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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures will be continued.

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

The spam denier
_____

An old phone conversation with a client:

Me : Hello

Client : My website and server are suspended? why is that?

Me : Your server sends spam messages.

Client : We do not send spam messages, we are on vacation, there is none in the office.

Me : Yes, but it is not necessarily you, according to our logs, your server sent spam messages in Chinese and Russian, so someone from Russia or China....etc.

Client : I do not believe you, we do not speak russian or chinese, how could we then write spam messages in those languages?

Me : I told you, maybe someone exploited some vulnerability in your website or server firewall. And if you want to activate your services, please check with your webmaster and sysadmin to secure your ....

Client: I tell you my son, because I am old and I have more life experience than you ... I am 60 years old and I tell you, spam does not exist, and YOU suspended my website and server, and created issues to sell me more of your solutions and services.

I won't check my server, I won't hire a webmaster or a sysadmin, AND YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY SERVER NOW !

(I suddenly realized that I am talking to a wall, so I switched to a robotic tone).

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services..

Client : YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY S...

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services...

Client : WHAT IS THIS SPAM STORY ANYWAY, I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU ...

Me : Please google that word and you will understand what is spam is...

Client : YOU ARE F**ING LIARS, SPAM DOES NOT EXIST... ACTIVATE MY WEBSITE N.... Beeeep !

I hang up.

Well, I thought about configuring an automatic response for this client, or a for-loop.

His voice was really unpleasant, as if he is a heavy smoker.

Boss: I need to know how much resources a server would need to serve 20000 users at the same time

Me: Sure, can I see the webapp?

B: There's not one yet

M: Ok, can I see its documentation then?

B: There is none

M: But ot depends on the programming language, libraries used, what kin-

B: It's an e-commerce. Try browsing Amazon and see how much they nees to handle the page requests.

Me: *still processing* wh-

Boss: I have to give an estimate to a client within 30 minutes. Hurry.

So.... Uh... I guess i have to hack Amazon now?

It happened to one of my friend at work place.

So my friend is a UI developer and was working on a super critical project with very tight deadline. He was waiting for design team to give him mocks and web api team for giving Apis, so he can start his work. Now there are 4 days left for deadline and none of the parties are ready with their work, and my friend is sitting idle. Management is getting anxious day by day. So one program management lady called him the weak link in the standup meeting and started putting blame on him for the delay in the project. Guy tried to explain that it's not his fault and he is stuck. But that lady was not in a mood to listen.

Now come the next day, in morning he got the design ready and complete Apis from other teams. That day he missed the standup meeting, worked whole night and completed the work with two days remaining for deadline. He went to standup meeting after completing the work, and when the turn came for him to give his status, he started with "the weak link has finished the work". There was a pin drop silent in the room. He continued to give his update like this for next couple of days. And finally that lady was forced to apologize in meeting room by him.

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

"Ok, the site looks fine. Now let's move the style tag into it's own file."

*makes css file*

"WHY DOES IT HARDLY EVER LOAD!?!?, I checked the syntax trice"

*Spends 20 min. Asking friends for help, but none of them knows a reason*

"Time to ask the teacher, I guess"

*Teacher comes over, but has no clue either*

Teacher: "Give me the files, let's test it on my laptop"

*Css doesn't load there either*

*Teachers pair programming and trying some serious debugging technics. No progress*

*I decided to look at the sourcecode while refreshing the site*

1. Refresh: Css is loaded properly
2. Refresh: Css is gone, and source turned into various asian symbols.

Looks at the (default) file encoding: UCS-2
WTF NOTEPAD++, I SPEND 2 HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE YOU DECIDED THIS WAS A PROPER ENCODING!

Web programming seems fun.

Me: *sends meeting request*

Attendee: *3 days later*, hi is there anything in particular you needed to discuss?

Me: ... nope, none what so ever. Decided to take 30 mins out of my busy day to talk to you, a person I don't know, for 30 mins. Definitely the title of the meeting request has nothing to do with it, I wouldn't bother reading that now, since you haven't yet anyway. Cheers!

To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

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

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

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

I introduce to you, my team ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yeah, FML.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

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

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

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

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

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

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

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

jasdkl;fk

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

THERE IS NOTHING AS FRUSTRATING AS WAITING FOR A RESET PASSWORD MAIL... ONLY TO GET A STREAM OF 16 PLAINTEXT PASSWORDS 30 MINUTES LATER, WITH NONE OF THEM WORKING.

Fuck you, IKEA. 🖕

!!pointless story

Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."

"I'll look into it" I say.

I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.

I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.

"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.

Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.

I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.

"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.

I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.

I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.

Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...

Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.

"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.

After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.

I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.

I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.

Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.

About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.

Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?

One month ago. By email.

Boss: so, this client A has a problem with one of our devices and he believes that it's a bug in the software.

Me: all right then, what happens?

Boss: well, he says that the parameter P in the option menu does not changes the device's behaviour as it is supposed to. I'll forward you his mail. You will find attached an excell file with the results of his test performed with and without the parameter active.

Me: < read mail, read excell file > well, boss, his tests are performed in completely different conditions, how could he expect to infer a meaningful results from this?

Boss: damn, you are right. Send him a test plan and follow up.

Me: < send detailed test plan >

No answer in a week. Then...

Client: hi, there, I made this tests, I attached the excell with the results, can you check the software now?

Me: < read another bullshit filled excell file with none of the suggested test performed >
You know what? Just download the procedures you are using from the device and send them by mail, specifying the software version you are using so we can perform some tests here in the lab and get yo a solution asap.

No response. For a MONTH.

Super Boss: client A still has his problem, how could possibly be that it takes more than A FUCKING MONTH to solve his issue??

Me:...

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Dear all wonderful ranters,

I apologize profusely in advance if over the next few days I cannot contain my anger at people and rant about non-dev things. I promise I will try my best to not do this, but there are very few places (none) other than here where I feel comfortable enough to express myself freely and not censor my words.

I will be working as a security guard (3rd job) for a car show full of pretentious assholes who have a tendency to think I'm their servant. I have wonderful bosses who have my back, and there are truly amazing people in attendance as well, but if someone tries to run me over again after a long ass day, I might need to vent.

I fully accept any and all down votes, and will likely delete the rant after it's out of my system, unless there's a conversation going in comments (I wouldn't do that to you).

Please bear with me while I try boot to strangle everyone I come across. I'm hoping this year is the year everyone is nice, but history tells me that's naive and won't happen.

All my love,
Your (co)queen who may end up arrested for using her bionic arm to rip their balls off and feed them to their wives

!rant

Just wanted to share stuff. It's my first time.

<backstory>
I'm a c# dev, recently got excited about neural networks and stuff. I have a gf who studies biology
</backstory>

So i've noticed yesterday what my gf is doing for her science stuff. She has an image taken through a microscope of some erytrocytes and shit. And she's clicking on those tiny fuckers to count them. There are like almost a hundred of those things in an image and she has a butload of those images.

I was like "what the fuck? Don't you have an app that counts the stuff for you or something?"

And there is none. Or at least i wasn't able to find one. That's bullshit. My inner programmer screams with hate for boring repetitive tasks.

So i guess i'm going to write a neural network to count similar stuff in an image.

Me: Can I have PhpStorm please.
Company: Is it free?
Me: No, but it's the best php IDE out there. It's a huge productivity boost and also helps avoiding bugs while refactoring.
Company: Nope. Use Zend Studio 9.
Me: Why?
Company: We paid money for it like two years ago.
Me: <contemplating life and my decision to ever work there>

To whomever it may concern: Zend Studio is the commercial brother of Eclipse PDT, which also is one of the most shittiest idea out there. Almost as bad as Netbeans for php.

You have all the problems you had with eclipse, and none of the features of phpstorm. Zend Studio does not help you to get work done. It is a constant hindrance, everything you achieve you achieve despite its usage.

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

!dev

After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:

They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.

• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.

(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)

It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.

It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.

It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Best part of working from home? Oh boy, here I go

1. NO COMMUTE !! Fuck public transport. I can just grab my laptop straight to my bed, get comfortable and work in whatever posture I wish to.

2. Relaxation and peace of mind. The local park, library, football ground. I can go anywhere to get work done. All I need is my phone and laptop.

3. Better food - I can cook my own food. Dieting actually works by eating home-made food and not the fried bullshit we eat outside.

4. No office politics - Remote working means you don't have to think about being a circle and getting liked or not. Get your work done and that's it.

5. No "Extra" Activities - We all know HRs are just bored af people making employees have "fun" activities just to push a "culture" agenda on LinkedIn. Umm no thanks.

6. No toxicity - Well, this one is a doozie, you don't get workplace toxicity but you do get home toxicity. People assuming that you stay in ur room all day and do nothing. I'd still take home toxicity though.

7. If there is no work, I don't have to pretend that I am working and hiding my screen from my boss. I can just play video games in that time.

8. Option to start a side-hustle. You have more chances to retain some energy after your shift to start investing/putting time into something that can make you extra cash.

9. Worldwide opportunities - Because of WFH, I work with clients from Netherlands, Estonia, London and Cayman Islands. It never would have happened if I was in an office job.

10. Only work, no extra bullshit - be it smoke breaks, casual tea, conferences, work summits etc. None of that and I don't want it.

11. Your errands get done - Need to go to the dentist at 10 am? You can do that. Need to pick up your kid at 3 pm? You can do that. You need 5 pm time dedicated to go the gym? You can do that.

In conclusion, I absolutely vouch for WFH and would never take WFO for as long as possible.

WFH FTW !!!

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/

Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..

I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o

I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o

Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o

C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..

I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..

C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..

Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O

I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!

I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!

I get dressed & go back to my desk..

C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!

I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:

C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..

M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa

Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

After two extensive talks with a potential employer (they lasted for hours), I decided to accept the offer, although the salary was ~25% lower than at my previous job. Everything else sounded fantastic and I needed that desperately since at the previous company everything was toxic for years.

These new guys wanted a senior php dev because they had none of them, except only wordpress and drupal people who were not skilled enough to take other types of projects (they called them "custom php"). I liked it and thought I'm gonna shine there and quickly earn a raise because the agency will start earning more by getting projects that they were unable to even bid for.

First day at work and I got assigned to a new Drupal project, although it was supposed to be a simple restful API for a simple iOS app. It could be done in a week or less, with no rushing at all. But it had to be Drupal. And I happened to be around to hear that there is a queue of Drupal projects waiting. After 2 days leaving the office late and having my brain melted by nonsense I was looking at, I quit the job.

No offense to Drupal people, I really do admire you, but I just could not stand it after 8 years "doing custom php". It felt too much like being downgraded. But more than that I was pissed off by the fact that I have been shamelessly lied to and tricked to accept something I clearly said that I dont want.

This happened a year ago. I now earn 2.5x more money than those guys offered and work in a very healthy environment. In the meantime, I heard that the other guys shut their company down.

Diversity Support Tickets EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE
Because if you happen to be born a woman or you like men (or women or both or none - its up to you) you'll get that €399 ticket for free. Seriously? From when white straight man can afford to pay for the conference but a different skin, gender or sexual orientation cannot?
No hate - you do you, but from my perspective as a woman, I feel this is kind of unfair to all my male fellas out there.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

That moment when you search for Microsoft documentation and realize there is none, so you go search for source code and realize there isn't any of that either. 😑

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

I don't have a ton of friends, but I do have a few. None of them can code (one has tried HTML/CSS and didn't get past the fundamentals). When I make something cool, and show it off to my friends they just don't understand the struggles and triumphs that were involved in that project. As a beginner/intermediate dev, feedback is huge and no one I know in person can give it to me. There are a couple people I chat with online that help me with my projects, but that's nothing like sitting down with someone and listening to their feedback, suggestions, ect.

Why do my friends have to be so non-techy?

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

Today I learned that there is a person who exists, called Logan Paul, who doesn't do anything, but is enormously famous, presumably, for being famous. None of the hundreds of people I follow on twitter follow him, which I find reassuring.

The company I interned at last summer decided to adopt a JS framework a little over a year ago. The managers went with the old Angular 1.x because they didn't want a JS build process. Each page has ~100 script tags on it, and these are manually included in various files (no automated way to include dependencies). None of the CSS/JS files are minified, either.

They really should have chose Angular 2+, or an entirely different framework (React, VueJS). They're also just now upgrading the codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 (5.6 support ended a long time ago, and security support ends this month).

I love the company itself but these practices are poor.

I may be working there full time eventually. I hope to eventually help with the inevitable transition to a newer framework once Angular 1.x is dead since I am an avid user of newer JS technologies. Any tips on convincing manager(s) towards newer technology? (Or at least convincing them to combine+minify these files in production to reduce # of requests and bandwidth.)

Also this company's product has millions of active users.

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

"Why not adding fancy buttons when you could fix serious issues" - Android devs everyday

Oh, yeah, and the battery issue without having the ability to change the behavior of app, background apps and whatnot. Cuz battery is the forbidden apple that Android loves to feed on so muchhhh

I cannot wait to leave my job. I love my bosses, but the customer service people are the fucking worst!

Since I'm the only developer day in and day out I hear the same problems of people forgetting how to do so something over and over and over. Then they yell at me because they say I don't train them enough.

I WASTE 8 HOURS A WEEK RETRAINING YOU SHIT HEADS BUT NONE OF YOU TAKE NOTES IN THE MEETINGS!!!! ITS NOT MY FAULT IF YOU THINK YOU PEA SIZED BRIAN WILL REMEMBER ANYTHING!

AND ITS NOT LIKE THE SYSTEM IS HARD! THERE ARE TOOLTIPS AND CUSTOM ERROR MESSAGES THAT YOU JUST CHOOSE NOT TO READ!

I am just so burned out of answer the same damn questions day in and day out

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Funniest meeting ever!

Some years ago, there was the regular department meeting where useless news from upper management were handed down. The team I was in was also there: team lead, co-worker and me. The team lead had a new girl and was daydreaming of their nights, my co-worker wasn't quite back from the football match on the weekend, and I was playing chess on my mobile.

Department lead was blah blah blah and when can we do this on your rig? We looked at each other and instantly realised that none had been paying attention.

My co-worker was the fastest to recover and straight-facedly turned to me: "Well Fast-Nop, that's your domain."

I picked the ball up before team lead could say something: "Sure, but schedule appointment is for our lead."

Our lead couldn't contradict us and then had to negotiate a schedule while trying to find out what it was about. *LOL*

For several years now, I have been writing programs for myself. I have been publishing the source code for them, but none of them ever got much traction. Then I wrote a program that existing users on social media could just interact with without installation (because even that is too much apparently).

When I wrote the programs for myself with others secondary, I had logic problems to solve and dealt with fucked up API's. Now I still have that problem, but I also have to deal with user retardation. They are not using the program in the way I wrote it to be used, at all. They are not passing arguments where there should be, they are running commands that are still under development and therefore (rightfully IMO) available to only me. I am the one being blamed, why doesn't this thing work?

I'd like to rephrase their question to me. Why are you user not using the goddamn program properly? Why should I need to make half the goddamn code account for users' sheer level of retardation?

Yes, users are retarded. And it's not a battle we can win. Earlier I heard this saying that "every time you make your tools more foolproof, the universe invents a better fool".

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

Testing hell.

I'm working on a ticket that touches a lot of areas of the codebase, and impacts everything that creates a ... really common kind of object.

This means changes throughout the codebase and lots of failing specs. Ofc sometimes the code needs changing, and sometimes the specs do. it's tedious.

What makes this incredibly challenging is that different specs fail depend on how i run them. If I use Jenkins, i'm currently at 160 failing tests. If I run the same specs from the terminal, Iget 132. If I run them from RubyMine... well, I can't run them all at once because RubyMine sucks, but I'm guessing it's around 90 failures based on spot-checking some of the files.

But seriously, how can I determine what "fixed" even means if the issues arbitrarily pass or fail in different environments? I don't even know how cli and rubymine *can* differ, if I'm being honest.

I asked my boss about this and he said he's never seen the issue in the ten years he's worked there. so now i'm doubly confused.

Update: I used a copy of his db (the same one Jenkins is using), and now rspec reports 137 failures from the terminal, and a similar ~90 (again, a guess) from rubymine based on more spot-checking. I am so confused. The db dump has the same structure, and rspec clears the actual data between tests, so wtf is even going on? Maybe the encoding differs? but the failing specs are mostly testing logic?

none of this makes any sense.
i'm so confused.

It feels like i'm being asked to build a machine when the laws of physics change with locality. I can make it work here just fine, but it misbehaves a little at my neighbor's house, and outright explodes at the testing ground.

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I love to work in pubs/bars, this special kind of noisy environment works so well for me. I even go "into the zone".

Lets talk about this. Is anyone else the same? Just curious.

These are my 6 reasons:

0) Beer. 🍺
1) None of the activity in a bar actually interests to me, if you know what I mean. In my house, every single noise/movement will get my attention.
2) After some time all the noise blends into a kind of "homogeneous hearing blurb". Like a mantra. Maybe there are even white/pink/brown noise benefits (guess).
3) I go to places where I enjoy the music and atmosphere.
4) I like bars and pubs anyways. I feel good in these places.
5) Beer. 🍺

I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.

Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.

Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.

I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?

Any advice would be helpful.

Oh god, I'm rewriting an old Python script we use at work and I had a look at the original tests for inspiration... There are 600 lines of "passes", #TODOs, assertions that can never fail, and tests of imported packages. Basically none of it is testing the actual script 🙃

YouTube just deleted my favorites playlist for supposed hate speech. My playlist had like 4k vids in it (none of them uploaded by me) and most of them were just stupid music videos or whatever, nothing even comes to mind that would qualify as hate speech, so because of this alleged needle in a 4k video haystack my playlist got deleted, YouTube did not even show any evidence of the supposed hate speech content within, my appeal was denied instantly. This is why I hate big tech- it is tyrannical and bullshit. It serves as an extra government nanny rather than appealing to its user base. This is because once a social platform grows so large that it has the monopoly on users, it no longer has to appeal to its users, it can then just focus on politics or other agendas. They can do this with confidence that they will not lose their users because they know that the modern internet narcissist will flock to any app that gives them the biggest audience, and since they have the monopoly on users they can rest assured the common narcissist will flock to their app (no matter how shitty or tyrannical) because they’ll get the most exposure there. This is the pattern every big social media platform falls into. At one point YouTube was cool….

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

!Rant

Story, only read this if you feel like wasting your time

Ok so I live in a small village and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the next city by car. I can't drive yet because I am 15 and so I would need my parents to drive me there. There are also no buses anymore which drive to the city after 2pm.

Most of my friends live in that city, none of them code. We always meet on a discord server and then play games or do some other shit. Today I got online at around 3pm and when I joined the discord server they asked me if I wanted to go see the movie 'IT' with them tonight, I said yeah of course (I am a huge fan of horror movies), but only if my parents come home early enough to drive me there.
Time passed and then my last friend left the discord server because he had to walk to the cinema.
I was the last one still on the server and also the one with the farest way to the cinema. I already knew that my parents wouldn't come home in time anymore and so I decided to just start coding something. I usually code while listening to some music and so I switched over to spotify to choose a playlist. I just randomly clicked on the first playlist spotify recommended me and the song started playing: 'Sound of silence'.

Fuck you spotify algorithm.

I know that not being able to go to the cinema with your friends is a fucking stupid reason to be sad but I just feel very sad right now. Sitting alone in my dark room staring at my computer screen.

Sorry for wasting your time

Advice to new coders? I got multiple, unrelated to each other.

1. Start with the FUCKING BASICS !! Invest some time with fundamentals, don't just directly jump on frameworks like React or Angular.

2. You and everyone else are always going to blame your technical skills if you're unable to land a job. But you have to realize that is not always the case. Your attitude and energy towards the interviewer plays a vital role too.

3. You're gonna have to take a hit to your salary expectations starting out. It's just the way this industry works.

4. Think of yourselves as a freelancer working for companies. Those who call themselves Employees get stagnant and dependent on their company pretty fast.

5. Your objective is either to learn or earn. If there is both, amazing job. If there is either it's good enough. If there is none, time to jump ship !!

6. HR is there to protect the company from you not the other way around. Be better at spotting crocodile tears.

7. Try to find a WFH job over a WFO job. If you have an urgency, then either works but keep applying to WFH jobs. It's the best thing.

8. Focus on what you're building instead of what you're building it with. Devs have a tendency to fight over what tech stack they should use instead of focussing on the larger picture.

9. You're gonna get overwhelmed at some point when you're gonna get terms thrown at you like XML, JSON, API, Figma, Git, SOAP, REST. Don't worry though you'll get there.

10. You should know how to google your solutions, like really. This is like 60% of the job.

First year at university, prepared to set up multiple electronics.
rPi, arduino Ethernet shield, laptop, and desktop.
Brand new netgear switch to satisfy my internet surfing needs....

After setting up my devices, I realized none of them have internet. Hm. The feed port on my switch wasn't blinking either. So I tell the front desk, and a short 7 days later the port is back on. Yay, problem solved.

One morning I arise to see the port dark and inactive. Furious I use my laptop to share an internet connection while my actual port is "broken".

Support ticket is reopened and this time I get an email saying the port was disabled due to a security issue.

Me: what's the issue?
IT: there was more than two devices connected to the port

(OnLy TwO dEvIcEs PeR port???)

Me: oh okay I will only connect two.

The next day the port is disabled, again.

Me: can you tell me why it was disabled?
IT: a switch was detected being used, security error.
Me: how do I connect more than one device to the port without a switch???
IT: ...
IT: Please only connect one device.

🤔

So apparently there was a prod issue all day today because some server app couldn't start up.

The error was caused by missing Params...

And seems everyone that got asked to look at it are pretty clueless.

I looked at the text msgs now cuz my phone wouldn't stop vibrating from notifs (yes it got that bad) and I'm thinking, of all the ppl you guys could've asked, no one reached out to me... Who well knows exactly it works, and how to fix it.

But the issue with the team is everyone works on everything but most people have no idea how the apps actually work...

Jack of all trades, master of none...

Anyways, sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos ain't too bad either....

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

Serveral users complain that the error messages our software produces are completely useless, so I get assigned to improve the error reporting.

Starting the task by checking what's there and how it works together.

Looking through the code I discover 4 completely different error reporting implementations, each having the same intent and promised functionality. All of them are used somewhere, sometimes next to each other. Needless to say: None of the implementations actually implements all it promises.

My favourite part is the setErrorMessage(string) method that is defined in one header and used in many places, which has the implementation

void setErrorMessage(string){}

Fuck my life.

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

TLDR: Find a website that requires a subscription but doesn't check their cookies' integrity, now I'm on a website for free.

>be me
>wonder if it's possible to intercept browser data
>download Wireshark
>download Fiddler
>find that none of these really fit me
>go to youtube, search how to intercept POST data
>find something called BurpSuite
>Totally what I was looking for
>start testing BurpSuite on devrant
>neat!
>I can see all the data that's being passed around
>wonder if I can use it on a website where my subscription recently ended.
>try changing my details without actually inputting anything into the website's form
>send the data to the server
>refresh the page
>it worked
>NEAT!
>Huh what's this?
>A uid
>must be a userID
>increment it by 1 and change some more details
>refresh the page
>...
>didn't work 😐
>Hmmm, let's try forwarding the data to the browser after incrementing the uid
>OH SHIT
>can see the details of a different user
>except I see his details are the details I had entered previously
>begin incrementing and decrementing the uid
>IFINITE POWER
>realize that the uid is hooked up to my browsers local cookie
>can see every user's details just by changing my cookie's uid
>Wonder if it's possible to make the uid persistent without having to enter it in every time
>look up cookie manipulator
>plug-in exists
>go back to website
>examine current uid
>it's my uid
>change it to a different number
>refresh the webpage
>IT FUCKING WORKED
>MFW I realize this website doesn't check for cookie integrity
>MFW I wonder if there are other websites that are this fucking lazy!!!
>MFW they won't fix it because it would require extra work.
>MFuckingFW they tell me not to do it again in the future
>realize that since they aren't going to fix it I'll just put myself on another person's subscription.

Feeling sick as fuck. Stayed home instead of going to work but I am already upstet about what is happening whilst I am not there.

The manager was gracious enough to task the other developers with creating the templates for one of our projects. I submitted a document before stating our design guidelines and how under no circumstances they should not use bootstrap for the design since none of them know how to manipulate the source code enough to deviate from the standard bootstrap design. The lead developer, even tho I love the dude, has an attitude against new tech. He is primarily and only a php developer still in love with just jquery and php with no real knowledge of proper design methods. He is the kind of dude that would tell you that pdo is a waste of time and that why should we create models and use oop to separate our code into manageable files.
Today I get "why should we not use bootstrap" and shit like that.

Sigh.....i really don't want to see the shitstorm waiting for me tomorrow.

Funny how our cms administrator is eager to learn the list of technologies i proposed. They both gor Programming Ruby, the pickaxe holy book of Ruby and the dude is already halfway through it while the other developer is still asking why should we even bother when we have php.

I get the idea of if it ain't broken don't fix it and being proficient with one stack and whatnot. But that idea of i dont want to learn something new is precisely what shuts down progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am really Fed up with it all

Fuck safari literally nothing does what it's supposed to do, I have a `document.getElementById('x').innerText = "hello there"` but it sets a totally different element to that text, this is apparently because of display: none although JS should NOT look at css wtf.

There's a whole bunch of these issues but I won't rant about them until I've solved them so I can fully explore the depth of stupidity in safari. If you work for apple and developed WebCore or WebKit, I'm sorry but I hate you and you would be better off shipping with lynx.

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

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

WHATEVER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UGH!

Might be more of a self-rant.. We’re developing an application with token-based authentication.
It’s a big an complex authentication model and flow, which we wrapped up a month ago. All of us very proud of it.

All of a sudden none of it worked.
We debugged for days, there were no errors or anything to trace what was happening.

Today we realized that we set the expiration of the token to 20 years.
Aaaand the expiration time is later on converted to epoch.

Guess what happens when you try to use a value > 2 147 483 647 in C#? Stuff blows up, cuz that’s the limit of an int32.

So yeah, feels good having prepared for the Y2K38 bug already, even though we’ll be replaced by AI writing better software than my dumb ass by then.

(To be fair, it was hidden in Microsoft Owin, which could use some error handling and/or proper messages..)

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

Pathetic third world country salaries. I made around 670$ this month with overtime which funny enough is about 2.6x the avg median salary in my country. We have low wages, europe's taxes (with none of the benefits) and a higher cost of living lmao. there was some weeks where I worked 50 to 60 hours, some people tell me I should be grateful but with night shifts and working 12 hours a day I feel like I should be making much more...

At my job there is little to none documentation of the software. Software is from 2000 and updated since...

Imagine the features no one knows about.

My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.

Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.

So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).

The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.

So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.

So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.

I am not on the list.

My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.

Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.

So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?

tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.

I'm so tired.
Got enough sleep but tired nevertheless every day.

Situation in the company isn't helping, would really like to get a review as I'm really close to a 'final' version for productive use, none given.
Didn't think far enough and didn't include various OO-things when starting to program this application, so I had to rewrite lots of it. It certainly got better by the time but as it's a grown structure I'd feel happier if someone other than me had seen and cursed the code.
Coworker that has most experience in C# only once implemented something with multiple threads, couldn't help me there.
Could not test the code yet because the hardware was inaccessible and is now potentially broken.
I really like working independently, nevertheless I feel a little bit lost at sea - I can deal with that, but it's exhausting.
Also, trying to get an answer from the colleague who should act as my supervisor whether or not I can work remotely during a CS related course in the semester break for > 2 weeks now. Course admission is the mid of January so I'd like to have an answer this year so I can repeat the basics I'll need if necessary.
Also, Midterm is coming.

It's a lot of little things piling up right now I wouldn't mind if there were only 1-2 of them.
I'm just so damn tired.
I'll go to sleep now.

(In happy news: my internet connection is working pretty decent now, technician that fucked it up apologized and said that he probably needs glasses, he misread the connection number. :D)

I’ve been at this job 4 months and I feel like I’ve been here long enough to make an accurate opinion of it. From day one I have not felt welcomed. There is no communication within the team.. none of my questions are ever answered.. and when I do ask questions I get snarky answers. I don’t expect my hand to be held, but as someone who is new, I’d like you to give me guidance. Especially since the code is mostly legacy and no one else on the team seems to know anything about anything.

Oh and there are not daily stand ups, project managers, or direction in the tickets themselves.

I guess I should have expected this on the first day when I asked for a SIP or documentation on how to get my environment setup I was practically laughed out of the office and then had the nerve to ask me why it took me the entire day to get 5 environments up and running.. not giving me the custom mappings or the global UDFs.

Today was my last straw.. when I asked a question in three different forms of communication on multiple different channels and was never given an answer.. and then was asked why I did something the way I did instead of doing it the way they wanted me to.

I think the saddest thing is that I felt tricked into this. I was told this position was going to be one way but ended up being something else. I was excited to share my knowledge and best practices to the team. Instead, I’m an outcast and get only be negativity and excuses when I politely bring up suggestions.

I no longer have the will to code here.

Some have good teachers and do some good work.

The main problem for me is their false promises. There is no scarcity of junior developers. None.

Anyone can be a programmer doesn't mean that everyone can be a good one.

The first 2-3 years will be very complicated.

Today we updated PHP on our server. From 7.0 to 7.2
Promptly the whole server went down and none of the pages on it worked anymore. I guess we sort of forgot that there are other pages on the serve than the one we were working on...
Now everything is operational again.

I got a dayjob in a company. I got an error. I cannot solve it and I am so desperate. So I go to stackoverflow, nobody answers. I post on git issue, but nobody solves the problem. So, I pay someone to solve it, like Hackhands.com to find a mentor. There is no mentor that can help. So I pay more, hired a peer, and finally a development team just to help me. They get paid only if they solved it.

But each of my folks repeat my same steps, asking on stackoverflows or github, and none of these help. So, they end up hiring their own friends and mentors. Their friends also end up paying (pay before problem solved) someone to help them.

their friends pay for friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends

And all of a sudden it becomes a giant MLM scheme.

And those people they paid for actually work for a company behind the scene which I am a founder of 😁

Multi billions startup idea, is it?

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

I have come across the most frustrating error i have ever dealt with.
Im trying to parse an XML doc and I keep getting UnauthorizedAccessException when trying to load the doc. I have full permissions to the directory and file, its not read only, i cant see anything immediately wrong as to why i wouldnt be able to access the file.
I searched around for hours yesterday trying a bunch of different solutions that helped other people, none of them working for me.
I post my issue on StackOverflow yesterday with some details, hoping for some help or a "youre an idiot, Its because of this" type of comment but NO.
No answers.
This is the first time Ive really needed help with something, and the first time i havent gotten any response to a post.
Do i keep trying to fix this before the deadline on Sunday? Do i say fuck it and rewrite the xml in C# to meet my needs? Is there another option that i dont even know about yet?
I need a dev duck of some sort :/

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Liferay. Fucking Liferay.
I'm mostly C#, Java Dev with only a year of experience and as Kruger-Dunning effect says, I thought I'm not that bad. At the beginning of my job I've got tasked with creating an portlet for Liferay CMS which is written in Java. Can't be that bad, right? WRONG.
Liferay is real shit. Not only there is little to none community life but also documentation and tutorials are outdated! Many methods are doing the same functionality but are in different packages. JSP make coding a big fucking mess if you won't make shit ton of classes to clean it up. Also it has this incredible ability to crash whole portlet after a small change in classes structure.
I have to mention that no one could help me because company that I'm working for is a rather small one and there's no other Java developer beside me. This also means that it's hard to really get gut when no one is oversying my progress.
Also I really dislike web development. And Liferay made it even worse. I hope it will burn in hell.

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

>Be client
>Have an issue with incredibly slow webpage load time
>Blame memcache issues

So... I look into the problem. Yes, the page either loads up fast, or times out. So, into the logs I go. Webserver is fine (except the timeout), PHP though... Error log is fine (just notices), but slow log shows the issue is the database (of course... its always the database... ugh)

So, checking the database, there is one ugly query that seems to be an issue. 5 joins and a huge where condition.

So I run EXPLAIN on the query and... Proceed to bang my head against the wall.

OF COURSE ITS SLOW YOU FU******, NONE OF YOUR TABLES HAVE ANY INDEXES.

What do they expect when the database has to always go down the whole table and do everything in memory, until it runs out and has to dump it all on disk and work with it there.

Ugh... Some clients...

So i am a diabetic and carry an insulin pump. Now being in India, the pump is not covered by insurance (for some god forsaken reason that I don’t know) and therefore is not a common sight here (contradictoraly India has a major diabetes problem). So I was at the metro station going through security check and the security personnel asks me what the pump was and asked me to show it to him. Now since insulin pumps are uncommon here I understood his concern and showed it to him. Now I like to carry the pump under my shirt with a clip pouch. So naturally I had to lift up my shirt to show it to him. But this isn’t the highlight of the story.
The guy behind me rised above and started peeking over my shoulder and constantly repeating like a 2 year old child what is this. And that too with my fucking abdomen exposed. I went into rage mode there and then like wtf dude, none of your business just step back a little.
Now my issue is that I do not understand that in their own curiosity, why do people forget to respect others privacy. And a very big problem with medical equipment manufacturing organisations (yeah you medtronic). Why are you only concerned with sales and why not awareness? I mean spreading awareness will only help your sales as more people will become aware about your product and it will be less awkward and concerning for people like me to wear your device out in the public

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

That moment when I have to give my method a name, so I wonder if it will return a boy or a girl, and I check every baby names book at the library.
But none of them suit my need, I don't see myself calling a Mathew or Charlotte in the future.
I feel the stress in my bones, beneath my skin. The method is almost complete. And then it comes, like a shooting star through my mind.
There it is.
I shall call my method:

What the fuck?
Are vegans that special to need a fucking own dating site??!
Are normal dating sites not good enough for them?

Funny part is that he says there have been some other vegan dating sites before. None of them did it. Of course his will! Because his sites will do ads. And ads means thousands of users!

I thought living alone without my family will help me to be more productive but no! When I got out of the office and start walking towards my home, I feel like there is no one waiting for me. What am I doing? When I reach, I feel empty, all alone, by myself. Maybe, it's time to marry someone, maybe a girlfriend? But I don't have any courage to start a conversation with a woman. I just expect someone will talk to me out of interest. But none! Is marrying someone the only solution? having a family is the ultimate peace? IDK

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

What's your worst experience with "not invented here syndrome"?

In the recent past I've been dealing with custom made JS datepickers, autocomplete boxes and various other widgets that were purpose made for some feature. Almost every single widget the app uses is built from scratch.

Now there are new features that need these widgets to behave differently, and needless to say, none were built with customisation or extendability in mind.

Hardly shocking, I know, but I'm the one that has to spend several hours to get these widgets to work for the new features instead of using some of the many open-source, tested, mature and customisable solutions that are out there.

!rant
Question for all the people who know bash around here. Is there a standard for bash scripting? Kinda how like PHP has the PSR standard. I've downloaded a couple of pdfs from various sites but none have been an actual standard.

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

Last night I had a very strange dream. I should point out in advance, all of this is fictional and none of it really happened.

I was looking at an answer I posted on Stack Exchange.. for the sake of argument, let's say it was Super User. I remember the question being about volume limiting, which is actually an issue I and many other iOS 14.2/14.3 users have been facing in the last few months. Apparently it has been partially addressed in 14.4.

In the real world I fixed the issue by jailbreaking the phone and unloading the healthd service, while in the dream that was the answer I had documented on Super User. In reality I have documented it in several other places, but not there.

Fast-forward a couple of days in the dream where the answer was posted, and I was now looking at a reply. I don't remember the exact details of it, but apparently in the answer I had posted something about my network.. a screenshot from the iPhone? And the comment on it basically said something along the lines of "your answer is shit, and you probably have a very basic internet connection with default settings". I was really upset by that, as my network is actually quite advanced (on account of being a sysadmin).

Then I woke up and realized that it was all just a dream...

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

With all M$ buying GitHub thing i really hope some good things will come out of it like:

- Better version control inside Visual Studio.
- Microsoft making its projects more open source, since it now has an official platform for itself.
- Faster and better service from GitHub since there is now a much bigger budget for servers and other things.

But there are some things that i think are worth thinking about:

- Will this be another one of Microsoft's paid services?
- Will there be "intergration" into the Office apps along Skype, Word and others?
- Will the privacy policy change?

Most likely, none of the bad things happen but me being paranoid as i am, I'd prepare. I always try to be optimistic and just ignore it for now until Microsoft start doing things.

My .pryrc and a Ruby script it loaded (in another directory) both disappeared seemingly without cause. I lost days of work including a bunch of debugging and performance utilities I wrote over the past year.

But I have no clue how this happened. Neither the .pryrc file nor the script’s folder are tracked by git, so it wouldn’t have been deleted, overwritten, stashed and dropped, etc. None of the other dot files are missing, and the folder is still present, albeit with one fewer files. I wouldn’t delete them, and commands that would delete them do not appear in my zsh history. So I’m at a loss. Figuratively and literally.

They’re just. Gone.

Is there any way to recover missing files on OSX?

I never thought I’d need a backup solution for local scripts.

Yes, I have to admit, sometimes Linux is a F*KING B*TCH.

I was supposed to fucking format a pc for a close friend of mine, cause he produces music and win 10 fucked his machine up with its broken updates.

Knowing the guy is a talent I promised that by 7PM the pc would be fixed.

Not really, I'm feeling the stupidest guy in this fucking earth, cause I've been here for 2 hours, fucking trying to extract an ISO image, and nothing on this fucking planet seems to work.

Tried the graphical archives, none open de ISO, tried 7z, it gives me an error, tried fuseiso, which is recommended in Arch Linux' documentations. Doesn't work. Tried mount - o my file.iso /mnt and it says /mnt isn't in the fstab file which makes me even angrier cause I always mount everything there without editing shit. So I installed 7-zip for windows in wine, it extracts until 90% and freezes. Now I'm trying hsuebrirbwkwpxjhw9shrbejejwke and my mouth is foaming and my ear is bleeding my brains out and I don't need you shit.

Fuck you, Fuck your goddamn ISO and Fuck this faggot ass spell checker, that changes Fuck to duck and assign to asset.

Fuck it, I ain't gonna format anyones pm anymore.

In 11th grade I had a shitty teacher who would make students go away from this one computer he always used in the computer lab. It was pretty annoying because he only ever used it to watch YouTube videos of fuckall Bollywood news and other garbage like it.
It was extremely annoying and inconvenient to everyone.
One day, I went to his PC, when he was not there, and reallocated the default way to open all .exe files to nothing, using the Windows Registry.
He came back and saw that none of his applications work and his PC is basically unusable now.
It was extremely funny for a few days to watch the IT guys try to fix but they weren't able to.
Now I don't know what they told the school but a month later they bought a completely new CPU and placed it instead of that one.
So fucking stupid.

Went through changing Apple ID email. I have 💻,📱and⌚️.

Felt like that horror movie moment when protagonist tries to be stealthy but makes a noise and a huge mob of zombies turn heads all at once. For what I love apple, the simplicity, in the email changing process there is none of that.

They forced me to enter my 60 arbitrary obscure characters password on Apple Watch screen.

On the other hand I felt nostalgic. When I was using Linux this all was my day to day experience no matter the distro, and I got a Linux Foundation certificate, I contributed to Elementary. Can’t imagine the experience of a user who just switched to Linux.

Windows? I don’t want to think about that, let alone talking. You only need to know that I successfully configured a SoE setup AND active directory in ad-hoc unstable network of literally rusty old computers. And I still switched to Linux back then.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

I love how CS universities teach stuff like every student there is going to create a programming language from scratch, but none of the real world stuff. Then people get surprised that bootcamp students get promotions twice as fast.

Browser rant:

I just want to get this off my chest, IE isn't a bad browser. It's highly outdated but it was good back when the alternatives weren't there. And today it's new "browser update" Edge isn't bad either. Edge really is a neat freaking piece of software. Microsoft tries their best to make a browser for their operating system (and a browser engine for their new app format!) that means it has couple of features the alternatives don't (or only with plugins) - oh and plugins, they're coming too. And still it's not slow either. From my own experience (I say this because every user says their browser is the fastest) it's way faster than Quantum. Yet Quantum is still a very good browser because it's faster than the old firefox, I guess it's open source(?) and still a privacy focused browser. Chrome (my personal favorite) on the other hand is really the fastest thing you can get - if you allow it to use all your ram - (if people like linuxxx say firefox is faster for them, I'll just smile) but for everyone worrying about ram usage and "spying", well - you know what I mean. And still I can understand people trying opera or FF/Chrome/Edge mods, I myself love "Monument". Just stop saying a browser is bad because it doesn't have what you like/does have what you don't like. The only bad browser is Midori, okay? 😘

Tl;dr
IE isn't bad but old. Edge isn't bad today. Every high end browser (edge, quantum, chrome) has their perks and none of them is "bad".

Q/A:
What's your favorite Browser? Comment below

Fuck this I need to ventilate.

Thinking about job change because maintaining and extending 3 years old codebase (flask project) is FUCKIN exhausting. It was badly written since start by someone who obviously didn't know much about python. (Going by commit history.)

Examples:
- if var != None / if var == None
- if var is not None / if var is None (well..)
- Returning self-parsed obscure JSONs from dict variable
- Serializing dictionaries into database by str() (both sqlalchemy and mysql support JSON format) - THEY ARE ALMOST UNUSABLE OTHER WAY AROUND (luckily, python can deal even with that)
- celery tasks, the way they are called they BLOCK the whole flask (not bad in itself, but if connection breaks there are no errors, nothing it just hangs)
- obscure generator/yielding that contains return of flask's response in itself
- creating fifteen thousands of variables one by one where they would look so nicely as dict keys, and hey they are then both MANUALLY SERIALIZED into returning dict by "%s" (string formatting) [okey, some of them are objecst like datetime but MATE WTF]
- many, many more, PEP lint shall not pass

I would rather deal with fresh startup owners wanting me to program unicorns in one week then trying to extend and manage zombie-like projects.

Nothing personal against the firm I actually like the place.

Alrighty, saturday morning rant time!

I just recieved a mail from one of my not-so-much-loved colleagues.

Now Background first: I work in IT-Support. We provide services for other companies. One of those services is monitoring servers and clients for various things. I recently took over the project (was assigned to do it) and restructured everything, wrote new scripts to test more stuff, successfully tested it internally and rolled it out over the last 2 weeks.

Now one of these scripts hooks into the Windows Update API and looks at the update history. It filters for known Windows Update Agent strings (UpdateOrchestrator, AutomaticUpdates and AutomaticUpdatesWuApp in case you also want to do something like this) and then looks for installation errors over the last 24 hours and wherever there have even been any successful updates over the last one and a half months.

Back to that mail.

My colleague sent me this lovely mail about a ticket i opened about his customers servers beeing all out-of-date on updates.

"This is all wrong, everything's fine. I disabled the checks."

...

It's on bitch.

So i logged on to my work PC via TeamViewer, opened my script, connected to the customer and was ready to debug the shit out of my script, knowing i probably won't even need to.

I looked at the update history via Windows Update itself and behold: 1st April. That's almost 50 days in the past.

So the script works, go figure.

Great, so search for new Updates then.
>None found.

Hm. What could it be? Did my super special colleague forget to care about his very special totally-needs-WSUS-customer WSUS again?

Yup.

Online-Search finds a ton of new Updates.

Screenshot, write pissed mail to colleague, re-enable checks, breakfast.

!dev

I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.

The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.

As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.

This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.

My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.

That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again.

-Applying for internship
-the "previous work/employee records" field is their
-can't leave it blank
-so did this "------" for its various fields of work position, start date of job, and date of job, salary, etc.
-warning says "can't leave that field empty"
HOW THE FUCK ONE APPLIES TO AN INTERNSHIP WITH WORK EXPERIENCE WHEN THERE IS NONE ?