but I can't replicate it in CrOS).

* Produce a close to Chrome's release channel.

Here's a screenshot of me using it, it works but I'll need to start over from scratch to make it more contributable

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

In my day off I was eager to try overclocking in my pc and this is how it went:

- Fucked up overclocking parameters for cpu and ram speed.

- BIOS is broken, had to take out gpu to do a reset taking out the bios battery.

- BIOS is up again, default values loaded, bla bla

- Did not try to fuck off anymoar with overclocking, just kept playing star wars and went to sleep safe and sound like a baby.

- Gotta work now. docker does not start, closes itself after tried to start, docker panic, I panic, tried to uninstall, tried to update. nothing works

- Then I remember bios default values leaves virtualization off. enables it again, docker still not working. I panic again, restarted pc like 10 times between disabling/enabling hyper-v in windows.

- Docker dies. not gonna change my overclock options again. silly me 🤦‍♂️

Time to time I do some Hard- and Software repairs for neighbors and get some little money for it.

My neighbor let's call this one "Bob".

Bob has a new printer and a old one which is over 15 years old.

First: Holy shit 15 years old printer works still. WTF? Is this thing Hulk or what?

He ask me why he can't print a 128 site Doc with pictures in it from the old printer. It always stop at around 50 pages.

I tell him that it has only 32 MB Ram/Flash and can't print more. Before the Doc's were much smaller and could print that, but today you got files with more than 10 MB and on a printer it need's atleast 128 MB Ram to process and print it.

Guess what? One week later he asks me the same questions.

Why don't you print it on your new shiny expensive printer and why do you need still that OFFICE WAR VETERAN OF PRINTER to print it???

Seriously just use the new and better one!! Bob please give that old one a burial. He deservs it!

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

So today I saw another 'OOP should die' article.
And I decided I should google around a bit to find out why.

Reasons I found:
- Things get too complicated
- Things get too abstract (same as the above really)

But when I search for alternatives, only functional programming and different ways to use OOP get mentioned.
I still don't get why OOP is supposedly bad though.
Maybe my 20-30k LOC projects aren't big enough to see it?

For me the abstraction works very well. The abstraction is used to keep the complexity low(er).
And the different ways of using OOP are a plus-point for me. (Like the Entity-Component system)

I don't know enough about functional programming to be able to say it's better or worse, but the ideas behind it a perfectly usable in languages like C#.

So if any of you have a good concrete reason to not use OOP, please feel welcome to tell me in the comments :)

Raging here, overheating really. One spends thousands on technology that is promoted with the catch phrase "it just works", yet here I am, after updating my fancy new emoji maker (iphone x) to 11.2 and then attempt to carry on working by compiling my code to test some new features. And...

oh, whats this xCode? You have a problem? You can't locate something? You can't locate iOS 11.2 (15C114)... sorry and you think that this "May not" be supported in current version of Xcode?

Let me get this straight you advanced piece of technological wizardy, you know you are missing something, you in fact know what it is, you can actually TELL me what is missing and yet, still, in 2017, you can't go FETCH it?????

Really? All you can do is sit, with that stupid look on your face, and watch the paint dry? Your stuck? That's it?

I hate you for the false pretense of advanced capability. and for your lack of a consistent dark theme so my eyes stop bleeding when reading your "I don't know what to do" messages...

By the way, maybe you can stop randomly crashing, or pinwheeling, I get that your bored as a machine designed to crunch numbers/data/code all day long and that for fun you feel you have to add some color to your subsitance. But stop it. Do what I'm told you can do, "JUST WORK" for once without me having to drag you forward kicking and screaming.

K. that feels better. Now for some whiskey.

I mean... I'm not even trying to find reasons to complain about Microsoft or MS Teams. They find those reasons for me.

Out of the blue Teams stopped working. There is a button "Try again" and a link "Sign out".

The button works, but still I'm loaded into the same page.

The link is not even clickable... sooo.. emmm... How the fuck do I sign out then?????? [I know how to as I'm tech-savvy, but Margaret from accounting surely would have a hard time]

Today I delivered the beta of my first product to the customer. The customer is only a different department within my company, but I'm still proud of what I've built. This project was of my own design and vision and it actually landed me the position I'm in today. Now I sit back and wait for feedback as they tear it apart and find out what works for them.

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

I have a situation that is so out there I almost wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t happening to me. The company I work at has three branches and around 100 employees. The owner of the company has a brother who needs a liver transplant. Two weeks ago, a company-wide memo went out that all employees would be required to undergo testing to see if they were a suitable liver donor for the owners brother. No exceptions.

Last week at the branch the owner works out of most of the time, his assistant went around to schedule days off for everyone so they could go get tested. People who declined were let go. One of these people was born with liver disease and therefore ineligible to donate. She had a doctor’s note. Other people also had medical reasons as well and some were just uncomfortable with the request and didn’t want to do it. One was pregnant. They were still terminated. My employer’s assistant has said that because our employment is at will, he can legally fire us.

I’m in remission from cancer. I’m ineligible to donate and any kind of surgery would put a major strain on my system. Even if I was healthy, I would still object to possibly being forced into donating an organ just to keep my job. Soon they will be scheduling people’s days off for testing at my branch.

I know this situation is nuts, but I don’t know what to do. I know I could just go for the testing and then be declined, but I don’t think I should have to do that. I’ve had enough with hospitals. Other coworkers who don’t have medical conditions are afraid they won’t be declined because they will be a match. I’m looking for another job but in the meantime I don’t know what to do and I and many of my coworkers are really stressed out.

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

I practice stress-debugging.
It means that while I'm debugging and still in the phase where I have lots of ideas about what possibly went wrong (thanks to my loyal diagnostic team of ducks), I intentionally increase my discomfort level, forcing my brain to work faster and solve the issue. I don't drink, eat, or go to the loo no matter how desperately I need to, until the bug is fixed.
My colleagues and managers think I'm insane or a closet masochist but nevertheless, they acknowledge it actually works for me.
How weird is that?

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

!rant

Today is a happy day.

I just got a job to finance my last year of studies as a frontend dev for two months this summer.

I'll be working as an intern and won't get paid much, but it's still tremendously more than I would've ever made with any other shitty student job.

Best thing is that my best friend works at the same company and we'll be seated next to each other (he also convinced the HR to invite me to the interview, woul've been rejected right away without him).

So basically I am a lucky bastard and they even told me that if I'm doing well they wouldn't hesitate to hire me after my studies if I'd still be interested in a year ❤️

What I'm missing most as a student is to work in front of a computer 8 hours a day. This will be a welcome change and a nice addition to my CV.

Wish me luck! Starting right after my final exams on the 16th 😎

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦‍♀️

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

So a few weeks ago I wiped my MacBook Pro to regain some space and speed, it wasn't really that slow I just had the disk partitioned into two installments of MacOS. When I erased the disk I thought the secure thing to do would be to set the format to journaled, encrypted rather than just journaled. Everything was working fine, there seemed to be this weird step of login when I restarted but whatever, except iCloud Drive. On my iMac it works fine but for whatever reason my MacBook Pro doesn't want to download custom folders (ones that aren't created by an app and don't have an app icon on folder icon) from my account despite them being clearly available in iCloud.com. So after this much time of messing with it I'm wiping my MacBook Pro again and formatting it as journaled (not encrypted). Wish me luck...

Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!

So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".

Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.

Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.

But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!

"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!

"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".

WTF!

We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!

Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?

I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!

Fuck my company. Let the technology people work with technology.

I work at a small company who constantly brings in people who are absolutely useless. The project manager requires me to take items out of azure Dev-ops into an excel because he will not take the time to understand how a board works. The business analyst hands bullshit requirements in formats which no one but him can understand under the pretense that the Devs and architect can ask him when they feel like it. The CEO wants a power-point which again the technical teams have to prepare for him because the project manager or BA will not have time for it. However they make sure to gut the estimates handed over by the Dev team and introduce unfeasible deadlines.

Meanwhile the client has zero problems as the work still somehow gets done due to people in the Dev team overextending. Goddam leeches wasting mine and my teams time doing bullshit.

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

Haven't had such joy as with developing the devrant client in a while. (when things work of course haha)

The js plugin system works now with barely any time added to just loading the rants and in proper order too! (thanks asyncjs) now just need to add a way for the user to download and manage external ones.

The screenshot shows the test plugin linkify, which fetches from the API if there's any links and linkifies them even on the feed (which devrant web doesn't do and always annoyed me) - though since html gets stripped by handlebars I'll have to find a way for them to properly render with other tags to still be stripped (maybe handlebars has that inbuilt already? didn't check yet), plugins currently have access to all values the template would get too, so one could fuck around with e.g. the usernames too lol.

btw: the app is fully responsive even on desktop, which will be handy for me personally, iirc all the other clients I've tried always had some sort of size limit, without which it'd also better fit all our i3 archers out there.

I am a Windows person. I always argue how great it is.

Well, not today.

I was today years old when I learned that you CANNOT uninstall store app via store ;p You need to go to settings / apps and functionality / your app / uninstall

The photo app (Yes the one bundled with win10) doesn't work if you use Hard drive compression AND it is a symlink for OneDrive (So you don't need to keep all photos on the drive). Fucking Paint works without problems.

Email client : If you alt+tab too fast after hitting 'Send email", there is 50% chances that email won't be send. Basiclly you need to hit "send" and wait until you see it in "sent" folder.

Well, as i'm ranting, here for Linux too :
I have a small ubuntu server VM, worked very well for last 6 months. Now "System in read only mode". Fucking apt-get upgrade fucked with something. I don't want to look, so I'll just rebuild a fresh vm.

And macOS should take sometyhing too : Who the fuck decided "enter" is for editing the name of file ?! really !

Well, ALL os are shit, all have downsides, I need my own OS. But I still want AA games... So windows for me.

I just got pissed off when someone on my team asked me how to start a web server on port 8080 (needed for network port testing)

I check the port get 404. 🤔🤔🤔

Spend half an hour explaining to them about ports and how there's already a week server running... And that 404 is a HTTP Status code.

I'm pretty sure she works on our webapp and maybe even REST APIs...

New grad but still.... Not recognizing a 404?

Maybe those pretty 404 pages these days make the realizing that it's a fucking web server error response harder....

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

Regus sent me to collections.

Jist: if you ever think about renting an office from Regus, for the love of your bank account and your credit, just don't. Go into the kitchen and pan-fry your face instead. it'll be better.

Moral: get it in writing. What is "it"? Fucking everything.

------

I needed someplace quiet away from my children to work, so I rented an office from Regus. They said they had a minimum 6-month contract, which is fine, but at the time I was pretty sure I would be moving within three to five. They said they understood and offered the quivalent of a month-to-month plan: I could cancel my contract whenever I wanted, given a few weeks' notice, and that would be that. It wasn't in writing, but both the accounts person and the regional manager were there offering it to me, and they seemed cool. Awesome! I agreed, signed the contract, and paid a hefty damage deposit.

Long story short, I ended up hating the office, and chose to bear the distractions at home instead. Seeing how much I disliked it, the accounts person I talked to originally called me and offered to cancel my contract. I agreed, and she walked me through the steps to cancel it and request my deposit back. Done. I aske her if that was it; no more payments, no more contract. "No more," she said. "You're done." I liked the sound of that. Done and done.

The next day, I check my bank account; no deposit.
Two weeks later, still no deposit.
A month later, still no deposit.

They did say it could take up to three fucking months or something, so whatever. I waited.

Another month later, and instead of my refunded deposit, I get an overdue invoice notice? Seriously?

Apparently they never cancelled my contract, don't remember offering me the month-to-month agreement, nor does the very chick I talked to remember telling me over the phone that everything was paid up and done. Apparently my contract wasn't even for six months like they originally promised, but indefinite? despite all of this? and despite the two of us fucking cancelling it? together?

But no, the legal agreement is binding and explicitly states that they are fucking assholes and due their pound of cash.

So fuck that and fuck them.
And in response, they sent me to collections.
Huge fucking surprise.

and now collections is calling me saying I owe $1900, which works out to a lot more than the couple months it's been since I cancelled that crap, AND.

AND IT'S LESS THAN THE FUCKING DEPOSIT REGUS NEVER RETURNED!

SO NOT ONLY DID THEY NEVER CANCEL MY CONTRACT, THEY CHANGED ITS TERMS (or lied up-front) AND DECIDED TO POCKET THE DEPOSIT INSTEAD OF APPLY IT TO MY FUCKING IMAGINARY BALANCE!

FUCK YOU SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS!

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

Added a bond interface in my Proxmox installation for added cromulence, works, reboot again, works, reboot once more just to be sure, network down.. systemctl restart networking, successfully put the host's network back up.. lxc-attach 100, network in containers is still down apparently.. exit container, pct shutdown 100, pct start 100, lxc-attach again... Network now works fine in containers too.

Systemd's aggressive parallelization that likely tried to put the shit up too early is so amazing!
I'm literally almost crying in despair at how much shit this shitstaind is giving me lately.

Thank you Poettering for this great init, in which I have to manually restart shit on reboot because the "system manager" apparently can't really manage. Or be a proper init for that matter.

/rant

And yes I know that you've never had any issues with it. If you've got nothing better to say than that then please STFU. "Works for me" is also a rant I wrote a while back.

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

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

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

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

Me been in the company for almost more than a year now and still understanding the system.
Another developer, been here for around 4 months, and where ever I look, she will be contributing. Whether it's coding or resovling complex host issues. She works a lot.
I feel lucky to be able to work with her and also all other Devs in this team are awesome.
My motivational source and inspiration to work harder and contribute more and more to the team.

Me: Hmm... My Android phone has been acting strange lately, cell signal keeps dropping... Maybe I picked up a virus... let's flash the latest update.

Phone: Updating Done

Me: Hm... signal is still bad... maybe it's hardware... *Angry*

Phone: By the way you lost root

Me: @#$%$&&$%^#$!#$@$%$#%^ OK LETS SEE, SUPERSU, REINSTALL THE BINARIES... YES!!!

Phone: Reinstalling... Restarting...
......................................................
......................................................

Me: it's not loading.... why? NO! I bricked it..... NO NO NO NO.....

*1 hour of flailing...*

Hey Recovery still works! OK, let's try to reflashing the OS

Phone: Flashing... Restarting...

Me: Please, please... let this work.... it's not starting............. wait. IT LOADED!!!! WOOT!!!! AWESOME...

Phone: still no root...

Me: Eh...

And there went my most of my evening which I was supposed to spend preparing for an interview tomorrow....

I wrote a file transfer thing to appease the initial idea that keeps coming back into my head every so often, like it's trying to haunt me. Problem: No mobile provider will let me test it, as it's meant to throw disgusting numbers of SMS messages at someone waiting for them. How many, you ask? Well, 1MB of data translates to about 8100 "standard-length" SMS messages. (Standardized length, non-"long" SMS messages are, at best, 70 UCS-2, 140 ASCII, or 160 7-bit characters.) It does work, though, as if I just write out all the SMS messages to files and read those in (in place of actual SMS messages, different delivery of the same data) it works flawlessly.

Why would I ever wanna make this? Well, T-Mobile seems to be more concerned with building new cell towers, rather than fucking fixing the ones currently working. The mobile data component usually dies for 8 or 9 hours a day in this medium-size city, but SMS still works, so... just use that to transfer data!

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

Okay, I knew one of my colleagues was actually a work freak, but to this point...

He's been working for most of the day yesterday on a school project, and so was I. Satisfied with my progress, I push the code with TODOs on things we had to agree on tomorrow as well as mentioning it in the issue associated with it on Git, with my last commit a bit before 11PM.

I wake up, with a ping on Discord asking me what was that "bug" I just pushed, wondering what editor I use and asking me if I even use the console debugger. Said "bug" was the point of discussion I said we wanted to talk about tomorrow, I replied in the morning. But he decided of the fix on his own and committed it, as well as other things until... 3AM...

Honestly, I don't blame him for choosing at our stead, he's the leader of our branch and the Gitmaster on top of that. I just reproach him to call it a bug, not see the issue, and all that while he could, you know, sleep. And get some rest overall.
This dude has been working himself madly these last weeks, where he did about 80% of what each of the team member was supposed to do in a whole semester (which amounts to 150 hours of work) for this project (we're nine folks on it).
Now I'm pretty sure it's how he works and that he still gets a decent amount of sleep (like I dunno, until 9AM or so), so I don't expect a response beforehand.

And indeed, as he woke up, he replied to me.

At 7:50AM.

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

A few years ago my boss held a brainstorming meeting to go over features for an internal reporting app. I brought up we should have related business news stories scroll on the page header like Fox business or something. He laughed and said sure. Two things happened after that.

1. Found out the marquee tag still works in chrome.
2. Yeah you bet I put that shit in there.

Anyways a meeting was held a few days after where my boss chewed me out for actually doing it. He showed the app to his boss and got laughed at by his leadership team when they saw news headlines scroll over analytics graphs.

After writing this I realize this is more his embarrassment than mine. Have a great Tuesday fam.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.