Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Whenever I come across some acronyms...

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs

The Top 20 replies by programmers when their programs do not work:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"

And the Number One reply by programmers when their programs don't work:

1. "It works on my machine."

But it didn't crash the system? 🤔
Hey hey Windows, take note of this!! 🙃

And, the other side, husbands 😂
——————————————————–
Dear Technical Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. The new program also began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate

——————————————————–

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: ” C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME” and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5. But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1.

Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.

You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck,
Tech Support

This is why my embedded system keeps crashing

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

!dev
Nearly had a crash today driving home and almost had a heart attack. Apparently my car had the heart attack for me and started doing. A speaker test.

So I'm contemplating what just happened and my car's speakers start going BEEEEP BEEEP BOOOOOOOOOOOOP (Subwoofer).

Then the radio came on and switched to a Spanish station.

I looked it up, apparently I had entered diagnostic mode on the infotainment system when I was fiddling with the wheel buttons as a stress relief.

Long story short, the diagnostic mode informed me that my car runs Windows ME!
I would like a new car please, kthxbye.

>give person jailed access to my server.
>person breaks out, and notifies me.
>i fix the hole
>three weeks later i decide hes trustworthy enough and the jail is causing too many problems so i give him unjailed access
>first thing he does is crash the system
albeit unintentionally, but seriously?

This isn't my own creation, but I couldn't find it shared here yet.
It is a poem:
< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED

It reads as:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH!

And then there was this big review...

DEVs:" this bug is hazardous and needs to be fixed quickly! It could crash a productive system completely!"
CTO and DEV teamlead:" shut up! This big exists more than two years! No customer will ever klick this button!"

--exactly twelve hours later--
Customer:"so we clicked on this button and our system crashed! Can you help us quickly? We are losing money!!!"
CTO in the meeting:"who programmed this shit? Are you insane?"
Teamlead:"you are useless !!"

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

Dev: Hi Guys, we've noticed on crashlytics that one of your screens has a small crash. Can you look?

Me: Ok we had a look, and it looks to us to be a memory leak issue on most of the other screens. Homepage, Search, Product page etc. all seem to have sizeable memory leaks. We have a few crashes on our screens saying iPhone 11's (which have 4gb of ram) are crashing with only 1% of ram left.

What we think is happening is that we have weak references to avoid circular dependencies. Our weak references are most likely the only things the system would be able to free up, resulting in our UI not being able to contact the controller, breaking everything. Because of the custom libraries you built that we have to use, we can't really catch this.

Theres not really a lot we can do. We are following apples recommendations to avoid circular dependencies and memory leaks. The instruments say our screens are behaving fine. I think you guys will have to fix the leaks. Sorry.

Dev 1: hhhmm, what if you create a circular dependency? Then the UI won't loose any of the data.

Dev 2: Have you tried looking at our analytics to understand how the user is getting to your screens?

=================================

I've been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to figure out how to respond before they come online. I am fucking horrified by those responses to "every one of your screens have memory leaks"

So, I found this :

Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, HuntingAndFishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6. I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks ...Troubled User
-------
REPLY:

Dear Troubled User:
This is a very common problem. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed not to allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 installed and work on improving the configuration. I suggest installing the background application YesDear 99.0 to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to do this before the system will return to normal anyway.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as CleanAndSweep 3.0, CookIt 1.5 and DoBills 4.2. However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program NagNag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0, but beware because sometimes these applications can be expensive.

WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install SecretaryWithShortSkirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system. 

WARNING!!! Attempting to install NewGirlFriend 8.8 along with Wife 1.0 will crash the system.

(see Wife 1.0 manual, Apologize, High Maintenance & Secretary with Short Skirt)

Saw this on Facebook and couldn't help but share here! 😂

A young woman submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship to her husband) presumably did it as a joke…
The query:

Dear Tech Support,

’Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as: Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as: NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
What can I do?

Signed,
Desperate

The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):

Dear Desperate,

“First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Please enter command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)
In addition, please, do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0.Good Luck!’

Good Luck!

Yeah sure, the Metaverse will be bigger than the Internet.

I really believe that. Short of a system collapse, there's nothing which will stop some Web/VR/AR amalgam from eventually going mainstream. If anything, a prolonged pandemic will make humans hunger for more digital entertainment and socializing options.

Might take 5 years, or 25, but it will happen in some form. Eventually, people will even readily accept various augmentations to their bodies to further immerse themselves and connect to digital experiences.

BUT:

We're still pre-bubble.

Does no one remember the dotcom crash?

Facebook/Meta will become the new Yahoo, decimated to a sliver of its former glory. Million dollar hype NFTs will become the new $10 parked domain names. 99.99% of all current efforts and content will end up like a modern day Geocities Archive.

So yeah... when I read that my pension fund is considering "investing in metaverse technologies"...

...you fucking bet it's time to transfer to a different fund!

App: *Crashes*
Every Android user in the universe: I MUST SCREENSHOT IT AND SEND TO DEVELOPER, SYSTEM CRASH DIALOG WILL DEFINITELY HELP TO FIX THAT

It feels SO good to have nothing to lose on your system! Code on GitHub, pictures on an external disk, documents on Google Drive and OneDrive and bookmarks etc. on my Google Account. If my PC were to crash completely then I wouldn't be as lost as I'd normally be :D

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.

25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.

Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️

At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.

Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.

Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.

Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.

Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.

Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.

OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.

Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.

Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.

Shit runs fast on several cores now!

Working on a module in an old shitty system. It takes 150 seconds to boot the fucker for debugging, which gives me one minute of debugging before the inevitable crash. Four minutes of debugging costs me 10 minutes of watching the loading splash screen.

I'm about to send my keyboard on a journey, straight through my monitor.

Sorta dev related.
I work at a service desk for an automotive supplier.
We've once hab out entire mobile phone system crash and for whatever reason, it won't let the phones connect, if there are more than 50 phones trying to connect at the same time. Kind of a problem if there are 400+ phones trying to connect.
My colleagues showed me what to do in order to get one phone to connect to our system.
It was basically: enter some invalid data on out webinterface, save, enter the correct data again and safe again.

It was too stupid for me. So i hacked an AutoIt script together in about 15 minutes, and let it run for the next half an hour. Showed it to my colleagues, they were excited and I went and got a coffee.

I crash my system on purpose because cinnamon's fallback mode is the best desktop environment

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

Android flow I’ve found(fixed in android 8, working on 7.1.1):
To make app uninstallable by the normal user make the app device administrator, add “android.permission.SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW” to the manifest and make sure it’s not granted by the user.
Now when you try to uninstall the app, it tells you to disable it from device administrators but the device administrator disable dialog is System Window handled by the app itself and if the app has this permission but not granted, settings will crash with SecurityException leaving the app untouched.

Seriously, why can't youtube devs get their crappy code together!! Got a BSoD after watching a certain YT video.... I think its outputting malformed video data that causes MS Edge to crash the whole system....

And this started happening after Creators Update....

CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.

We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.

Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.

Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.

Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.

This shit makes me fucking rage! Ok, so here it goes. I use Multiswipe (multiswipe.com) and I'm actually very happy with it. It works as advertised and doesn't crash. Then I bought a new laptop. I wiped the old one and installed multiswipe on the new one. After launching I'm greeted with the registration (I bought it) where it claims I have already registered the software on a different computer. So I reach out to the owner and ask him to help out and am told

"MultiSwipe can be installed and updated as many times as you want as long as it is in the same machine, but if you change laptops then you will need to purchase a new license, this is because MultiSwipe implements a serious of optimizations depending on your touchpad brand and model and as such it's physically linked to it."

This sounds like horseshit to me. If I download a fresh copy, wouldn't it optimize depending on the new system?

But ok. I'll purchase another one, only to be told that my e-mail address is already in use. After reaching out I am told that I HAVE TO CREATE A NEW EMAIL ADDRESS.

Jon, if you read this, I seriously love your software but what the fuck is this fuckery. Like, seriously, how god damn hard can it be to allow customers to purchase multiple licences?

I'm so angry that I'm considering pouring time into cracking it and sending him the new version with the text "nvm, got it to work."

I'm open to suggestions....

Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.

===================

My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...

===================

Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.

===================

Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:

GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10

the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!

===================

that's it, it's over, why are you still here

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

hey guys yesterday I got roasted cuz I was using a pc instead of Mac for development work and this was my reply. For me I don't gonna spend 2000+ $ only for 1 sec faster app loading and only for writing codes if someone willing to spend lot of money then they have completely command on there system Mac is very overpriced and overprotective it doest allow dual boot tell u what Mac sucks in 4k video editing,games,it don't even support maya or 3ds max rendering on Mac is gonna hit you hard , and there is same for linux but because it's free I don't much care about it but it is extremely crash and error prone I've installed Ubuntu nearly 20+ computer and after few days some kind of internal error occurred if u cancelled any ongoing installation it's going to hijack your system not let order program to install unless you manually clean that shit out ,yea Unix systems have bit faster app opening time and I appreciate that .
For nerds like me it's not only about coding stuff I like to do crazy stuffs

Imagine you have a car and it runs faster than other cars and needs less gasoline, but due to historical reasons the steering wheel is made of barbed wire, there's 8 different accelerator pedals for different streets, pushing the wrong one may lead to a crash, and instead of a driver's seat there's a huge wooden dildo sticking out of the floor.

This is, in a nutshell, what using the C++ type system feels like.

Hyper frustrated...lost all the code due to a system crash had to reinstall OS, did not create a backup, screwed as shit!!!

Now has to start coding from scratch...

#forgot to push to git

P.S deadline is today

The worst part of collecting crash reports is that the application crashes the whole system so the report won't be sent. Fml

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

always free your pointers people.
what's worse is when you preach that to people and end up being the one who leaves dangling pointers everywhere

woop memory overflowed
woop woop system crashes and you dont know why
woop woop woop sometimes it doesnt crash and you dont know why

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I turned on my old phone to transfer all my p̶o̶r̶n̶ photos, and it crashed from the notifications.

And I understand that it's an underpowered device and notifications aren't expected to come by the hundreds, but how terribly misdesigned must a pubsub system like Push be for the client to crash?

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

Don't you just love it when gitlab's ci pipelines crash for no apparent reason, causing tests which cannot fail to just magically break down, change logging levels to Just about anything and basically PMS for about 3 hours before it decides it needs to restart completely and when you return the same pipeline which you've been trying to fix for the better part of an entire evening, after regular work hours, it. Fucking. Works. With. No. Changes. To. The. Entire. FUCKING. System.

Waste of a day.

As of two days ago, I no longer use systemd on my Arch system, I switched to openRC.

Basically it all started right around 9 months ago, installed Arch on a new laptop, and whenever I would reboot (which was never very often, mainly kernel upgrades), about 7 out of 10 times it would crash when booting up. My solution for a while was "just don't reboot then".

I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what was causing the boots to fail. I tried disabling systemd units, just trying to narrow it down. I even got the logs from each failed boot, comparing it to a successful boot to find any differences just to have some idea of what the issue was.

One day I figured, it's possible that it could be an issue with systemd itself. So on my day off of work, I figured I'd try using a different init system, just to see if it would work 10 out of 10 times. Decided to try openRC, and sure enough, IT FUCKING WORKS!

Now, I don't hate systemd, I've always been on the fence about it. I feel like it just tries to do too much. I will say, it is fairly convenient to have a lot of things running off of one component, making them all compatible, BUT there's also the factor that one issue could potentially fuck shit up.

Hell, I'll say that it is easier to use systemd than openRC. Enabling unit files is easy as shit in systemd. But I personally like a challenge, and to learn new things, that's part of why I use Arch.

Anyways, I'm done with my rambling for today.

Updates! (( ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ ))

Why do they break things..

After updating my system my VMs suddenly stopped working, all of them. They didn't crash or anthing but became unsuable, stuff like force logouts..

Almost lost it, but thankfully there was a difference in the snap version and the deb package..

At first that also didn't want to work, but it was just that the snap wasn't completely removed so it had some problems..

Now thankfully it *seems* to work again.
( ´꒳` )

That moment you setup 17 domains on sparkpost as a email delivery system

make your account secure with 2 factor authentication like a good infoSec enthusiast

Go on with your life

Having a Phone crash but nothing to worry because you made them backupz

Restore backupz

once again go on with your happy life.

Having to setup a different bounce action on sparkpost

logging in to sparkpost to make the adjustments

opening google authenticator

realising the backup you restored was before you added the sparkpost entry

mailing sparkpost asking to deactivate 2factor authentication

Having them tell me that they have no access to Google authenticator so they can't help me and all they can do for me is delete my account if i answer their 7569357 questions that i entered a year ago ..

--
You have access to your database yes ? You can delete my account but you can't adjust a fcking Boolean column from true to false? #@?#&!

Why even offer a feature where you have apparently no control over. Stuff like this happens all the time and almost no one saves that fcking authenticator secret.

Make people use authenticators to keep the hackers out, forces them out instead.

So I have flashed and rooted (superSU) lineageOS 14.1 thats running android 7.1.2 on my phone and now I read that this will trip safetynet and won't allow things like netflix, banking apps or pokemon go - I tried to install netflix and it worked, tried pokemon go and after granting GPS via privacy guard it worked too.

But still it seems that if I would now flash Xposed (which I didn't find a good build for 7.1.2 yet anyway) that it would actually then start tripping those protections and that I should go with "systemless root" via magisk.

How does magisk compare to superSU? I loved root some years ago because of xprivacy, adfree etc. which are actually modifying system files as far as I know and I would like to go as "extreme" as denying camera usage to apps, but not making them crash, so just like xprivacy has fake IMEI I would like to show just a black image served to the app, I remember there was an xposed module doing that, but how far can magisk compare there?

And most importantly is there a way to just hide superSU and xposed from all those detections?

Woke up early. Drank coffee and my mindset is so ready to do some work. After 30 minutes I'm so sleepy like a literal crash down and will sleep now. Body why you do this? I hate night shifts. It destroys my body clock. I hope weekends and mall hours are night shifts as well.

Also I hate company internal system project when I am assigned to a client and the client don't know that. I can't tell it to the client and my company can't tell also because my hours are 100% committed to the client.

I don't have an ios device (and hope I'll never have to :p) but I hear people saying that apps never crash on it.
Is this true? And if so, how is this achieved:
Forcing devs to pay extra attention to this or some system mechanics/structure or...?

Although i think i already saw things crashing somewhere...

Are any of you "cursed" with a particular set of software tools/programs?
Take me for example, I cannot use Adobe shit or it crashes. The same thing can be said for Microsoft Office. Anything in there, it does not matter. It always crashes on me. I continuously get the "Not responding" status. Regardless of operating system.

This has made me absolutely *despise* anything that is Microsoft Office or from Adobe. Now, I am sure you can all guess how and during what circumstances I would have to touch Microsoft stuff, work and the like.

But Adobe, mainly photoshop because it is what my designer uses for mockups and the sort. Dude has been constantly baffled when I show him me trying to open something only for it to crash. And we have made the experiment, in which two of my other employees would use MY COMPUTER to open something in Adobe and it would not crash on them. But the fucking moment I attempt to open anything in these two pieces of shit, guess what? it crashes.

I fkn hate Office and Adobe products

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

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

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

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

Why does it have to be so hard to watch blu-ray movies on Linux? Either the decryption libraries crash or they freeze the whole system.

I give up, I'm booting Windows now.

We need to capture ips on our internal Network in order to figure out who is actually calling our apis because we will be meeting a breaking change so need to melee sure they support.

But in order to have IP capturing, we need a be Production Issue ticket...

So to prevent crashing downstream system, we need to crash their systems... 🤔🤔🤔🤔

!Rant

TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.

MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....

A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);

Dear Systems Analyst,

I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.

In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.

Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.

Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?

.... The Systems Analyst replied:

Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.

Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.

Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).

Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.

When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.

It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.

Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.

To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).

DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.

BEST WISHES!

Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.

!rant
I have my 121 in a few days with my new manager and am trying to get a raise either through moving from junior to mid level dev or being given a significant raise , am being paid a tad below the London market rate's lower range for my skill level.

Any advice on how to approach the topic?

Some bits of my background:

I got almost 4 years of exp :
almost 2 working there...
6 months short term contract as a ruby sql dev another company...
1.5 years worked for an abusive joke of a company who took advantage of my naivety since i was fresh out of uni ( did stuff like pressured me to add more features to a pojo system i made for them) barely learned anything there since i was the only IT person there developing solo, the project lasted 1.5 years and was a total mess to finish, so am not too sure of factoring it into my years of exp.

My Qualifications are:
bsc in information systems
Msc in enterprise sw engineering

My "new" Manager is seeking to retire real soon.

The company isn't doing too well but we just landed 2 big customers who are buying the product my team is working on

I Am one of two last devs on my team and we are barely holding on with the load, can't afford the time to train a newbie to join us

my department is soon to be sold (soon according to what mgr says). They have been saying so for 10 months now.

Last year , since the acquisition Is taking so long and funds were running out We were hit by a wave of redundancies which slashed our workforce in august/ july, told we could last till march this year on our funds . Even senior staff were on a reduced work week...but since we Got new customers then money should be coming in again , this should mean thats no longer the case. Even the senior staff have returned to 5 day work weeks.

Am being given only JavaScript work to do despite being hired as a junior java dev, my more senior colleagues dont wanna even touch js with a long stick

Spoke to 3 recruiters , said they got open roles in the junior- mid level range that pay the proper market range if am interested to put my cv through.
Thats like 25% more than I currently make.

Am a bit scared to jump into a mid level position in another company because i lack a bit confidence in my core java skills.
although a senior dev who used to be on my team thinks i can do it.
i recon i can take on the responsibilities of a mid level dev in me existing company since am pretty familiar with the products

I dont get to work with senior devs and learn from them since we are so stretched thin, hence am not really getting the chance to grow my skills

I know i have gaps in my knowledge and skills having not been able work in java for a while hasn't allowed me to fix that too well. I badly need to learn stuff like proper unit testing, not the adhoc rubbish we do at the moment, frameworks like spring etc

Since I have been pretty much pushed into being the js guy for the large chunks of the project over the last year , its kinda funny am the only guy who has the barest idea how some of the client facing stuff works

The new manager does seem to be a nice guy but he is like a politician, a master bullshitter who kept reassuring all is well and the company is fineeee (just ignore the redundancies as the fly past you)

The deal for thr aquisition seem to have sped up according to rumors
And we heard is a massive company buying us, hence things might pick up again and be better than ever

Any ideas how to approach the 121 with him?

Any advice career wise?
Should i push for a raise ?
promotion to mid?
Leave to find a junior to mid level position?
Tought it out and wait for the take over or company crash while trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge ?

Sorry for the length of this post

I go on vacation from work for 3 weeks at the end of this week, the longest I'll have taken at once in at least 10 years..

Finding it REALLY hard to a) focus on work now (yay vacation brain).. b) trust my coworkers to not crash the system, burn the backups and just generally bugger everything up while I'm gone. Aaarrrggghhhh

Dear Thieves.
So I was looking at some guy who's job I designed today.
He was sitting there with the new laptop I bought during one visit here.
It was an hp with a silver keyboard and handrest because supposedly normal people stopped owning laptops when you all decided to embrace schizophrenia and create inane rather stupid meanings that are associated with literally everything but sense or sophistication.

comparing oneself to an animal for example doesn't focus on positive or spiritual values, its something perverse.

ordering food is not about enjoying new things or savoring flavors, its about something perverse.

going to school is not to learn things, its to crash and burn later because the powers that be refuse to update the system from the 1970s.

living, is not living at all, but working to pay bills and get old bitter and fat.

well.

shit.

retards.

anyway. doesn't explain people like myself who made things when we could and were enthusiastic about our jobs at points.

oh. and supposedly the guy who stole the job was 'I".... and it was a job that would become 'outmoded'......
i believe that was the word often used. let;s check. yup, close enough.

then all these people talking about 'new' jobs because noone could trust the group of monsters they made with too much spare time. since you know. they thought it was funny to steal human beings lives since they were not human. subhuman.

anyway.

where suddenly everything meant something else and a whole new world of retarded people emerged from the shadows because the trash children of a former generation got sick of being lectured about morality when they were in fact just bad people who should have been shot.

i don't care how else the whiney bastards explain themselves. i really don't.

you can say that in desperate fucked situations involving psychological torture, rape, etc that a decent person *raises their hand* might do TERRIBLE things to their captors in order to escape, but THEY caused that while whining that someone from the 1940s or earlier made them evil and they had no choice but to steal jobs, money, retirement funds, public institutions, the morals of a generation, i'll bite: toddlers, spread their legs like psycho whores to get pregnant, so steal people's unborn children, turn every fund available that could have gone towards people that needed things to money laundering and in general gleefully fucked our whole country up with the lack of foresight that psychopaths commonly display.

great job.
was it worth dying ?

how about going crazy and letting another group of evil people make an excuse to drive everyone into an endless idiotic loop ?

but hey no, keep lying. works so well.
well at least fedora 37 is released again.

give the stolen photos back.
just want to know what i looked like, and don't want to talk like a retard to get people who understand english to pretend they finally comprehend.

fucking bastards.