I do tech support for our platform for real estate agents. Today I got a call from a user saying she can't find her files.

Me: "are you logged into the platform?"

Her: "Yes, but I hate this whole technology thing. Why is it so complicated and unintuitive"

Me: "which part exactly, we welcome feedback"

Her: "when I download my pictures from your site, I don't see them on the desktop..."

Me: "...ummm... have you checked your 'downloads' folder?"

After 5 minutes of explaining how to get to it...

Her: "you see, this is exactly what I mean, why does it have to be so unintuitive... your web site is poorly designed"

😑🔫

Should I just delete her "FREE" account?

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

Worst part is having every single idiot you know (and their friends) ask you for computer help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

the fuck kind of manager are you that you tell your leads not to fucking answer their damn phones when services need restoring????? If your fucking team member can do his damn job like a grown ass adult, but sees that you (his lead) made a change and has questions, your ass better answer the phone, or i will rocket launch it up your ass, straight into your brain so it's the newest, latest, fucking hippest trend and hooked into your system so you answer every fucking call hands-free. Even when fucking "Windows Tech Support" calls you every 30 minutes because your keep expired.

There are people counting on you, worthless fuckwipe. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself. And do your fucking job.

Edit: phone tried to censor me

I hate being a fucking tech support dude. Everyone thinks it is my job to fix their device. Some girl asked me to replace her iPhone 6 plus screen a few days ago. I reluctantly said yes. I bought a screen. And I started the process. I opened the box for the new screen and it was just the screen with no digitizer. That was completely my fault. I was an idiot. I immediately buy the correct one on amazon and tell the girl, I'm sorry you won't have a phone for two days. As soon as the new package comes in, I will do the repair.
3 Days Later: Today.
Her: Has it come in yet?
Me: No, I'm going to call Amazon
Amazon: We're sorry, the thing you asked for was out of stock, you'll have to buy it again.
He was very nice, and he gave me free shipping, but this was not my fault!
Her: I have to wait 2 more days? That's like a whole week without a phone!
I had to do this for free and pay $40 for the new part. I am never telling anyone I am a developer again. I feel so fucking bad, and she's mad. And I can't do anything about it.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Those are rookie numbers, gotta pump those numbers 😂

Made the mistake of telling my family what I'm going to school for... Now I'm free tech support.

I study software engineering, so that obviously means I'm also free family tech support right?

Apparently some lady that lives nearby believes this, but she replaced family with vague acquaintance.

This lady is very computer illiterate, so much that I have to describe the wifi icon as a dot with two waves above it.

So one day, she calls me because her Outlook isn't receiving mail. I ask her if she has any internet and she confirms she does because she can visit Google. After trying a bunch of possible solutions in Outlook, I ask her to download a remote access program so I can look at what's wrong.

She didn't have internet. Visiting Google means seeing the Chrome logo apparently.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

Yeey, my mom just called me that when I got home I'd have to fix the neighbour's TV. Because after 10 hours of school the only thing I want to do is fill in the role of a free tech support.

I seem to be everyone's free tech support. I'm always helping my friends and family but I don't get anything in return. 😣

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

Give them free tech support.

Almost all my family think I'm free tech support.

My dad knows what I do and he's proud because I finished uni (he didn't), he sometimes asks for help (he repairs electronic stuff) and I try as hard as possible to be useful (it's fun!). He knows that (most of the time) I'm working when I'm in my laptop, so he doesn't bother me, he kindly asks if he needs help with something.

My brother's studying the same I did, he's doing fine. I think better than me when I started.

My sister knows that I can repair her phone/laptop but she asks me to do it whenever I have free time and how she can avoid to "damage" it again.

My friends think I'm awesome, but I'm in constant stress (thanks imposter syndrome!).

My dog, he just barks and smiles whenever I'm around and he thinks I'm awesome, so I have that going on for me, which is nice.

🐶

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

When I became a dev my parents said: "it's not rocket science, or chemistry or anything good, but at least it's not stressful, or dangerous and we can get free tech support. I hope you are able to pay your own bills and find rent"

A few years, a degree and finding a supportive woman who is now my wife and and I make 4 time as much as my parents make now they want me to move back so they can get their tech support and see my wife I guess she is more social than I am

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

The technical incompentency of the people I try to help with their tech problems, is utterly astounding. Especially family members. For the love of God, if somebody is offering you tech support, put in at least some minimal degree of effort!

Devs with young kids: how the hell do you do it?

I am a foster parent for my cousin who is 4 months old and I don’t know how in the fuck to make this work. How do you do it? How do you balance code and kid?

For reference I work full time at a tech support place, I go to school full time, and I’m trying to pivot into software development, which means any free time is spent coding/studying code/building a portfolio. Problem is I don’t have free time because of the baby. How in the hell do people do this.

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""

Family support (2 phases)

When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.

I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.

At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.

Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.

I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.

Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".

By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.

And it worked out.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

More tales from University Tech Support:

Haven't been able to get ahold of this staff member for weeks to do required maintenance. Emails, VMs, surprise office visits, she's never anywhere to be found.

Finally my boss emails her with the subject line "Free Money", and gives her some sass in the email about calling IT back.

Yeah, she responded in minutes...

Do not buy Hostinger... They are so aggressive with caching that I ran out of devices to test the features. They probably cache based on userAgent because changing other parameters (IP, local cache) doesn't resolve the issue. I talked to tech support whole day, and although they were helpful few times I just got three same answers for the three different questions. Seriously, the only thing I like about Hostinger is their user friendly UI.

The rant goes on. I can basically DoS my website by clicking fast on it. That shit doesn't happen with some free hosting plans... My site goes down for a few minutes before I can visit it again.

THE RANT GOES ON

Using the file manager is tedious work as you get randomly disconnected after less than few minutes of inactivity.

I might seriously switch to Google's Cloud Console. It is more expensive, you have to do all the hosting config yourself using a virtual machine, but I guess it's more reliable and it gives you a lot more control.

My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.

My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.

So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.

At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.

I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.

Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.

Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.

That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.

It was a very satisfying bug to fix.

Cross-platform open-source & free password manager.

Description:

Cross-platform mobile/desktop password manager application. No backend needed, private data will be encrypted and stored in Google Drive/One Drive/Dropbox etc...

I've used multiple applications over the years but they pricey (especially if you switch platforms) and most of them don't have full cross-platform support.

Also, I've made a POC app with Ionic a while ago, but I didn't like the hybrid app feel.

Tech stack:
Js/React Native