I'm sure this has probably been posted before, but it never fails to drive me nuts, and customers never stop doing it, so:

Why do end users think "it's broken" is all they have to put into the support ticket?

It's a web app, not a goddamn pretzel.

If the turn signal on your car stops working, do you drop your car off at the mechanic, hand them the keys, and say "its broken, fix it!"?

While I'm on the topic, "I tried to do {x} and it gave an error" is better than "its broken", but still: why do you think what the actual error says would be completely irrelevant, especially when we put in the effort to give you relatively meaningful error messages?

I mean, is "there was a problem sending the email" so utterly gibberish to you that it is indistinguishable from "error: 0x000351e6"?

If so, I'm sorry, but you're too stupid to use a goddamn computer!

In the 1990s code editors on the Mac could insert the omitted function prototypes into a header file with one command; and even automatically keep the header declaration updated when you changed the source definition (name, parameters, etc)

Today in Xcode you have to copy and paste the stupid function header definition from the source code into the header file. What happens if you leave the "{" that got copied accidentally? OMFUCKING LORD, it triggers all sorts of erroneous errors in all the **source code** files where it is included instead of the header with the stray "{"

I started to question whether nor not I knew C, if gravity worked, if the sun would come up. I wasted a day of dicking around in StackOverflow trying to chase down all these insane error messages which make no sense in Xcode.

I just **happened** to see at the bottom of one of the source files, after all the erroneous error, a very important error:

"};" Expected

So I started deleting code from the bottom up in this source file, same error every time. Got to the point where the includes were all that was left.

FUCK YOU XCODE and the hacks that designed that horrendous piece of shit

Xcode is only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.

literally what the fuck is the point of C++
>takes 3 years to make anything half-functional
>language was made in like fucking 1902 so it's damn near fucking impossible to make anything that works without sifting through bumfuck retarded syntax/libraries
>error messages that tell you absolutely nothing of use and are indecipherable garbage 90% of the time
fuck C, fuck it's retarded downie little brother C++, and fuck the stupid fucking boomers who say you're not a real programmer unless you force yourself to become a masochist by using either one of these stupid fucking languages
"oh but it's fast!!11!1!!" yeah but working with it sure as fuck isn't
half the fucking time if I just stop including certain headers in another file then the compiler throws like literally 400 fucking errors at me even though the thing(s) I excluded had no bearing on whatever the compiler decides it wants to loudly bitch and whine about
"oh but games were made on it!!!!111!" yeah not without fucking horrific spaghetti code and 900000 different libraries and dependancies designed just to make a single fucking window

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

When I launch my startup, I'm gonna insert all kinds of very stupid and weird error messages in place of the actual errors just so the people can have a chuckle instead of being annoyed
maybe someone's gonna post it on reddit or something, I don't mind, that's actually a good thing

Error while writing to file: success

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

Sending webrequest to book car service, but the website isn't telling me if the request went through - just back to the same page with all info filled in. No error messages. Right now they either have 10 requests from me, or none. Stupid fucking site.

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

I read the other day here about people not reading the error messages shown by the IDE and thought "there can't be people this dumb..."

Well, today I was helping a friend out with his java project and he was trying to figure out an error for at least 10 min so I told him, read the error message, he goes like nah, that won't help, I kept repeating it till he did it and guess what? The explanation was there and helped him figure out the problem.
His excuse? He didn't have the patience to read the message, it was 2 lines long...

How can you be so stupid to the point where your first thought isn't checking out the damn message the IDE gives you? It's there for a fucking reason.

I am done with .NET and it's bullshit error messages.

"Validation error happened! Please see Entity.Validation.Properties to see what the error is, then consult an oracle, who'll summon a demon who'll answer only three questions . . ."

FUCK OFF and just give me the error. I swear to god exceptions in NET always lead to some stupid fucking scavenger hunt rather than just letting me know what the fuck went wrong. This isn't the first time I've encountered this either, where it tells me there's an error and there's a mountain with a shaman at the top who'll provide me with the details if I can just hire a sherpa who'll help me climb it.

We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.

The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.

Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.

Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".

The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".

God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.

What the fucking shit, Arch. In what universe/reality is a user expected to easily/quickly address GPG/PGP bullshit when they install Arch. It's already hilarious enough as it is for the user to input every single command in order to install the thing. -- That's actually what's great about Arch; you get return and assurance from each command. -- I understood the fact that you need the latest ISO release in order to even install Arch, but now, if you decide to pacstrap linux-hardened, or god forbid, a package that is who knows what, less maintained?... fuck knows what will happen.

The fantastic part, is that you can't do shit when you're in an arch ISO install. All of the simple and possible solutions that involve GPG DBs/keyrings/etc require you to have the all of the shit installed already; which is fucking impossible if the package manager is bitching about keys not being imported. The most fantastic part, is that there is probably some complete bullshit, ultra-exclusive command or simple solution that will fix this crap. - And if you even dare ask the Arch forums, you'll be branded as a "newbie" and sentenced to read the fucking wiki. - ??? -- That's not a fucking good thing. -- The majority of people who are installing Arch right now, are people who are installing it for the first time, and chances are, most of those people have no fucking clue what is happening; they're learning what is happening. Furthermore, they're probably the kind of people who aren't inclined (or they don't know how) to scour Google or the Arch forums for answers to vague, lazy-ass error messages. The whole point of this thing is show and confront the user about what they're installing and what they want on their computer. Holy shit. This is all the more reason to ensure that total, stupid, ambiguous bullshit errors do not occur. -- "error: key "dogshit master <dogshitmaster@dogshit.org>?" could not could not be imported". -- That's it. That's the error in it's entirety. For a fucking OS install. What the fuck.

Working on an Angular project for the change of things. God, please kill me already.
Its fucking slow - hot reload? I am gonna make myself a coffee in the meanwhile
Its fucking stupid - Why make it easy when you can make black boxed. Make the magic happen!

And please dont get me started on Ressources, documentation, error messages and all the other stuff thats annoying here. Never going back to Angular, if it wasnt paid that well…

Fuck you Spring and your stupid cryptic, useless, no relevant information error messages.

"Oh I am crashing violently because some of my internal component cannot automagically talk to another my internal component" says spring.

Well shit, why do I let you manage your own dependencies if I still need to hunt down what garbage transitive dependency you bring in 5 time.

YOU HAD ONE JOB!!!

Fuck++ I C only red error messages which make me god damn furious. Why is it such a pain in the ass to ./configure this stupid external lib to work on Windows on MinGW and Qt Creator? Why can't I just pip install that crap and import from a single line of code instead of getting fucked several hours without even realising what's fisting me that hard?

You are penetrating me C++. I'm not happy with that. I can't figure it out cause the docs are crap.

Just add the path to the libs they say. Just add the include directory they say. It's damn easy they say.

You know what? IT'S A FUCKING PAIN IN THE AS I SAY! DAMN IT.

My stupid Messages app won't send urls with a .xyz on the end. No error, no explanation. It just won't send. What the fuck?

So I'm the only tester at my company, and I've had to adapt a lot of my skills to fit in with our in house expectations. So everything was fine when I focused on trying one component (manual and automation).

Slowly over time I've had more components to test with exact same resource of me.

Eventually my automatic breaks as I could no longer maintain that and all the other manual tests and all the other jobs I do ( light level internal it support, jira ticket rangerling, rollbar (error messages) basic investigation).

My boss keeps saying why is x,y,z not tested / missed while I can point to time periods where was focused on v instead so didn't get to others.

I keep wanting to just hit them with a keyboard until they realise 10± devs to one qa in our environment just isn't going to work.

I keep getting promised some dev time to help with qa so I can play catch up but never seems to arrive.

Don't get me wrong I'm not the best I used to be at testing(before joining I was proud of my abilities, maybe all stick and not enough carrot wears you down)

We keep taking on new work flows that make no sense (create a bug ticket, then a task ticket if bug take more than hour to do, then I'm stuck chasing developers to update their task ticket so I cam update the bug ticket (if its a bug then log sodding log time against it).

I've gotten to point now where I'm stopping my suggestions, explaining why something didn't get dome and will see if they can answer their own stupid questions

At what point do you stop ignoring the voices in your head (metaphorically).

Do other people go through this cycle where feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, for them to either push your boulder down the hill, replace it with a bigger boulder, move to a bigger hill, get you to move more rocks at once or all the above.

I know QA has its quite and busy phases but for me it seems to be constantly busy with no respite