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Search - "things need to change"
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I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.
The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.
We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.
Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.
Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.8 -
C: application not working
Me: k. What changed?
C: we didn't make changes
Me: k... *gets a tech team (W) on the phone*
W: Hey, what's broken?
Me: C's application. How do things look?
W: running healthy. I'll check logs.
Me: thanks. *gets tech team (S) on the line*
S: hey, everything clear on our end, will check logs.
Me: thanks *gets tech team (U)*
U: hey! They asked us to deploy their new version today during normal deployment time. Is it acting up?
Me: C, what did you change?
C: nothing major, just how we connect to W and S...
W&S: are you shitting me???
Me: U, will you please roll it back?
C: no! Must stay on this version, you need to fix your side!!
Me: nope. *calls U boss (UG)*
UG: U, you have my permission to roll back, they need to fix. C, if your boss doesn't like it, have them call me.
*rollback fixes problem*
IF I FUCKING ASK YOU WHAT THE FUCK YOU CHANGED, YOU BETTER TELL ME THE TRUTH, OR I WILL STRIP YOUR CODE OFF OUR FUCKING SYSTEMS AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. MY JOB IS TO HELP YOU AND YOU NEED TO BACK TO FUCK UP AND NOT GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOB OR YOU WON'T HAVE ONE ANYMORE.11 -
!rant
This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.
I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.
- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...
This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.19 -
"Aah, time to make a new Android app"
*starts Android Studio*
AS: "Yo yo yo, before you proceed, update all these 512 things in your SDK"
*creates a new Activity*
AS: "Nuh uh, this shit won't work without this, install it"
*runs app on emulator*
AS: "Hoooold your horses, you need to install this, and this, and update this and this.. oh and also that"
*emulator finally runs, app crashes*
AS: "Ohh, ha ha, oopsies, your Gradle config is also screwed up, change every dependency to the newest version and then update them all"
*config finally done, runs again*
AS: "Umm, I am too lazy to sync it myself, so you must press the nice big button on top to sync it"
"Fuck this"
*closes Android Studio*
AS: "WAAAIT WAIT, before you go, a new Android update just showed up, you must upd..."
*alt+f4*5 -
Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:
practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team
It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...
<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>
Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.
So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:
- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole
So lets look at some example of their work:
- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"
- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"
- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"
- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.
- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"
Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them
Thats all the time we have for today,
Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:
- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead
See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex14 -
Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!
Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday
Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.
Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things
Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!
Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through
Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!
Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.
Manager: !!
// *************
Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.20 -
Holy fucking shit.
Why do people always expect you to know absolutely everything the second they ask?!
PM: "Yes yes of course we can do that!!! We've done it a million times, we do it for breakfast HAHAHAHAHA"
ME: "Well not really, we've never implemented a solution like that one, its gonna take some time to figure it out"
PM: "HAAAAHAHAHA HE'S SOO FUNNYY LMAOFUDKSJ DONT WORRY WELL HAVE IT READY FOR TOMMORROW :P".
Holy fuuuck I understand you wanna make the sell but you need to give the costumer a realistic look at things, at least give a reasonable deadline for what he's asking! FFS ASK ME HOW COMPLICATED ARE THE THINGS HES ASKING FOR BEFORE TELLING HIM WHEN THEY'RE GONNA BE READY! MAKE A FUCKING ESTIMATE, WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE A TEAM!
Oh and this rant is gonna happen, dont care if I get fired.This needs to change.3 -
Client: Please fix the logo.
Me: Okay, what needs to be fixed exactly?
Client: Put this word next to that word(shows me an example).
Me: Okay, no problem.
*after 5 minutes*
Client: You did not do what I asked for. Please fix the logo. Make it look better. Make it bigger and more outstanding. Dont change my logo
Me: Okay, I will revert the changes.
*Reverts to the old logo, and only does that as I do not fucking know what to do with oudstanding for fucks sake*
Client: I will talk to your boss. No one cares. My web site is not even finished and no one cares.
*It is finished, now the client looks for small things to make a big issue of*
Me: Could you please tell me in detail, what do you need to be fixes?
Client: I want the wording better. Im going to talk to your boss...
well fuuuck fucking fuck Im pissing blood!!!!!!!!!8 -
I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.
Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.
I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.
They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.
I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.
I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.
I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.
At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.
One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.
I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.
I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.
TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.
Live long and prosper. Peace.16 -
Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?
Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!
Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?
GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!
I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.
it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google
THANK YOU FOR NOTHING
A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.
also, whats up with
AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);
ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????
WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?
Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!
Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!
Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!
THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!
thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.
If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!
fuckers.48 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"
This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.5 -
Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".
If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".
No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.
Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.
They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.
Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.
Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.
You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.31 -
Ok, so, to every pieces of shit out there that got a "revolutionary idea that will change the way we look at things" and who asks you to code it :
Fuck you, you sons of a cunt
No, i won't make your app on 3 different platforms for free, i'll make you pay for every platform you wanker, i'm a freelancer, i need money.
No, making database is not something that a little business cunt like you can handle, you don't even know what sql means
And fuck no, I won't make that shit in 2 weeks just because your peabrain thinks that it'll make mad dosh and that "It MusT bE eAsy to Do!!111", "a dating app but with a twist" won't work you gobeshit
If you want me to work on this shit, you give me money, specs and shit, you handle the rest, if it doesn't make money, it'll be your problem. I'm not your employee you wanker
Fuck y'all4 -
- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one
- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!
- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!
- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts
- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..
- netikras, please share your scripts with your team
- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script
- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!
- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered
A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.
When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.
It just makes me tick!
Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time7 -
I used to work in a role that was basically tech support for engineers. Folks would call, we'd look at their code and see where things were going wrong.
One customer calls in, they're having timing problems with a satellite control system.
I dig down through their code, and buried in one of the modules is a comment to the effect of:
"Once we upgrade to Windows 98, we'll need to change this call to the precision counter"
They never did.
This system was running XP.
Somehow, they'd avoided destroying satellites despite having the code run on Win98, and ME without fixing that call. It wasn't until they upgraded to a multi core system and XP that their gyros stopped responding correctly.
Holy shit.9 -
Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID
Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?
Designer: yes, use it in all other apps
Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?
Designer: nope no error
Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?
Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?
Designer: Yes, to test edge cases
Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that
Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode
Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings
*Deep breath*
Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time
Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this
Me: ... tough luck then, not happening
Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first11 -
I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.
So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.
It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.
Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).
Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!
The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.
Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.
So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.
There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D12 -
Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.
A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.
During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.
They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.
A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".
Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.
"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."
Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".
After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."
Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.
"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.
The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.
Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.
So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.9 -
Apparently, part of being a software engineer means knowing how to read minds and do other people's jobs.
While implementing a user story for marketing, we found some associated features that, according to the database, have not been used for years. We tell them this. We do the courtesy of asking, "Hey, is there anything on the site that is utilizing these features? We'd like to clean up the DB."
"We don't know."
Engineering suggests, "Ok, lets turn the feature off, then, and see if anyone complains. It's been years according to the DB."
Marketing gets angry and hostile and says, "That's not the way to do things!"
I don't vocalize, "Well, not knowing how to do your own damned job is not the way to do things."
-
Marketing asks us to integrate a third party feature to the site. We ask, "Ok, what page do you want it on, and what information do you want to collect, and what should it look like?"
"I don't know. You're engineering. You tell us."
We implement it as best we can.
Marketing says, "HEY! This isn't done right! It's missing this and this and this!"
"Did you ask us to implement that? According to the user story, it passes acceptance criteria."
Marketing says, "I thought you would just know that! I didn't know it was a separate thing. Just put it on all the pages, then. You guys really should know the site better."
Engineering gets angry and hostile
-
Marketing says, "We need this removed from the site."
Engineering replies, "We have a GUI for that. Just go to this URL and you can do it yourself."
Marketing replies, "Well, if that's a really complicated thing, can you just run a script against the DB?"
Engineering says, "If we've built a UI for you, we really shouldn't be executing SQL scripts directly against the DB."
Marketing gets angry and hostile.
-
Engineering tries asking nicely.
"Marketing, if you want us to add new stuff to the site, or change stuff, please tell us what it is and where it should go and what the customer experience should be like."
Marketing replies, "We don't know the site that well. We are leaning on you to tell us."
I do not vocalize, all while trying to keep my eyes from bulging out of my head, my face red with rage, "YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF SELLING SHIT ON A WEBSITE THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT. YOU ARE ASKING FOR CHANGES TO SOMETHING YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?"
Engineering is angry and hostile.3 -
Guy I work with: Hey can I borrow you for a minute
Me: sure. What do you need?
Him: so this is a project me an the other dev worked on
Me thinking: Well I know he did it all and sent you the project so don't tell me you worked on it
Him: so we use it to do this and this and send an email to this new account I made because (2 minute explanation)
Me thinking: I don't care. Just tell me what your issue is! I already know what it is and does from what you told me the last time when you showed me. Which took an hour of my time.
Him: so he sent me this code which is called <Descriptive name> and in the method we have variables call <descriptive name> and it returns a <variable name>
Me thinking: You mother fucker! I don't give a shit what your method is named, what it the variable names are, and you don't need to read through every line of code to me! Just from the descriptive name you just said I know what it does! What the fuck is your issue!?
Him: we also have these other methods. This one is called <Descriptive name> which does...
Me: are you fucking seriously going to read me your code line by line and tell me what you named your variables AGAIN!?
Him: and we named this one <descriptive name>
Me: you mother fucker...
Him: and it calls this stored procedure. (Literally opens the stored procedure and shows me) and it is called...which has parameters called... And it is a select query that inserts
45 minutes later after he finishes explaining all 3 pages of his code and his 5 stored procedures that the other dev wrote...
Him: So anyway, back to this method. I need to know where to put this method. The other dev said to put it in this file, but where do you think I should put it in here? Should I place it after this last one or before it?
Me thinking: You fucking wasted my fucking time just to ask where to place your mother fucking method that the other dev sent to you in a project with only 3 files, all less than 500 lines of code with comments and regions that actually tell you what you should put there and 5 small stored procedures that were not even relevant to your issue! Why the fuck did you need to treat me as a rubber ducky which would fly away if you did have one because you didn't have an issue, you just didn't know where to put your fucking code! FUCK YOUR METHOD!
Me: Where ever you want
Him: Well I think it won't work if I placed it before this method.
I walked away after that. What a waste of time and an insult to my skills and really unchallenging. He's been coding for years and still can't understand anything code related. I'm tired if helping him. Every time he needs something he always has to read through and explain his shit just to ask me things like this. One time he asked me what to name his variable and another his project. More recently he asked why he couldn't get his project he found online to work. The error clearly stated he needed to use c# 7. His initial solution was to change his sql connection string. 😑
He should just go back to setting up computers and fixing printers. At least then he would never be in the office to bug me or the other dev with things like this.7 -
I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:
Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"
Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".
*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.
Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.
Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".
Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"
*At this point he was really pissed
Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"
Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."
Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"
*Guy ironically laughs
When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.4 -
So I've had my "emergency meeting" with my manager about me leaving.
(Re https://devrant.com/rants/4896068 )
As some of you advised I prepared to try my best to stay exceptionally calm for this.
First my line manager just casually asked if I could stay. I politely explained "no. :)"
Then she said it's a catastrophe, they would be in a chaos, etc etc and then she personally assures I would have less bs meetings mid-sprints (one of the things I had requested a while back).
I responded that's kind but I also was far from what I should be earning.
Then she explained that suddenly now that I am leaving it would not be a problem to raise my salary as appropriate.
So I asked why could they not do this when I had brought this up a ton of times earlier and why I got peanuts as a raise in summer.
The response was that "they unfortunately could not get a higher budget authorised from higher up" and that " sadly that affected the whole team".
So I asked since when can they get this authorised and the response was "recently". Then she quickly switched back to the question whether I'd stay with higher salary and other earlier requests met.
I was pretty salty at this point so I just sarcastically said "unfortunately I've already signed".
She then switched back to "ok, ok, but we really need your help! you know it, the x project will be a nightmare to keep in one piece without me".
I literally just didn't respond so then she continued "ok so then can you then help us out for just a few hours a month for x/hour? please"
Now the thing is that this last offer actually would have been super compelling but given everything else I would not want to rejoin this environment. Thankfully I had to say anyways that my new contract doesn't allow that.
So then belive it or not, she asked me if I could ask my new employer to change the contract to permit me to still work a few hours a month for them.
What. the. fuck.
After this I was super done so just kept responsing a few words to everything and shortly after that we called the meeting. I feel dumb to have stayed here so long and am glad that my new contract doesn't allow working for others as maybe my stupid ass would have considered the offer on the spot.9 -
So I took on a fairly big project and poured my heart and soul into it, was the biggest thing I did yet. I kept on sending beta's to the customer after each change for review! Kept on insisting that they review it, the answer was always "this looks amazing keep doing what you're doing"! After I finished and pushed everything to production.
They didn't use it for nearly 6 months! And then out of the blue they call me saying that half of the app is wrong.. WTF? Where was this information during testing! I informed them that the changes would take some time since I need to do migrations and change the whole database schema.
In which they replied "but you already finished it once won't changing things make it easier? We shouldn't pay for your mistakes"
I don't know how I handled that but they should be thankful they were half way across the country 😠😠😠😠3 -
I just told my biggest client that they have to start changing things or they will need to find a different company to work with.
I'm hired to program what they want. They are suppossed to do all the concepting, functional designs, QA, testing.
So they tell me to program feature x, not realising that this interact with feature y. And then complain about the change in feature y. Make me do a lot of extra work and then complain that my estimates are way off.
So I told them they also need to hire my company for the software design and QA and prefferable testing because I'm done getting blamed.9 -
I'd like to tell a story about a friend I once knew. She was good at her job, but only her job. People loved her so much, but when the people got interested in things other than her job, they took her with them. She was forced to do things she couldn't do as well, and all because people couldn't change. She feels overused, overworked, and she still tries to keep her head up. People need to stop using her.
#KeepJavaScriptOnTheWeb5 -
31st December 2016, I had signed up for devRant.
It's my cake day today. Feels so good to be part of this community, have learned so much, made some of the greatest friends here.
2021 was a mind fuck. Taxing and draining. Very little growth and even less learnings.
I realised that I am in a toxic environment.
Lately, no philosophy, therapy, supplements, activity, work, etc. has been helping me to get back to my original self.
I used to spiral down with a lot of negative self talk and playing the victim card.
Just day before yesterday, I decided to listen to some affirmations on the Tube and that actually helped me bounce back.
I started socialising and stepping out to attend gigs and just be outdoors as much as I could.
My surroundings changed and so did my thought process.
Hence, I made a decision to continue affirmations and slowly change my surroundings, even if that demand domestic relocation.
Things are starting to look positive after a long, loooooong, time.
I also need more sun exposure for my vitamin D3 deficiency and steady dose of serotonin.
I feel lot clear in head and heart. My goals are clearer and I am ready to start working hard and be my original past self again.
I love you all and I really wish you all achive all your wishes and dreams, be happier and healthier in 2022 with ton of success and money.6 -
When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.
When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.
Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.
In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.19 -
Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.
*My morning so far, 2 hours in*
Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?
Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.
Remote dev: cool thanks.
Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.
Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.
==========
Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.
Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?
Remote dev: Correct!
*debugging for 5 mins*
Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.
Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.
Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.
Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.
Me: ... and BE team.
Remote dev: why?
Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.
Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.
==========
Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?
Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?
Product: correct.
Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X
Product: What do you mean the screen?
Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature
Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.
Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.
Product: No this is a must have.
Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.
Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.
==========
Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.
==========
... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
This is something that happened 2 years ago.
1st year at uni, comp sci.
Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server
I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)
Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.
We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.
No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.
2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes
we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.
1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree
we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"
Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.
Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.
The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.
Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.
And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.
Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:
1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed
2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.
3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.
4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.
Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.3 -
Dev: Can you please tell me why you changed this?
Me: Because we need to handle permissions in the app. The quickest way of doing it, according to the docs, is [insert change log here]
Dev: But we can just check for the user's token.
Me: That's not exactly a permission, because...
Dev: I was only showing the information related to the user according to their token.
Me: I understand. But that means you're filtering data, not authorising users to access it. If a user is logged in, but changes query parameters, they can still access data they shouldn't be able to.
Dev: Whatevs.
Le me then proceeds to try to push my changes (that took the whole day to implement), gets a "you need to pull first" message from git, doesn't understand why, logs onto GitHub and realises dev has implemented their "permissions".
I was the one responsible for making those changes. Le dev was meant to be doing other things.
How do I even begin to explain?7 -
So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.3 -
Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -
Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.
Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x
Manager - please join our meeting.
I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.
Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?
Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going
Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - ) New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.
Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.
We are all like yeah probably. 2hrs pass 3hrs pass Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.
Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back.7 -
Mid-Friday: Boss: Start programming this application.
Me: Cool, how will it be setup? what lang-
Boss: Everything's already setup, just start programming in PHP. Check in and make sure it's done by Wednesday morning before 9.
Mid-Tuesday:
Me: Cool, it's done. Had some trouble with connecting our database to the clients, some permissions were conflicting.
Boss: Now I need you to pull it, publish it to our other azure portal, change it to ASP.NET Core 2.1 MVC and install it to teams. Also change the database to MySQL.
Me: I thought everything was already setup.
Boss: things change.
Me: Cool.
*Pulls an all nighter*
Me: Something isn't right...
Wednesday
Me*hasn't slept yet*: It's done.
Boss: Why do you look so tired?
Me: I was working last night
Boss: Well you shouldn't do that.
Me: The deadline is today. only way it was going to get done before 9 was to do it last night.
Boss: Doesn't matter.
9am Meeting:
Boss: it was easy, no hassle, it's up and running.
Me: no hassle?7 -
My bosses...
Honestly, I give them shit over here for their errors, their actions and the fact that they don't know what's going on. But as they've been my first programming job, they've taught me a hell of a lot.
I started my internship about a year ago at my current job, and it would last for 4 months.
I was timid, did as I was told and didn't discuss orders.
Within a week, I started voicing my opinion whenever it was asked, and I was heard, and if it gave insight, the bosses would listen to me and we'd change the product.
After two weeks, one of the bosses wanted to show me a comparable website on my pc so I could get some idea of what the bosses meant when trying to explain their idea, and after five minutes of typing on the shitty keyboard I had (shittiest in the whole office), he asked me why I didn't complain earlier. Truth was, I was afraid, he was the boss and I was just merely an employee at his company. Who was I to criticize his office materials??
He told me to follow him, we got into his car and drove off to a shopping mall, went into the tech store and he literally told me to pick whatever keyboard suited me best.
A few weeks ago, we got active noise canceling headphones, these things cost a hell of a lot of money!
My senior and my bosses have taught me that I am still an individual, still a part of the team, of the company, and of the machine, if I can't do my work, the rest will suffer.
They taught me that I am valuable, that I am not just another employee and that I need to speak up for my needs, wants and opinions.
Don't forget how valuable you are guys and gals :)8 -
I just cant fucking believe this bullshit!
THE PRODUCT YOU'RE ASKING FOR NOW ITS NOT THE PRODUCT WE AGREED ON MAKING. ALL THE ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY AND CHANGES YOU WANT TAKE TIME!
I can't believe how rude can people be! We were supposed to stop working in this product MONTHS ago but you keep asking for changes, for additional things and then you yell at us just because we dont have it ready for yesterday?! You got some fucking balls man just fuck off. You have to understand the development process, every change you ask for can have consecuences that make us rewrite a bunch of code and we also need to test everything again and again to make sure it works! Gimme a break!4 -
What the F**K? Why Marketing department always think they know better than IT Department? They always tell us "What so difficult to do this thing? You guys must have templates and change a few things!"
Let me give you some insight here, that this guy is the guy who buy website templates from programmers, change things and upload the site to Bluehost or Wordpress, That's all he do.
Our Software Archictect, colleagues and I personally went from "What the f***?" to "Are you f**king Kidding Me? "
Sometimes I just want to tell him this "Hey you mother f**ker, based on your f**king statement , why would you need programmers then? You guys can just buy the templates and change things".....
F**k you Marketing Department!5 -
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....11 -
I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.
They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.
The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.
It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.
This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.
Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.
I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.
In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.
He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.
Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.
When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.
At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?
It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?
The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.
I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.9 -
dear api author at my company pt. 2:
If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.
And one of those arguments is an array.
THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.
REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.
I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.
I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.
Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.
Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.
He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.
PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.
If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?
Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.
You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?
And that's just style, conventions.
This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.
"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"
We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.
YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER
And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".
WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????
EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.
The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.
MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!
This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.10 -
I am a people people pleaser.
Especially when it comes to deadlines. I struggle heavily with them. For example:
My boss: 'Will the app be done by Friday?'
Me: 'well some features won't be ready but overall yes.'
The truth: "No even if I work on it 24/7 there are just so many things in the background that are too technical to explain to my boss that it will be impossible for me to hit that deadline. It will most likely take over a month to be ready for beta testing...."
I just don't know how to deal with those kinds of questions. I don't want to say 'most likely over a month' because it makes me look like a bad dev but at the same time I know that that is way more realistic than 'it will be done by Friday'
The truth is: even if it just looks like 3 buttons to you, in reality I need to change thousands of lines of code to accomplish the expected goals...
P.S:
I wanted to write this rant for a long time. Now I am drunk. There will be a sober more ordered version of this rant.11 -
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();
Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).
Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.
Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.
So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.
Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.
I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!
Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.
Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();1 -
I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN
I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.
My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.
The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).
At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.
I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.
It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.12 -
Today was just marvelous. Locked up my car with keys inside and with engine on.
I was driving back home from work. I drove to a parking near home, which is really long, narrow and impossible to turn around. So I decided to get out of a car, for like, 30 secs and go check, if there were any unoccupied parking places. Parking brake; I stepped out of the car and closed the door. Click.
Brilliant.
I knew, that I needed to change contacts in the driver door, that sometimes were triggering central car lock, but I didn't expecting such outcome.
So, I am outside.
Engine is on.
Parking brake.
My backpack and phone were inside.
Luckily, one neighbor wanted to drive somewhere, so I explained, why he can't donit, why my car is here and asked to watch my car for 5 mins while I will run home.
So I ran home in home to find a second pair of keys.
After some time, LUCKILY, I found them, went back and unlocked my car...
Moral: don't delay things.. Small fixes to prolong life of some object will eventually fail in very, very uncomfortable manner.
I'm glad I found spare keys and there were no need to break my own car window... And I DO care about my car and do lot of things by myself.1 -
TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....
------------------------------------
Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"
Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:
If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!
JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.
More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.
If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.
Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:
Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".
The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.
New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.
Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.
We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...6 -
Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...
I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...
And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????
This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?
Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <36 -
Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.
So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.
So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.
First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.
Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).
This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.
So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).
And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).
They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.5 -
Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.
Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.
Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.
Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.
As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.
All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.23 -
I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.
Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.5 -
So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?
But I'll start at the beginning.
In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...
Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.
So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).
The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).
The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?
Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.
However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.
And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.
So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.
So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.
Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.
And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?4 -
Me and my manager throughout 2020
January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.
February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️
March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...
April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!
May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool
June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing
July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m
August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me
September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work
Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar
October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?4 -
tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault
—————
tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:
Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.
Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.
The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!
The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.
The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.
It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.
It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.
It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.
If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.
It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.
If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.
On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.
The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!
If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.
Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).
I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.
I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.
All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/
I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.
But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.
(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)15 -
I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.
As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.
We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]
2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]
3. He asks for a meeting
We accept the meeting, we go to their office.
When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".
So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.
FML I guess.
Sorry for the long post.7 -
Today after working 7 days on a project. My coworker comes up to me and says he pushed everything on the server and that he cleared git to make everything cleaner. When he did I that he forgot to change some vital things. Now we have a black website running and no backup code. I was so passed at him. Luckily a stressbal works really well. I threw it at is head and felt immediately better. Sad part need to do it all over again.3
-
Background: Since last 3-4 months, was working with a senior engineer remotely on a project.
Present: Currently, I am Out of Office and yesterday late night, I opened my official mail and after sometime I got an email with subject: GOODBYE!
It was from him. The same senior engineer with whom I was working. I thought it was a joke. But people don't joke when they send such emails to a huge group of people.
I never knew he was going to leave so soon. I wanted to learn so many things working with him. I used to ask him the silliest doubts ever.
I still wonder why he left the company. I have so many questions to ask him.
I am sad. I am feeling left alone.
It's awkward that today, this very moment, I can't ping him anymore forever.
It's obvious to be more professional and such things are normal.
But, I am fresher and my first project was with him. So, it's kind of tough for me too.
I know this will help me to grow up stronger and teach me that time isn't constant and we need to always be ready and use the right time preciously and deal with the "constant change".
And also, wherever he goes, my best wishes to him and I hope I will meet him some day. -
School gave me 3 DigitalOcean droplets to try out Kubernetes in the cloud, awesome!
Wrote an Ansible script to not only simply install docker and add users but also add kubernetes, nice!
Oh wait, error?! Well I should've known this wasn't going to be easy... ah well no problem. Let's see... Ansible is cryptic as always, it can't connect to the API server? Is it even running?
Let's ssh to the master, ah nothing is running, great. Let's try out kubeadm init and see what happens, oh gosh, my Docker version has not been validated! No problem, let's just downgrade!
How do I do that? Oh I know, change the version in the role! Wait that version doesn't exit? Let's travel to Docker's website and see what versions exist of docker-ce, oh I see, it needs a subversion, no problem.
Oh that errors too? Wait then what... Oh I need a ~ and a ubuntu and a 0 somewhere, my mistake!
Let's run it again! Fails!
Same ssh process, oh wait...
Oh god no...
Kubernetes requires 2 cores and these things only have 1...
Welp, time to ask the teachers to resize my droplet by a small amount tomorrow, hopefully I'll get a new error!
----------------------------------------------
My adventure so far with Kubernetes. I'm not installing it for any serious/prod reason, just for educational purposes. K8s seems like 'endgame' to me, like one of the 'big guys' that big enterprises use so I'm eager to throw stuff at a droplet and see what happens.
Going further down the rabbit hole tomorrow!
Wish me luck :3
(And yes, I could've figured this all out beforehand with documentation, but this is more fun in my opinion)8 -
Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.
The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.
The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.
Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.
In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.
After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).
I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?
In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.
Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).
But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!
Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.
He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".
To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....
Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).
01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.
When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.
No punt.
No finish.
Just the project file with a password still there today6 -
Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.
After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.
While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.
I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.
I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.
I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.
There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.3 -
So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.
I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.
For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.
However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!
Anyway, I am having fun.15 -
It's sometimes good I work remotely from the rest of my team.... So other can't see how pissed I'm while chatting with them...
Just did an afternoon basically hand holding someone... And well this is the 3rd day... And the original instructions I gave them was: here's the problem, here the code fix, now you need to change it for the other 10 APIs it affects (OS migration).
I have another problem I need to figure out....
Yes I could do it all myself and it would be faster but I don't want to be the only person who can do this stuff either...
But can you just try to use your brain and figure things out before asking how to ....
I don't know am I that much more experienced than everyone else so I just know how to figure things out quickly, know to the learn efficiently? Ask the right questions to Google?
How hard is it to just learn to Google your problems... 80% of the questions u ask me I either tell you to Google it or actually end up googling the answer myself...2 -
Will try to keep that one short.
So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.
Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.
I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...
Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like
30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC
And just casually missclicked...
And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.
No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work. -
Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.
Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.
Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.
Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.
I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.
Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.
Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.
Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.
All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.
So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.
In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.
These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.
The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.
This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.
I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.
I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.
Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.10 -
NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES: NO.
I clicked on this out of genuine curiosity to see if someone was finally trying to discourage people from annoying the shit out of website visitors. A summary of the suggestions in their article as to what to use popups for:
1. Announce new products/services, features, policy updates, new blog posts
2. Promote your sales or coupons (including countdowns)
3. Encourage people to input their e-mail address / subscribe, perhaps also offering some vague thing they will get as a reward for doing so
4. Contact forms (e.g. support etc.)
5. Prompt visitors to confirm their age before showing content
6. Login/register forms
7. Display social media "share" buttons when a visitor has scrolled a certain way through the page content.
8. Display cookie consent prompt.
9. Help guide visitors to the part of the website they want to go to.
Of these: 1, 2, 3, and 7 need to die for sure. If a website does any of these things I'm inclined to immediately leave and never return. 8 is a little annoying but seems a necessity.
Someone even replied to the Tweet saying that popups are annoying, the company responded with "let's change that!"
Blank portions of the screenshot are to avoid promoting the company unintentionally as a result of the rant ;)3 -
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!6 -
I've kinda ghosted DevRant so here's an update:
VueJS is pretty good and I'm happy using it, but it seems I need to start with React soon to gain more business partnerships :( I'm down to learn React, but I'd rather jump into Typescript or stick with Vue.
Webpack is cool and I like it more than my previous Gulp implementation.
Docker has become much more usable in the last 2 years, but it's still garbage on Windows/Mac when running an application that runs on Symfony...without docker-sync. File interactions are just too slow for some of my enterprise apps. docker-sync was a life-saver.
I wish I had swapped ALL links to XHR requests long ago. This pseudo-SPA architecture that I've got now (still server-side rendered) is pretty good. It allows my server to do what servers do best, while eliminating the overhead of reloading CSS/JS on every request. I wrote an ES6 component for this: https://github.com/HTMLGuyLLC/... - Frankly, I could give a shit if you think it's dumb or hate it or think I'm dumb, but I'd love to hear any ideas for improving it (it's open source for a reason). I've been told my script is super helpful for people who have Shopify sites and can't change the backend. I use it to modernize older apps.
ContentBuilder.js has improved a ton in the last year and they're having a sale that ends today if you have a need for something like that, take a look: https://innovastudio.com/content-bu...
I bought and returned a 2019 Macbook pro with i9. I'll stick with my 2015 until we see what's in store for 2020. Apple has really stopped making great products ever since Jobs died, and I can't imagine that he was THAT important to the company. Any idiot on the street can you tell you several ways they could improve the latest models...for instance, how about feedback when you click buttons in the touchbar? How about a skinnier trackpad so your wrists aren't constantly on it? How about always-available audio and brightness buttons? How about better ports...How about a bezel-less screen? How about better arrow keys so you can easily click the up arrow without hitting shift all the time? How about a keyboard that doesn't suck? I did love touch ID though, and the laptop was much lighter.
The Logitech MX Master 3 mouse was just released. I love my 2s, so I just ordered it. We'll see how it is!
PHPStorm still hasn't fixed a couple things that are bothering me with the terminal: can't reorder tabs with drag and drop, tabs are saved but don't reconnect to the server so the title is wrong if you reopen a project and forget that the terminal tabs are from your last session and no longer connected. I've accidentally tried to run scripts locally that were meant for the server more than once...
I just found out this exists: https://caniuse.email/
I'm going to be looking into Kubernetes soon. I keep seeing the name (docker for mac, digitalocean) so I'm curious.
AWS S3 Glacier is still a bitch to work with in 2019...wtf? Having to setup a Python script with a bunch of dependencies in order to remove all items in a vault before you can delete it is dumb. It's like they said "how can we make it difficult for people to remove shit so we can keep charging them forever?". I finally removed almost 2TB of data, but my computer had to run that script for a day....so dumb...6 -
There was an issue whilst you were away, we had to make a small css change.. We pushed it into master but it said something about the branch being behind the tip by 50 commits or something. It's okay, we forced it up though and force pushed it to production as well but the site went down.. In the end we had to ftp it up manually but the customer is saying things that were there before now aren't there any more?
I thought you put this "release process" in so things like this wouldn't happen! I think we need to review it as it clearly isn't working.4 -
Why I sometimes hate linux:
Found old computer with freya os.. I usually work on Windows, so I thought lets try to work on linux for a change..
First things first: sudo apt-get update / upgrade and while it is doing all the updates lets get something to drink..
Came back, logged inn and mouse is gone.. after some googling and searching on my mobile i found out that alt+ctrl+f1 and then alt+ctrl+f7 fixes problem..
Mouse now is back but upgrade failed half way though because no network.. wifi stopped working.. something wrong with drivers.. so to continue upgrade of OS i need a cable now.. (restart didn't work)
Two hours later I managed to update everything, wifi drivers are working and I managed to post this.. But it's too late to do anything, so I will probably put this away again for couple months and will go through same shit next time I open it.5 -
So, it's time to fucking rant!
Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.
A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.
He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.
In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.
So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.
- a week later
The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/
He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"
This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."
The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.
After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.
In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.
- 2 Weeks later
This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"
This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...
1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.
So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.
- 2 weeks later
Customer leaves. Good riddance.
- sometime later
I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.
It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.
To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS
I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.2 -
Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.
Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".
So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.
The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...
not right now.2 -
Has been a long time since I'm appreciating working with GRPC.
Amazingly fast and full-featured protocol! No complaints at all.
Although I felt something was missing...
Back in the days of HTTP, we were all given very simple tools for making requests to verify behaviours and data of any of our HTTP endpoints, tools like curl, postman, wget and so on...
This toolset gives us definitely a nice and quick way to explore our HTTP services, debug them when necessary and be efficient.
This is probably what I miss the most from HTTP.
When you want to debug a remote endpoint with GRPC, you need to actually write a client by hand (in any of the supported language) then run it.
There are alternatives in the open source world, but those wants you to either configure the server to support Reflection or add a proxy in front of your services to be able to query them in a simpler way.
This is not how things work in 2018 almost 2019.
We want simple, quick and efficient tools that make our life easier and having problems more under control.
I'm a developer my self and I feel this on my skin every day. I don't want to change my server or add an infrastructure component for the simple reason of being able to query it in a simpler way!
However, This exact problem has been solved many times from HTTP or other protocols, so we should do something about our beloved GRPC.
Fine! I've told to my self. Let's fix this.
A few weeks later...
I'm glad to announce the first Release of BloomRPC - The first GRPC Client GUI that is nice and simple,
It allows to query and explore your GRPC services with just a couple of clicks without any additional modification to what you have running right now! Just install the client and start making requests.
It has been built with the Electron technology so its a desktop app and it supports the 3 major platforms, Mac, Linux, Windows.
Check out the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc
This is the first step towards the goal of having a simple and efficient way of querying GRPC services!
Keep in mind that It is in its first release, so improvements will follow along with future releases.
Your feedback and contributions are very welcome.
If you have the same frustration with GRPC I hope BloomRPC will make you a bit happier!3 -
Dont become a dev if you:
- Cant sit in the office for 8-10 hours a day
- Dont know how to google information/ errors, instead you interrupt your teammates with stupid questions every 5 minutes
- Are a perfectionist and don't like constant change.
- Are neurotic and give up easily. If you get triggered about broken or messy things to the point where it ruins your day to you and everyone else around you. You need to separate your work from your life.
- Don't have good communication skills. Worst I saw was a guy who speaks with a stutter(nobody understands him) and also writes very poorly (nobody understands his emails). Also he gets very angry when you ask additional questions to clarify what he said. How can you work with someone like that?
- Are very sensitive to critique. I prefer someone telling me that my code is shit and telling me why, instead of feeding me delusions and false validation.
- Dont know how to balance working in team and working solo. Nobody likes lone wolfs who are arrogant and not in sync with the team. But also nobody likes to drag teammates who cant think for themselves and even after years of spent in the field are required constant spoonfeeding because they are unable to google and teach themselves with trial and error.14 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.
(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)
I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.
Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.
Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.
Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).
All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.
Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.
Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?
Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)
What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.
And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.
Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.
Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.
Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).
It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.
What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.
Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.rant fuck you shitty reviewer micromanagement by micrococks wk279 living nightmare fml glassdoor reviews don't lie9 -
Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.
Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.
Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.9 -
Sorry, long since my last post...
I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.
For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.
A bit of Context
November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.
Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.
December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).
Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.
Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."
January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.
Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.
February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).
Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"
Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.
High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.
March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".
End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.10 -
I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.4 -
Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...
Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.
Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.
Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.
Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.
"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.
"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.
As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.
In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.
After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...
---------
It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.
My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:
"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.
I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...
Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.
The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.
Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.
Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.
---------
Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.
Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.
That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.
My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.
I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.
Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.2 -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
Professors today in colleges don't know...
.
1. the proper denominations of outputs of basic shell commands like "ls -l", "cat", "cal" (pronounces linux as laynux)
.
2. how memory management works
.
3. how process scheduling actually takes place and not in the outdated bookish way.
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4. how to compile a package from scratch and including digital signatures
.
5. cannot read a man page properly, yet come to take OS labs.
.
6. how to mount a different hardware
.
7. how to check kernel build rules, forget about compiling a custom kernel.
.
.
.
n. ....
Yet we are expecting the engineers who are churned out of colleges to be NEXT GEN ?!
It is not entirely because of syllabus, its also because of professors who had not updated their knowledge since they got a job. Therefore they cannot impart proper basics on students.
If you want things to change, train students directly in the industry with versions of these professors UPDATED.6 -
Bluntly telling management that they're wrong, full of shit, and need to quit doing stupid things instead of just smiling and nodding and taking the paycheck. SPOILER ALERT: After 20 years in industry, they're NEVER going to change. They're just going to keep doing stupid shit. The best you can do is smile and politely point out that it's a problem. Then, look out for your own concerns and make sure you don't have to suffer with their bullshit decision as best as you can.
-
finally got TI to cough up their SDK and I noticed there's no compiler or linker or anything. Turns out I need to use TASM.
...TASM is for MS-DOS or compatible. I'm on Linux.
Well, it went poorly, as usual, specifically like this:
- tried to automate building with DOSBox config and Python script: output binary always corrupted. Manually repeated, TASM mangles output on DOSBox every time. No PCem or 86box, and i'm on a Ryzen, so no KVM DOS. Out of luck there.
- TASM Linux build or wrapper? No build, but there is a wrapper! ...wait, it needs... 4 things written by random people to be made from source. I mean, that's not actually that bad... oh, after setting all of them up (and struggling through some autoconf/automake bullshit, one of the programs only had source for a 2.x kernel and autoconf/automake were not happy about it) it fails because one project's been worked on a lot more and dropped support for working with the other 3... goddammit.
- Community SDK? Several options for this... but all of them need .NET 2 to run on Win9x, don't work in Wine, or require... hey look, TASM! GODDAMMIT!
- DOS on a real machine? It's a massive bitch to shuttle files to and from a real DOS machine quickly and I can't take 30 minutes between builds that take me 4 minutes to change enough to need tested again.
why must i suffer like this22 -
So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.
Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).
Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did2 -
It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.
I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!
We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.
His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.
„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“
When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!
But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.
„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?
That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.
For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left
His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.
Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!
It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.
He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.
Yeah his style
if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}
And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.
And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”
I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings5 -
Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.
For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.
I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.
I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.
Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.
When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.
Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world14 -
Undoubtedly the most common mistake that devs do : Ignoring your personal health, be it mental or physical.
I almost went through a burnout before realising things need to change.
Changed my lifestyle upside down after that
- Switched from wfh to an office job
- I cycle 12kms a day now
- Got a standing desk for myself to be more active
- and have a journal where i literally dump everything off my brain2 -
When my mom died in 2014, I was shocked to find that her profile on Facebook was suddenly changed to “memorial” mode and therefore I was no longer able to log into it. (If you’re tempted to tell me I’m dumb for using it, I don’t disagree, but save it for another thread...she and I kept in touch over FB because it was easier for her to manage.)
I think it was triggered by their monitoring of things and seeing keywords like “funeral” and “passed away” associated with her account, then having a person on their end change its status. Or something like that.
What I hadn’t known about (or I would have used it) was the legacy contact setting where she could have set me as the contact so I’d have at least a little access and control. But because of their strict policies, I’m forever locked out.
I get why they need to do this (to avoid fraud and impersonations) but the fact that there are zero documents or proofs I, as the executor of her estate, can provide that Facebook will accept to make an exception seems unnecessarily severe.
Anyone else experience this? Known workarounds?9 -
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
Here’s book most of you have either read a newer edition or some variant based on this book, as computer science students you had to take an intro to logic course.. prior to digital logic.. or atleast that’s how it went for me and many others I know.
Which regardless how much the universities screwed up teaching comp sci and programming.. this is one aspect I think they nailed. Requiring philosophical logic course for comp sci.
Again this isn’t a digital logic book. It’s just philosophical logic. The first edition of this book came out in 1953... and I think they are edition 14 or 15... for a book to have this many editions and last this long thru time it’s a good book.
It’s a book that should be a must read for anyone venturing into AI and working on human machine thought processing.
It’s a great book to have around as reference, considering philosophical logic is not a walk in the park atleast not in the beginning because it requires you to change the way you view things.. more specifically it requires you to think objectively and make decisions objectively rather than subjective emotional reasoning.
Programmers need to think objectively with everything they do. The moment you begin thinking subjectively .. ie personal style, wishes and wants, or personal reasons and put that into code for a code base with a team u just put the team at risk.
Does this book teach objective thought? No... indirectly yes, because it teaches the objective rules of logic... you don’t get to have an emotional opinion on wether you agree or disagree or whatnot, logic is logic even philosophical. Many people failed the logic course I was in university.. infact the bell curve was c- / D ... many people had to take the course more than once.. they even had to change the way the grading was done.. just to get more people to pass...
But here’s the thing it’s not about it being taught wrong.. people just couldn’t adapt to thinking objectively, with rules as such in philosophical logic courses. Grant it the symbols takes time getting use to but it literally wasn’t the reason people failed.. it was their subjective opinions and thought process interfereing with the objectiveness of the course exams and homework.5 -
So, rant!
So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.
Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.
It's a big deal for the corporation.
And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...
Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.
To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...
Pointless.
It's pointless.
But I guess this is why you get payed.
Work.
Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.
I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.2 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
I'll tell you the only time... The only times I'll fuck up.
When something changes. That's it.
Nothing else causes me to fuck anything up.
My code gets more and more messy the more people go oh change that ,😐 can that be a capital .... Hold on that box should be smaller
😤😡 Messy = I fuck up.
Now that might well be something I need to work on !
But if you send me twenty emails all with minor things that take seconds to change 😡 I will care less about your project , that makes me lazy.
If you want your project to be perfect on launch .. one plan a couple round of amends maybe 3 and your golden
But I can not keep checking if your application is all good after these minor changes 😐 (these are not situation you can write tests for)
Yes it makes me an asshole I'm aware , but I've been awake 40 hours fixing these peoples work, and quite frankly I couldn't give a toss1 -
1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.
That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.
2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.
That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.
3. Trust nothing that you see.
Bugs are everywhere
4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.
When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.
Good luck -
So I met this person via a social platform.
They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.
Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.
I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.
I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.
Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.
The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.
I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.
And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.
Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.
Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.
At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.
So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.
I fuck them off.
And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.
And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.
Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.11 -
Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.
Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".
Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.
They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.
Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...
Now....
I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...
Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.
It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....
Never change a fucking running system....
Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 87 -
Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...
TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it
FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.4 -
Working on a team to take functionality from the latest version of an old executable and put it into a new web-based app.
Coworker: I can't get the results to match so I'll just change the options I'm using in the original program until they match.
Me: That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Same options on both source and new app, and you should get identical results. Otherwise, there is a defect.
I walk over to look at what CW set up.
M: "Why do you have this box ticked? That option doesn't even exist in the new version."
CW: I don't know. It was there?
M: (trying not to lose my cool, sets up options the way they are supposed to be) This is actually a pretty simple program. It just queries the DB, so we have to make sure the queries and results are the same.
CW: (runs it) Still doesn't match.
M: What version of the source app are you using? Make sure it's the latest.
CW: I can't tell. There is no help/about menu.
At this point, I kinda want to quit and live in a cave.
M: You don't need that. Check the executable in Windows Explorer.
CW: What do you mean?
At this point, I'm sure I look like Anger from Inside Out. I show them how to do it (right click file, properties, etc), wondering how they got this far in their career without knowing how to do the simplest things.
M: (surprised and irritated) This... isn't the current version. It's two versions old.
CW: Well, I couldn't get the newest version to return the results that matched the test cases, so I used the version that did...
M: You can't do th... Why wou... How is that acc... (turns around and walks out to tell the manager he hired a moron)2 -
I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.
Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".
Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.
One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)
Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:
1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady
2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)
3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with
4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)
5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:
These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.
Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.
I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.
And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad. -
rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.
Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:
It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;
Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;
I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;
He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;
I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.
He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.
EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.
IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.
The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.
I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.
Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!
If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)8 -
An intern made a very bad impression on the first day.
This was before I become a developer. I was working in commercial art sales. One day, I had an appointment to onboard two new interns together.
Intern 1 shows up and I ask her for her signed confidentiality agreement. The boss had sent it out a week before and told me the interns were bringing the signed paperwork on their first day. I see the surprised look on her face and she says she forgot. She’s lucky I had access to another copy. If I didn’t, things could have gotten pretty awkward if I had to contact my boss, who was out of office. If there’s no signed agreement, I can’t onboard her and I’d have to send her home. The appointment was made with intern 1’s availability in mind, so intern 1 could have spent her time coming to the office for nothing and being turned away because of a stupid mistake she made.
While we wait for intern 2 to arrive, I try to engage in small talk with intern 1. I try to get to know her a little better and I ask “are you still in college/university?” She word vomits that she thought she had graduated, but six months later she hadn’t received her diploma and she called the school and they told her her pre-college credits had not transferred, so she’s finishing those credits now.
Oh, intern, you should have just simplified all this to “I’m finishing up my degree” or “yes, I’m still in college.” This is TMI. You don’t want to give out information about yourself that could put you in a bad light. You need to know to be discreet about yourself. You’re 22 years old. It’s really bad judgement to say this to your supervisor (me) and we’ve only known each other for ten minutes. I’m not your friend, I’m your supervisor. Honestly, I thought the explanation didn’t make sense because she would have found out about the credits when she tried to transfer them and when she applied for graduation. I didn’t prod for more details.
I did have to tell my boss about intern 1 forgetting the paperwork. It’s not something the intern would be reprimanded for, but it is something that’s not a good sign. The paperwork had been sent by the boss a week prior. It’s troublesome that an intern would forget to complete an important task that was sent by the boss. This was never a problem with prior interns.
Boss did freak out because boss thought I onboarded intern 1 without intern agreeing to the confidentiality agreement. Boss hadn’t considered an intern would forget the paperwork and didn’t tell me what to do if this did happen. I reassured boss that I had printed a new copy and had intern 1 sign the agreement.
I didn’t say anything about the word vomit. The content was troubling, but I was concerned this would be gossip and I wasn’t out to sabotage the intern.
Forgetting the paperwork and the word vomit were signs the intern wasn’t reliable. Intern had trouble taking direction even when it was written down. She’d do stupid things like invite her boyfriend to the office for hours and let BF sit at the boss’s desk—boss caught her and boss’s office is visible from our public viewing floor, so visitor did see this too. I suspected she might have an diagnosed learning disability.
In the end, intern didn’t ask for a reference letter. Boss said that if intern asked for one in the future, the answer would be no.
Intern 1 is the reason why I don’t want to be in change of interns ever again even though I’m not in art sales anymore.16 -
I honestly don't understand people who genuinely believe formal schooling will cover all the basics they need to know to do a real-life job, and still get barely passing grades on all relevant subjects.
I genuinely don't understand people who copy GitHub projects to pass classes, and graduate from a university with goddamn StackOverflow instead of a brain.
Whom I understand even less are people who don't do anything major-related on their spare time.
I mean, change your fucking major, do what you actually like, do things that actually light your nuts with passion.
Please don't waste my time pretending you are in it not just because it's potentially well-paid and "cool".
Please don't waste my time being my coworker.
Yes, I'm looking at you, trendy wanker with a CS degree and no personal projects.
P.S. Junior here. Yes, I'm full of hatred for all the "real programmers" in the industry out there. I hoped for a better experience.
P.S.S. I mean absolutely no offense to people using either GitHub or StackOverflow outside of the aforementioned context.10 -
Soooooo, why is it that so often 'security' just means bloody mindedly getting in your way for no reason?
Coz I fail to see how whitelisting a subnet of private IPs that are already only accessible through company VPN presents any kind of security risk, especially since the blocking software is literally only on our company laptops and can be easily bypassed by being on the VPN on *any other device*. But nooooooo, we have to go to the this other company our umbrella company owns (who by the way are making every dev at our company redundant in six months) and beg them to change each individual IP address every time we create a service.
Really does feel like security often means either 'our parent company doesn't understand security so we just need to go through the motions and *look* like we are doing things properly' or 'we just want to get in your way enough that we win in the who gets made redundant fight because you can't actually get any work done and we can'.
Bonus points: on the website for the blocking software they use, it literally recommends using Internet Explorer for everything. I'm surprised they haven't tried to enforce that on us as well.1 -
doing things right seems to be a waste of time
especially considering how fast things change beneath you
for years I've said I should just stop overoptimizing but I've yet to fucking try it. I said this to myself 5 hours ago and what am I doing. I spent the last 5 hours trying to overoptimize for a theoretical scenario that I won't ever even be in, because I haven't even decided what I want to immediately do
how about immediately do something Jesus fuck
next Tuesday this system will have to be rewritten again anyway
how many fucking asset loading systems do I want under my belt
just load the fucking assets
maybe decide on which assets you'll be using first so then you don't overoptimize for "WELL MAYBE ILL LOAD THEM INDIVIDUALLY THEN PUT THEM IN A NICE IMAGE IN RAM FIRST BEFORE I SEND IT OFF TO THE GPU" omg just shut up. just because you can doesn't mean you should. doesn't help everyone using this thing keeps insisting you do it this way. but you don't fucking need to.
actually you know what, I blame them. they kept confusing me with yOu ShOulD do It ThiS WAY. next thing I know I'm walking through every possible conceivable way to do asset loading so I can decide how to load assets and then end up in architecturizing of the perfect system. I didn't want to be on this path. but they told me to be on this path. I blame them
take-away: if you can make it work at all, just use that unless it breaks something. fuck how or for "what" the dumb system is designed. people don't stick to their "designs" anyway -- it's idealism just like free stuff sounds great in theory, but in reality it just shits up everything because it's unrealistic3 -
I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.
There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).
Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.
So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.
The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...
... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.
I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.
In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.
I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.
Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.
I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.2 -
Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.
I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.
People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.2 -
There are few things that annoy me more than an app with unneeded transition animations between menus. An example of this would be the Xbox app on Android. Whenever you navigate to a new menu, it always has a stupid slow fade-in animation. Why do we need an animation every time we switch between menus?! It adds that much more time before we can actually use that section of the app, just because we need to wait for this stupid unneeded animation to run. It's like whoever wrote the app was browsing a generic animation library and discovered the fade-in animation, and thought to themselves "Woah this is so cool, it'll make the app go whooooooosh every time they change menus, they're gonna be so impressed!!"3
-
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.10 -
I love git stash.
It's helps a lot for doing refactors to me. I guess it's not the most complex workflow, but it wasn't obvious to me when I started with git. Let me explain.
Refactors. As you start writing the first lines of a refactor, you start to notice something: you're changing too many things, your next commit is going to be huge.
That tends to be the very nature of refactors, they usually affect different parts of code.
So, there you are, with a shitload changes, and you figure "hey, I have a better idea, let me first do a smaller cohesive commit (let's call it subcommit) that changes a smaller specific thing, and then I'll continue with the upper parts of the refactor".
Good idea, but you have a shitload of changes nearly touching every file in your working copy, what do you do with these changes? You git stash them.
Let's say you stash and try to do that smaller "subcommit". What sometimes happens to me at this point is that I notice that I could do an even smaller change inside this current "subcommit". So I do the same thing, I git stash and I work on that even smaller thing.
At some point I end up `git stash pop`ing up all these levels. And it it shows that git stash is powerful for this.
* You never lose a single bit of work you did.
* Every commit is clean.
* After every commit you can run tests (automated or manual) to see shit is still working.
* If you don't like some changes that you had git stashed, you can just erase them with git reset --hard.
* If a change overlaps between a stash you're applying and the last "subcommit", then
if they differ, git shows conflicts on the files,
if they are identical, nothing happens.
with this workflow things just flow and you don't need to wipe out all your changes when doing simpler things,
and you don't need to go around creating new branches with temp commits (which results in bloated temp commits and the work of switching branches).
After you finish the refactor, you can decide to squash things with git rebase.
(Note: I don't use git stash pop, because it annoys the fuck out of me when I pop and you I get conflicts, I rather apply and drop)4 -
Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.
I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.
I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {
Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,
Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)
Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)
Etc.
}
So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:
Web design for non-web:
Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...
Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!
I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.
I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts
Lol, “just a quick rant”1 -
-4 Domain Administrators in my organization-
Me, a Doman Administrator: "Boy, I sure hope the FDIC IT Audit goes well!"
Braindead FDIC Examiner: "So let me get this straight, you use your administrator account to do things on a day-to-day basis?"
Me: "Uhh, I'm an admin so yeah, my account has admin privileges."
Examiner: *gives disapproving glare* "And your personal account has administrative rights?"
Me: "...I'm an admin... So I thought that'd be fairly obvious."
Examiner: "I'm sorry, but that is unacceptable. How can we tell which admin made what change when?"
Me: *dumbfounded* "...I'm sorry, what?"
Examiner: "You're going to need separate accounts, 1 normal user account and 1 admin account per domain admin."
Me: "You do realize that everything I do while I'm working requires elevation of SOME kind, don't you?"
Examiner: "I'm sorry, but you need to make this change. Thank you."
Me: *stares at the short pile of braindead shit as he walks away*8 -
There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.
Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.
If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.
Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.
Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.
Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)
Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.
But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.
But you can have json columns in postgres too!
Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.11 -
TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.
Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.
Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.
Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.
Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.
Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.
Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.
Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!
Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.3 -
So I have a job at a client to fix their system because the last systemadmin fucked everything up. One of the things I need to do is let the boss work from home.
No problem. I set up a vpn connection to work and everything just works. Except that the home network had the same dhcp range so that had to change.
I login on the router and literally everything is fucking locked. I call them and they send me a new router same fucking problem. So we bought an asus router so I finally can fix it.
QUESS WHAT THE FUCKING GARBAGE DOESNT EVEN HAVE BRIDGE MODE. FUCK KPN AND THEIR MODEMS.1 -
From our CTO:
"As cheesy as it may sound, if you want things to change, you need to be the change"
I was able to build a team based on that, now our team is looked at as the "cool team" in the company.1 -
I can't believe this shit happened in time for this week's rant!
Here it goes.
I have a table on AWS Athena which has partitions. Now, in the earlier versions of this project whenever I write something to a new partition a simple `MSCK` query worked (and keep in mind I am NOT deleting anything)!
Now, my so called Team Lead in the PR for the latest (major) release tells me to change it to an `ALTER TABLE`. I was like fine, but I did not add the s3 location to it, because it was NOT NEEDED. TL asks me to add location as well. I try to convince this person that it's not needed, but I lose. So there it is in production, all wrong.
Today I notice that the table is all fucked up. I bring this up in the stand up. The main boss asks me to look into it, which I do. Figure out what the issue is. This TL looks at it and says you need to change the location. I put my foot down.
"NO. What I need is to remove the bloody location. IT'S NOT NEEDED!"
TL's like, "Okay. Go ahead"
Two things:
1. It's your fault that there's this problem in production.
2. Why the fuck are you looking into this when I was clearly told to do so? It's not like you have nothing to do!1 -
I can officially tell, that XPS 15 series is the best series of laptops.
Mine does have quite a bit of stuck pixels, BUT
I can replace the ram
I can replace SSD
I can change the battery and its size, if I choose a smaller one I can add another 2.5" drive
I can replace the screen
I can replace power button
I can replace a mobo
I can replace the keyboard
I can replace the touchpad
I can use older or newer versions of these things since it will work for my laptop, it's just compatible
I can replace it by myself at home, no need for professional service to make it for me, it's super easy to repair laptop11 -
Listen dude I get it, you've been in more of a Systems Admin role for a long time, you haven't really worked on a devlike team.
I can be patient I can be understanding. But when you break the build you need to fix it.
Yes I know you didn't change any of the files that are now failing, but you the pipeline is no longer deploying and so we can't fix anything.
Okay dude we are being prevented from deploying because you broke the build, you need to fix it. It's stopping everyone else.
DUDE FIX THE FLIPPING BUILD EVERYONE IS WAITING FOR YOU TO FIX THAT!
Seriously I know we should be patient with people learning new things, but some days it is difficult.5 -
Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.
The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.
iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.
Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.
Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.
On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:
Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.
Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.
Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.
Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.
Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.
Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.
iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.
Even google apps working better on iOS.
The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:
I’m never ever coming back to android.12 -
Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.
I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.
WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.
I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.
Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.
I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,
Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.
I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.28 -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.7 -
I do not work developing, besides this is really a passion for me. Said that, today I was talking with my boss.
Boss: Your idea is great, I love this tool you made.
Me: Thank you, I just need to finish some details, this last dramatic change in our structure messed up with a lot of things.
Boss: Yes, I have some ideas to we code more.
Me: Great! I love development! We can do ...
Boss: No, we can use your time with other things as it is more expensive. I'm going to get a boy still in college to develop.3 -
Fucking Visual Studio is such a piece of shit. 2 years ago we created a solution for our 7 webclients with 30 projects (clients, common stuff, tests, ...).
Things were ok, we could change something, save the file and everything was built and we just had to reload the client. Only F12 between the projects does not work.
But now the studio doesnt get shit done. Opening the clients solution after a clean checkout takes 5 minutes, saving doesnt build anymore, building breaks the project because it cant find references, rebuilding works but takes 3 minutes. When you have a syntactic error in a file the fucking thing almost crashes and becomes unresponse for a few seconds. It randomly shows errors in some files that disappear once you rebuilt it, sometimes it builds but still shows an error in that file.
But at least we will soon rewrite the clients in angular5 and dont need this piece of crap software anymore for the front end.
If I only could get my team to use another technology for the server so that I dont have to see this big pile of shit anymore. Fuck Visual Studio.2 -
A day in the life of @C0D4
Yay it's Tuesday.....
So morning goes something like coffee, yea no coffee no @C0D4, get to the office, get busy with normal morning routine - run the almost automated scripts I have to run - delete the 100+ emails I don't actually need from last night, read the 2 I do care about - yea 2 freakin emails out of 117 🤦♂️
But what ever that's what outlook rules are for... except I actually have to glimpse over them all just in case something of mine broke.
Go get another coffee,
Start working through the days tickets - ok cool nothing major to worry about, let's get back to writing tests from yesterday.
Well fuck that was a bad decision, no matter what I do this little fucker won't pass, yet doing this process step by step, detail for detail, it works - no issues, but automate this fucker and it screams its head off.
So fine, I give up and go to lunch,
Come back... spend next 3 hours on this 1 problem... 1 FREAKING problem 🤦♂️🥴🤦♂️🥴🤦♂️
This thing has beaten me, and for no apparent reason - it just doesn't like running under a test scenario.
Would have given up hours ago, except its a vital piece of code I'm trying to cover 😑 of course it is.
Well somewhere in there I managed to do a deployment for another project and change a few things in there.
This week is starting to look like hell,
Yay hump day tomorrow!!!!!
That's something, the week is coming to an end.... right? Please.... right!!!5 -
Week 1 Day 1
It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.
So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.
I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.1 -
What i thought to be a cool company, turned out to be a shitshow.
Our "Team Lead" when assigning tasks keeps saying things like "it's only..." or "It's just..." or "You only need to change one line [there]..." And that's in regard to a terrible product with a pile of tech debt. So when you actually start to develop/fix things, you end up redoing third of the whole application.
How do you deal with this? How do you tell the "leader" that he should look into what we have in a code before making us all look bad for doing "just this one line change"?2 -
I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.
Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'? -
Amount of text you need to read to do something the framework way.
At the end it turns out you can’t do it cause nobody thought about it and it’s just another piece of crap for doing simple things. You start digging inside framework code and see that something is wrong. You see copyright Google and you wonder if they have phd for selling their ass on street. Why the fuck you override the validation flag to true every time ?
Then you start invoking couple of methods and one of them works and stops that madness but you don’t know why but you proceed further so you can glue shits together to stop the ship sinking.
At the end after you’ve tried all the “simple” examples that works cause they’re stupid and you need something special you start to think if this framework is so unique and special cause it covers 90% of things, left you with hands full of crap ?
At the end after wasting whole day to change the border color of the input using couple of separate controls the framework way and when you succeeded you ask yourself really ?
One fucking event emit and couple of listeners with style change ? Damn you frameworks with your bidirectional easy fast doing shit.
Another day in paradise.6 -
Pills. Failing that, everything everyone else has said... if you find yourself procrastinating too much, get medicated.
On top of that, routine, regiment and willpower.
I started learning Russian recently, trying for the second time. This time around, I found that the small positive reward gamification elements of Dualingo to be a great help (Streaks and daily bonus BS currency).
I've also found myself using Trello to list out things I need or want to do to stop from overwhelming myself. If I have a new task or thing I need to do whilst I'm already getting something else done, I note it down and then forget about it until it's time to find something new to get done.
If all else fails, then look at yourself. Take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror. I became good at this through necessity, after illness and injury I realised that there's no time for chronic procrastination. If your life expectancy halved what would you change and how quickly?
If you still can't fix it, I'm guessing it's not as big a problem as you think it is... enjoy yourself! -
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me3 -
Looking for ideas here...
OK, customer runs a manufacturing business. A local web developer solicits them, convinces them to let him move their website onto his system.
He then promptly disappears. No phone calls, no e-mail, no anything for 3 months by the time they called me looking to fix things.
Since we have no access to FTP or anything except the OpenCart admin, we agree to a basic rebuild of the website and a redeployment onto a SiteGround account that they control. Dev process goes smoothly, customer is happy.
Come time to launch and...naturally, the previous dev pointed the nameservers to his account, which will not allow the business to make changes because they aren't the account owner.
"We can work around this," I figure, since all we *really* need to do is change the A records, and we can leave the e-mail set up as it is (hopefully).
Well, that hopefully is kind of true—turns out instead of being set up in GoDaddy (where the domain is registered) it's set up in Gmail—and the customer doesn't know which account is the Google admin account associated with the domain. For all we know it could be the previous developer—again.
I've been able to dig up the A, MX, and TXT records, and I'm seeing references to dreamhost.com (where the nameservers are at) in the SPF data in the TXT records. Am I going to have to update these records, or will it be safe to just leave them as they are and simply update the A record as originally planned?6 -
It was simple Tuesday morning, got to work, turned on laptop. And hell began. First call, my co worker asked me to come. Got shouted, why I bought this peace of shit printer. Why it's printing slow. Asked to bring back old one because it's faster. But before I switched printers. I got strange and funny question, "why paper comes out hotter from this printer and not from older one ", I became speechless, and left her without answer. Ok I changed printer. Went to take tea break(hate coffee). Got asked by same women to bring original power cord that was with printer, because that one connected somehow slowed printing speed. The fuck? Too hot paper, now power cord? Why? How? That was stupidest things I ever heard.
P.S Slow printing problem was with her computer, bad drivers, something wrong with computer or OS. Anyway I need to change her computer pretty soon anyway.9 -
Not dev-related, but it's always the every day schedule optimisations that are satisfying. If I need to be in various places throughout the day, change different types of transportation, etc., I always think about the optimal route and time-planning such that I have the least overhead, visit the same place as few times as possible (usually my home, since I live far from most of my daily activities), take the shortest routes and be on time
The same applies to taking public transportation in my hometown. There is no clear schedule ("arrival can vary between 10-15min", no app available to tell you about it in real time), yet by living there for so long, I figured out when certain buses/trams leave based on the ones that are already passing me and the time of the day. This way, I know which buses/trams to take and change and get where I need to be, without even having an app or a clear schedule (of course, unexpected things like buses catching on fire can always happen) -
Ok, so: I have a macbook for work. And for the most part, I love it. Its a good looking device that has a fast cpu, enough ram to run stuff locally for testing, even multiple services / environments at the same time without getting overly sluggish.
And, the best thing: It isn't Windows. I have a good, working shell (zsh), so I can use all the command line tooling I could wish for, I have a somewhat working package manager and everything.
But there are just some little things I really can't wrap my head around. And since everything is so locked in by Apple, there are no sensible ways to fix those things without having a bunch of extra programs / services running all the time, introducing overhead, configuration for things I neither want nor need, and so on.
First of all, why the hell did you think the normal way of typing "@" on a german iso keyboard is the key combination for closing the currently focused application? I am a daily user of macos for over 2 years now, and I still keep quitting applications regularly, almost every day.
Or, scroll direction: I use a mouse (g pro wireless) and not just the touchpad, but when I am in a meeting or something (or when I take my macbook with me to configure a switch that isn't accessible over the network), I don't want to take the mouse with me, the touchpad is pretty good, it is big, precise and everything. But for some dumb reason, they decided to reverse the scroll direction for the mouse by default, so if you change that to use the mouse like a normal person, it also changes the scroll direction for the touchpad. And, the worst part is: there doesn't seem to be ANY easy way to separate those two settings, or to automatically set the scroll direction when a mouse is connected.
So every time I use my laptop somewhere else, wich also happens regularly, the scroll directions is wrong, which means I have to go into the settings, change it, then change it back when I am at my desk again.
It just doesn't make any sense, stop trying to "know what our customers want", and please, dear Mr. Tim Apple, give your customers the freedom to know for themselves what they want.
Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.8 -
TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...
Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.
For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.
Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.
I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.
And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...
Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.
I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.
I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.
The end.3 -
Are sql joins a bad practice? :o
I recently did some work on a page for a site ive never worked on cause my boss told me to. So they recently added product detail video urls to a table that has a relationship to the products table. The existing code was querying for the products on that said page and then during the loop that was outputting the products ,there was another query for getting the url for the current iteration/product. Told my coworker that this imo was pretty inefficient way to do it and switched it to a join and did 1 query then output that but his words were "The way it is now maybe ineffecient in your opinion but it works. Also combining inner joins with left or right is not a good practice. If the data is changed upstream the entire query would need to be redone to accommodate the change". Mind you that they query views a lot which are all made from queries that use joins and I'm also pretty sure these views were written by someone who used to be here because these guys are not good at sql or at least that's what there queries show. I'm at the point now where I'm realizing that my boss and this other guy don't give a fuck about efficiency or doing things the right way they just want it "to work". So this coworker changed my query back to the way it was because he said it broke the shopping cart even though that was already broken when I started... What is life? Maybe I'm the stupid one?7 -
fuuuuuuuuuuck. found this site with rant in the name so i decided to rant. fuck the system fuck politics fuck everything. IM A FUCKING 16 YO. I just want people to hear my voice and listen to me. i want to make a change but because im 16 everything i say is invalid. the school system sucks. i want to change that. oh wait first i have to change the people who manage that. well dang to do that i gotta change that part. before long its the entire fucking system. for fucks sake cant anyone do anything. i just want to be happy in this shitty world. maybe the world ending wouldnt be so bad. just fuck it all to hell. i mean jesus christ everything is screwy. we live in an outdated system in a modern world. when are things going to change to keep up with the times. we donbt need machines to work in factories like the school system makes. we dont need politicians who are so old they cant keep up with whats going on in the world. we need people that can keep up with current events and work to make a change so that the place can be better. just fuck it all. no one is willing to put in the work needed to get that. i say we should just destroy all humans and start anew.7
-
The hype of Artificial Intelligence and Neutral Net gets me sick by the day.
We all know that the potential power of AI’s give stock prices a bump and bolster investor confidence. But too many companies are reluctant to address its very real limits. It has evidently become a taboo to discuss AI’s shortcomings and the limitations of machine learning, neural nets, and deep learning. However, if we want to strategically deploy these technologies in enterprises, we really need to talk about its weaknesses.
AI lacks common sense. AI may be able to recognize that within a photo, there’s a man on a horse. But it probably won’t appreciate that the figures are actually a bronze sculpture of a man on a horse, not an actual man on an actual horse.
Let's consider the lesson offered by Margaret Mitchell, a research scientist at Google. Mitchell helps develop computers that can communicate about what they see and understand. As she feeds images and data to AIs, she asks them questions about what they “see.” In one case, Mitchell fed an AI lots of input about fun things and activities. When Mitchell showed the AI an image of a koala bear, it said, “Cute creature!” But when she showed the AI a picture of a house violently burning down, the AI exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”
The AI selected this response due to the orange and red colors it scanned in the photo; these fiery tones were frequently associated with positive responses in the AI’s input data set. It’s stories like these that demonstrate AI’s inevitable gaps, blind spots, and complete lack of common sense.
AI is data-hungry and brittle. Neural nets require far too much data to match human intellects. In most cases, they require thousands or millions of examples to learn from. Worse still, each time you need to recognize a new type of item, you have to start from scratch.
Algorithmic problem-solving is also severely hampered by the quality of data it’s fed. If an AI hasn’t been explicitly told how to answer a question, it can’t reason it out. It cannot respond to an unexpected change if it hasn’t been programmed to anticipate it.
Today’s business world is filled with disruptions and events—from physical to economic to political—and these disruptions require interpretation and flexibility. Algorithms alone cannot handle that.
"AI lacks intuition". Humans use intuition to navigate the physical world. When you pivot and swing to hit a tennis ball or step off a sidewalk to cross the street, you do so without a thought—things that would require a robot so much processing power that it’s almost inconceivable that we would engineer them.
Algorithms get trapped in local optima. When assigned a task, a computer program may find solutions that are close by in the search process—known as the local optimum—but fail to find the best of all possible solutions. Finding the best global solution would require understanding context and changing context, or thinking creatively about the problem and potential solutions. Humans can do that. They can connect seemingly disparate concepts and come up with out-of-the-box thinking that solves problems in novel ways. AI cannot.
"AI can’t explain itself". AI may come up with the right answers, but even researchers who train AI systems often do not understand how an algorithm reached a specific conclusion. This is very problematic when AI is used in the context of medical diagnoses, for example, or in any environment where decisions have non-trivial consequences. What the algorithm has “learned” remains a mystery to everyone. Even if the AI is right, people will not trust its analytical output.
Artificial Intelligence offers tremendous opportunities and capabilities but it can’t see the world as we humans do. All we need do is work on its weaknesses and have them sorted out rather than have it overly hyped with make-believes and ignore its limitations in plain sight.
Ref: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/...6 -
How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:
Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.
Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....
Drinking the first beer.
Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...
First beer poof.
Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...
Opening next beer...
Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...
Oh. Another half bottle gone...
Filling in the columns...
Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...
*burping*
*cracking finger joints*
Now let's get to the sad part...
Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...
Cost and description as columns.
Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.
Another beer...
Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.
Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...
SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.
Now we can add another sheet.
Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.
Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...
Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.
Why do I want to get even more drunk.
Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.
Let's add some colored highlighting ...
Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.
Too much red.
More beer.
Don't give a fuck.
Hm.
Time for some whiskey.
What else is there to do....
Oh yeah.
Diagrams.
The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.
Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*
Hm. More whiskey...
Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.
Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....
"Copy paste the last mail from last month"
Hm.
Ah.
*sipping whiskey*
Spell check extension - to the rescue.
Thesaurus *burps*.
Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.
Uh....
Trying to attach file...
*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*
Done.
Damn.
Need to press send button.
*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*
Done.
*Pressing computers power button*
Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.
*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*
Couch ... Where Couch...
After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.
(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey) -
Use Maven, they said... it's better, they said... you don't have to manage dependencies yourself, they said...
...only now I've spent three days in hell trying to figure out why Maven keeps insisting on sticking INCOMPATIBLE JARs in my WAR that causes a breakage when deployed. No matter what I do it still sticks stuff in the WAR that shouldn't be there!
Like, I'm not a lazy cunt, I can manage my own dependencies! I know what's supposed to be there, oh, and by the way, everything fucking works when I build with Ant instead and I'm in full control of what winds up in the WAR.
So, basically, instead of the "hassle" of having to download JARs myself, I've now got the hassle of dealing with Maven trying to be more clever than me.
I know which I'd rather have, especially right now. ARGH!
You know, any time someone says "this is an industry-standard and that's why you should use it" my first thought is "hmm, which of these buildings is tallest and will ensure a quick death when I inevitably jump off of it?" MOST ESPECIALLY when the company just decides X is what everyone is going to switch to, regardless of what they're using now and regardless of how many YEARS it's been that way and working perfectly. Nope, doesn't matter, just get onboard the freight train, and if your productivity takes a hit, if you start missing deadlines dealing with shit you didn't have to deal with when using the "worse" tools, well, I guess that doesn't fucking matter, does it?!
And that's not even talking about the fact that the Maven build takes almost four minutes, which is just about 4x as long as the Ant build it replaced, each and every fucking time I make a change.
Look, I'm sure there are solutions and I'm sure I'll find them next week because I always do... and I'm sure there's some tweaking we can do to improve the performance... and it's not like this is my first go-round with Maven, though it's probably the most complex project I've ever tried to do with it... by my fucking dear god this is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare of my choosing.
I'm disgusted, tired and defeated, three things I never get when it comes to technology. Congratulations Maven, you're on the verge of breaking someone who doesn't get broken. Another day like the last three and I'm not gonna need Stackoverflow, I'm gonna need a bus schedule so I can figure out exactly when to step off the fucking sidewalk!10 -
PM comes into my office: "Hey, if <client> asks about his edits, just tell him they're scheduled for this week."
me: "I thought they were scheduled for this week, I thought that you were currently in a meeting to get final specs so you could tell me what needed changed."
PM: "Yeah, he wants to take the plugin from 5 steps down to 3, we told him it wouldn't be a problem and we would have it done this week."
me: "Ok, there are limitations as far as what I can cut out of the process, his tag line when he started as a client was '5 easy steps' and I built something that did what he wanted in 5 steps. Changing things this late in the game is not simple, I'm talking a minimum 6 hours of work."
PM: "Well I tried to make sure that what he wanted was possible but I didn't have a developer in the meeting. It shouldn't change anything that much."
He ended up scheduling a meeting with me and the designer to go over the edits Thursday afternoon. So I will have the new specifications which I said would be a minimum 6 hours of work and I will be given ~10 hours in which to do it. I sure hope nothing unexpected pops up while I'm working on this.
I'm also the only developer this week (and technically speaking I'm junior) since our senior dev wrecked his car over the weekend and isn't planning on being in all week. I'm the only computer literate person in the office of 50 or so, which means that if there is any kind of tech issue I'm ripped away from my desk for 'emergency help'. I have two other sites to get ready for client approval meetings by Friday afternoon and if the clients approve I will be launching their sites that afternoon as well.
The sign on my door currently says "Error 500: unable to handle your request" I need something to throw at these people.4 -
I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.
But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.
Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.
I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).
Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.
And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.
Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.
There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.6 -
What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?
I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.
An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.
On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.
Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.1 -
Have you ever found a infinite task? Well, I did.
So, the software that I'm working now was under responsibility of another company for development and maintenance (I'll call them X) from 2014 to last month , and the company I work for was handling only with the business part. Now we took all the development for us as well.
This software has a lot of reports , so it has a lot of templates for this reports.
When X was handling the software, they asked the client and the old project manager if they wanted the templates to have the client's products dynamic (no need to change the template when adding a new product) or hardcoded for some products they already had, they choose hardcoded because it would be faster. Butterfly effect.
Fast forward to this week, the team leader designated a task for me, It looked easy at first, just fix 2 templates, easy.
Oh boy, I was so wrong.
I fixed the first template, discovering in the process the hardcoded things, had to add the product reference in a lot of places.
So i went to the second item, a super template that they use to put together some smaller templates.
It was really weird, I couldn't find all the templates that it was supposed to use, and I didn't really know the exact problem, the only thing I knew was that it was not being generated, the reason could be the super template itself or one of the 15 smaller templates, that could happen to have sub templates.
So I called the team leader and explained to him wtf was happening, he called the senior business analyst, that called the PM, we agreed that it would be infinite because of those fucking hardcoded things, they prepared a excel sheet with this and a lot of other problems and will send this to the client, explaining that we'll need a lot of time to put this new product up and running.
Now I'm in the middle of this shit storm seeing a time of darkness in the future.
Ps: This new product was supposed to be inserted in the software since last November, when it was under X responsability, and they analyzed it and said that it would take 190 hours to be completely done, the client refused. It was the first rain drop of what would become a shit storm. -
I have a bookshelf full of tech books. What should I do with outdated ones? What approach should I take to buying new ones? A lot of them are probably irrelevant now. Things that don't change significantly are fine (I have old C++ and Make books whose content is still relevant even if some new stuff is missing) but web development has evolved significantly and I'm reluctant to get anything framework related due to needing to replace books frequently.
I could get ebooks, but having tried a few, I much prefer a physical book.
In the case of old books I no longer need, I can recycle them (as waste paper, or at a book recycling place) or donate them to a charity shop. It seems silly to recycle them as waste paper, but on the other hand I doubt the content will be that useful to others nor will it be that useful in a charity shop!
So instead they just sit on my shelf and remain unused...
What do you folks do with your books when you don't need them any more?3 -
This is the situation:
I worked on a small project on freelance.mx: The project name is: "A Grid System with Bootstrap and Hover.css | Fontawesome Combination"
By the time I finished it, the client changed almost half of the requirements and told me that I didn't complete the work as It was supposed to and asked me to change it. He wanted that grid system to work as a sidebar as well...
He asked me then to make some modifications and adapt the code to fit the new requirements. I said: "I would do that but I would need to charge you more for that since a grid system and a sidebar are two distinct things and also these are new requirements"
Today is 7 days since I haven't heard anything from him and I sent him a message. He said that I didn't finish the work properly and marked the work on the platform as "Incomplete".
What should I do? This is unfair... Is there any way I can get the payment from this guy?
This is the first job I have on freelance.mx and it will make me have bad reputation.
Any advice?10 -
Trying to build motivation but a lot of things get in the way and I just want to finish the project 😞 even when I start I can’t stay focused long and I can’t get a lot done in one day. I feel like I need an environment change but I can’t go anywhere and moving to a different room doesn’t work. Idk I just feel if I can make some good progress I’ll be more motivated. Idk what’s wrong with me though. I just need to take a whole day to code my project.
Also I’m just worried I’m not good enough to apply to a entry level job I’m planning on applying to because I’m not good enough yet. and I haven’t even crossed off everything they want. I don’t know ASP.NET (yet), I can’t make a GUI with C# and I don’t know which one I should learn, I only know a little bit of JS and for some reason a .NET position wants JS with experience with JS Stuff like JQuery and some others I can’t remember. And stuff like that. Idk i just feel like I’m not doing good with it even though I want to.
TLDR: FUCK2 -
i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.
as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)
-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)
previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...
but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.
friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.
no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.
so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone
------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.
once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.
but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.
if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.
i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.
mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?
but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔6 -
Lol. In the years that `const` and `let` have been in Javascript, not once have they ever helped me read the code better or caught a bug. They have not helped me understand anyone else's code, nor have they really helped convey any sort of meaning for other developers that I have heard.
Usually the rule is, const first, then change it to let if you need to. It adds nothing.
All this gold plating is weighing things down.15 -
We can't say if the world was better before or would be better after...
There are good things and bad things every times..
We can't just say if everything is better or worse. Sometimes we want to stay in the present and sometimes in the past.
Things change, for the best and for the worse. We just need to move on or deal with it.
Just live with your time. You can just hope the best or try to make it possible. -
What is your wishlist for things that need to die or change next year. Mine is :-
1. Games that use peer to peer and have servers for data. Please buy servers on aws or any good cloud service.
2. ISP's that block all incoming connections for security5 -
I sometimes work with my company's so called "cms" tool. It's been patched up with new functionality along the way but was actually not even a cms tool from the start several years ago.
Nowadays you need to use Firefox or Chrome to change some content and IE for other stuff. So it's a lot of time and frustration spent on going back and forth between different browsers even for the simplest things. And I mean.. Hello... IE?!
Any of you have similar experiences? Please share and let me know that I'm not alone! 😢😅1 -
More a positive rant...
Just casually looked into an invitation to a collab tool my workplace set up for discussing optimizations of workflows, internal collabs, communication, yada yada...
Just to figure out, that there's A LOT of room for improvement being discussed and new ideas related to our work. Which is fucking great! Like "Hey we could maybe introduce A/B testing for our software" or "We should change the way our CI/CD works".
One of the best things I've seen so far: "We should do smth about (react) component XY, as it currently holds many configurable parameters for look and feel with too many possibilities" ... these components are like each 1 big file or so, that covers EVERY possibility. I had a feeling in my gut that some things were built quite complicated, but originally with a good idea/intention in mind. I thought that I just needed time to get used to new things. Now I know that I need to learn nevertheless but that things NEED improvement and that others agree on that, too.
I think this is a good sign when a company tries to reflect on itself to become better.2 -
!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore
I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing4 -
In my school, We started learning computer science (Java and programming stuff, to be more specific) last year in 11th standard (I was 16 at that time), starting to learn programming and stuff like this are common in India at that age (Yes, I live in India). I m the only student in my class or in my school who knows about programming and things related to that, yes of course I know, I made my own game when I was around 12 y.o.
In school our teacher started teaching us everything from the most beginning, It was really boring and exciting at the same time for me, it was exciting because I always wanted to tell my teacher and friends about my game and other programming kinds of stuff I knew, and it was boring bcoz I had to learn those things again which I already knew.
It was obvious that I was getting good marks in the subject without even reading my book for once, and it really amazed my friends, classmates and even my teacher.
Now, since my friends have learned CS for 1 year, some of them thinks its nice and are fascinated by the world of programming and developers, and some of them think it's boring and they just need to pass the subject for good marks and nothing else.
It feels funny and bad at the same time when some of my friends come to me and ask what does a for-loop (any loop) even does... And the rest of them thinks a for-loop is just used for printing tables of numbers.
well, that's the story of my school.
The thing that will never change is that I love programming and I will never stop programming...
Thanks for stopping by Ranters,
Happy programming!4 -
(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)
Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.
I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.
But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.
Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:
defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end
Jesus christ, I hate this shit.
Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.
It appears to be written by a child.
js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.
You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.
require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.
Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".
Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.
And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)
You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)
To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.
But here's where i drop the shit.
Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.
I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.
Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.
Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.
We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.
But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.
Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.
Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.
Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.
DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".7 -
So, I’ve been given the task of sorting the security out in an application plugging the holes and whatnot as to be honest it’s shocking haha. It doesn’t help that we automate security audits but that’s a different rant for another day.
We’re using devise for authentication (rails standard, ♥️ devise), we have no password resets through the login page, it has to be manually reset by ringing support, why who knows, even though it’s built into the gem and we allow the user to login using an username instead of an email because for whatever reason someone thought it was a bright idea to not have the email field mandatory.
So I hop onto a call with the BAs, basically I go that we need to implement password resets into the login page so the user can do it themselves and also to cut down support calls a ticket is already in place for it. So I go through the standardised workflow for resetting a password. My manager goes.
“I don’t think this will be very secure”
Wait.. what. Have you never reset a password before? It’s following the same protocol as every other app.
We go back and fourth and I said I’ll get it checked with security just to keep him happy.
The issue mainly is well we can’t implement password resets due to 100s of users not having an email on there account.. 🙃 so before we push this change we need to try and notice all users to set a unique email.
Updated the tickets. All dandy.
Looking at the PRs to see what security things have been done if any and turns out one of the devs in India has just written a migration to add the same default email to every user that doesn’t have an email present and yep it got merged. So I go revert the change but talk about taking a “we don’t care about security approach”.
Eventually we want to have the user reset their passwords and login using their email and someone goes a head and does that. Not to mention the security risk.
Jesus Christ I wonder why I bother sometimes.2 -
Oh the joy of multi-site working and design reviews in bigger corporations...
I try to propose if we could do it on-line with BitBucket commenting etc. Just put your comments there, we discuss it there, each in our own time, and get things closed.
But no. It's nicer to arrange 2-3h conf calls. So that we can really discuss items (and the reviewers don't have to do anything before the call). Nothing can be done beforehand. And the reviewers get to comment not only on design matters, but on system level things too. Like "I wonder if this would be better in place X". Well sure, maybe, but that's system level decision and would require architects etc. And all that work was done 2 years ago, we're supposed to now just check the source code (which you guys wanted me to change).
Ok, so I will arrange a conf call. Our time zones are not the same, so one guy is coming to the office when another is almost leaving. One wants to have Wednesdays meeting free. One has lunch at 11, another at 13. For fucks sake. Some guys have filled their calendar with meetings, most of them which they will not attend anyway, but Outlook shows them as "reserved".
So I spend my day trying to find a free spot that everyone could join. Half of the guys won't read the code and won't give any comments, but still need to be there. And then there are those comments saying "I'd like this variable name to be different" and "it would be cleaner if this was done like I do". Same people produce unreadable mess themselves, but somehow always manage to dodge all reviews of their own stuff. -
DREAM 1
(my comments look like this)
A kikiland metro system. It's extradimensional and shapeshifting. When you enter it, it adapts to your needs. The people inside (they're probably just vinyl shells), the social circumstances, all generated for you.
When you enter it, it knows where you want to go. It spawns exactly one train just for you. It will be the first, it will be the last. You have to catch it to go where you need. If you miss it, there will be no more trains, and you have to wait till the metro station closes for the night and reopens.
It's always you entering, catching the train that arrives just in time, going to where you need to go and exiting.
Because of its extradimensional nature, you cannot agree to meet someone there — every person has their own personal metro generated just for them every time, with exactly one train going exactly to the station you need.
It's used by BLA as a form of control. When they don't want you to go somewhere, the train won't spawn. Or, it might diverge and get you to some other place. It isn't known whether the map can be altered on the fly or not. So far, the consensus is that the map is persistent and is a public knowledge, and it's just the metro itself that is extradimensional. But, no one ever saw the real metro in its real form, and not the top layer that protrudes into the three-dimensional world you can interact with. It might be the case that they can make people disappear by creating ad-hoc stations that don't intersect with the real world, trapping them in places that are nowhere in particular.
(it took seeing BLA once in one dream to make all the following dreams include them. Sigh.)
Kikiland also has a school, and it always had it. I befriended a chemistry teacher there. His classroom is small — exactly as deep as other classrooms, but really narrow. There are no desks there, just his desk and some bookshelves. Chemistry isn't a priority there — his class exists only because it should. No one attends it. This is why he was so pleased to meet me. Despite his classroom being located on a busy floor, its door is overlooked by students, and NO ONE ever enters it. He just sits there, waiting for students to arrive, but they never do.
He has a secret, though, because of course he does. In the game Control, if you complete the main storyline before you complete some side quests, one of the main characters will be sitting in the C-suit hall, doing her things, waiting for you to come and talk to her. But at the same time, she will be waiting for you deep down the oldest house's mines, again, just sitting there, waiting for you to take the quest. This teacher is the same.
If you have a good relationship with him, and you attend his class, the classroom will change to a tunnel entrance, with him being the security guard. He's your friend, he'll let you in. It looks like Fallout's vault entrance. THIS is how you enter the REAL kikiland metro. (Dream 1 ends here.)
Episode 2
Tiny waterborne rat puppies whose mouth is their entire face unfolding like a piece of paper with teeth covering it as a grid. (I wrote about them already, but here they are again.) They are _tiny_, a bit like tadpoles. Also, like tadpoles, they die if you touch them out of water. As I was flying over some mountain resort (I routinely fly in my dreams, but it feels more like a very low gravity falling I can control, like using a parachute in GTA San Andreas), I dumped them to a location that resembled the garden level of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for my cat to eat. It didn't want to. -
Can someone explain to me the need of a "technical management"? I know my question is naive, but try to explain it like to kindergarten kid.
Case 1. When team is good, and has a good tech leader(s) then the software director/manager makes more harm with his silly ideas, pompous cliche "calls to arms" etc.
Case 2. On the other hand, when software team is shit, it means that the management is responsible for assembling such team. Then it further means that they can't distinguish impostors from really good talents, which leads to bad quality, missed deliveries, bugs, frustrations, etc.
I saw many times when good technical lead (aka architect, staff, principal) made a positive difference. But I NEVER EVER saw that things were bad and "manager/director" made a positive change. This concept is soooo flawed....
... any one explain please?5 -
my phone is dying. Very slowly, i see the first signs of decay, i probably have months or even more than a year, but it will die on me. I knew it will happen.
I currently have an asus phone (ZE552KL), it is technically DualSim or SD-Card, has a camera that is..badish and sometimes the bluetooth wont start and then it reboots. Also the camera has a pure software bug where it isnt able to ever focus properly, but with tricks you can get it to work again. The asus forums constantly refer to sending it to a repair station (wherever one is in germoney). That annoys me.
Back to dying. For now its definetly the battery.
I remember when you could change the battery on a whim. Great times. My last phone died duo battery aswell (well, the gps module broke aswell so it wasnt all flowers besides the battery).
My current asus phone was something around 300 € and according to reviews 2 years ago it has a good bang for the buck ratio.
I havent looked into the market, just a cursory glance. But apparently if you want a phone that has a decent battery life, is not basically a tablet, has an sd card slot and a camera that is not total rubbish it gets hard. Its hard to balance those things, and if you want a swappeable battery all hope is lost.
Further i have started to misstrust chinese phones, the asus software support is wacky and some stuff is weird. I suspect its as bad with huwai and all the others. Also its apparently kinda hard to get any resemblance of quality in accessoires for non-mainstream brands (i mean cases and display protection)
So i dread the future, the future in which i need a new phone that is somewhere in the mid price segments and fits my needs. In the end i will take something suboptimal and be unhappy with it till it dies.
I despise the phone market.rant cheap quality no sd card phonemarket off-brand no swappeable battery all is lost need new phone5 -
It was one of those "I need more coffee days"..
I was writing some checking function called "check" (now to clarify my company is not coding oop style so no classes etc.) And as I went on I included another file for some functions and what not. Pretty normal stuff right? Right. In that file I required there also was a function called "check".
Guess who tried to use the "check" function of the imported file in the "check" function?! Right! A Fucking genius aka. me!!
So I tried to figure out why the page wouldn't load and why the server was starting to lag more and more.
After killing all the apache tasks three times i finally realized what I did.
Took me 10 minutes to figure out that i was causing endless recursion. That day wasn't my best and clearly not filled with enough coffee.
PS: yes I know oop would have probably eliminated the possibility for this but I'm just adapting to the coding style of my company as I can't really change things since I'm just an intern.1 -
I don't have any experience in teaching, but I'd venture to say that teaching anything is hard. For most subjects, teaching has been refined over thousands of years to be easier and meaningful. Not CS. As has been mentioned by many people CS is a very new subject when compared to the likes of maths, for example, and education systems haven't been able to cope with it adequately (nor should they be expected to).
That the CS industry is rapidly evolving certainly doesn't help matters, but in reality that shouldn't really be that big of a problem (at least in earlier years of education). The basics of computer systems and programming don't really change that much (please correct me if I'm wrong) and logic stays the same. Even if you learn stuff that's a bit out of date it can still be useful and good lessons should be able to be applied to new technologies and ideas.
Broken computers is a big inconvenience, but a lot of very useful things can be done without a computer, and I should think the situation is a lot better than it was 5 years ago. What I think would be good, instead of trying to use broken computers would be to get students to set up and use a raspberry pi each; you learn about something other than windows, learn how to install an OS and you don't need that much computing power for teaching people computer science.
I think the main problem is a lack of inspiring teachers. Only a very few teachers will be unable to get you through the exams if you put in the effort, but quite a lot of the time students don't put in the effort because they can blame it on the teacher.
My solution would be to try and get as many students into computer science as possible and the rest will follow: more people will become teachers, more will be invested in the subject, more attention will be payed to the curriculum.
That's not to say I don't agree that many of the problems that have been mentioned need to be fixed for CS education to work properly, just that there is no way that I can see to fix them currently without either creating more problems or some very rich person giving a load of money.
This has gone on a lot longer than I expected so I'll stop now.14 -
I'm learning Kotlin while trying out Android Things and that sparked my interest in learning more about Java platform again. I tripped upon the news that Oracle had change their commercial plans for the platform by going with the rolling release model and limiting LTS releases for paying customers.
Java SE 8 was one of those former LTS releases that was on my computer, leaving me vulnerable, despite that version still being the most compatible with many applications, and that's been on my computer well passed the date they cut off public support. And I'm, like, "WTF!?"
Luckily this is when open source shines at it's brightest. Both the home brew and corporations, such as Amazon and IBM, alike - mostly the latter - both agreed to create their own LTS releases using the OpenJDK code and all disturbing to the public FOR FREE with no strings attached and the sources opened. I'm sure Richard Stallman is smiling with glee.
It isn't a total finger towards Oracle. Java SE is based on OpenJDK with no difference between the two anymore aside from loss of LTS support from the public - that's it. So Oracle still benefits despite the retaliation. Probably?
Did Oracle learn nothing from OpenOffice? If the point was to get users to pay for security then they've failed in the long run because Java is open source. People have used that fact to create their own free distributions that bypass their paywall, making the need to go through Oracle pointless. And I'm glad. Open source aside, security is a big issue these days and the last thing people need is yet another thing to subscribe too.1 -
One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,
Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.1 -
So I’m pretty sure I’m wrong here but I wanna rant anyways:
Had a US to pick up a date or time based on a zone and use that in the db in all locations, US had four functions written and told that only these need updating and DB itself will have no updates. Update four functions and made PR. Tech person who filled in US saw PR and approved, I merged and gave to QA. QA asked why some things aren’t being updated and I said oh those are meant to be updated too and I said ok. Get a defect. Checked that there is way more functions to update than needed, and tried so that no dB update happens in US. Made PR, reviewed and pushed. Still something is still not updating (this time purely mb I guess) another defect. I make PR again and dude asks why I don’t change it in this way which requires a DB change. Resist the urge to tell him he specified in his US no dB change. Did the thing and now it’s still in process. Product owner is pissed with amount of defects from me. -
!dev
Personal rant, but as one shouldn't bottle up emotions, probably not so bad idea....
Started with diet and exercise in the vacation, as finally a certain thing starting with C calmed down...
Its maddening how fucked up the world is. Now as a lil private info (that might not be so unknown, shared multiple times here) - my body is a train wreck.
Lungs are fucked, muscle distrophy, some other things are fucked.
I'm the kind of thing every gym trainer dreads - the client that needs not only a lot of ass whooping, but also has a lot of problems that need to be taken care of.
Which is why I rather do exercise at home, cause... My experiences with humans in gyms are bad. Most trainers behave like fucking chimpanzees screaming commands while not listening what one tells them...
First challenge: Find a low impact cardio training.
What one mostly finds is a female chick (which is sad cause I like men more for obvious reasons), that should gain some weight, screaming at ya how great sport is while jumping around like a bunny on ecstasy.
Low impact isn't really low impact when you jump around, lil bunny... And it isn't low impact when you just let yourself fall to the floor and start doing push ups.
If an obese person like me did that, it would end in pain, frustration and an empty fridge TM.
So one has to painfully look and skip through 20 min vids of "Non low impact low impact YouTube / ... vids" to find one that is doable without wrecking the body even further... Yaaaay. That makes one totally not feel depressed :-)
The other thing that I always hate is dieting. Note that I don't have to change much - I'm basically on a diet since years, holding weight the whole time.
The jolly fun is that I can't take off with just an diet. If you never heard that such thing is possible, a lil advice: It is possible. Nothing hurts more than being told that eating less solves all problems magically - cause it doesn't.
What I usually need is added protein, as I suffer from muscle dystrophy in my left side. (hence the low impact vids).
If you go to a grocery store, you most likely find *tons* of protein stuff.
The fun thing is that roughly 80 % of that are - like all things in a supermarket - completely bullshit.
I know one could avoid using protein powder / ... - but that makes dieting a very very very hard task, as one has to not only do a lot of planning, but cooking and eating becomes a depression palooza... It just doesn't make fun when you have to scale components for every meal or force yourself to eat e.g. 250 g of low fat curd cheese to gain the necessary proteins.
Why is supermarket stuff so shitty....
Added sugar / saccharides . When one has been dieting for long for health reasons, one finds out pretty quick that most products (especially those labeled as healthy / fat reduced / "weight loss") are perfectly made to lead to a sugar crisis and binge eating.
I've found protein drinks containing up to 25 g of sugar per drink (330 ml).
A coke has 27 g of sugar per 250 ml...
:) Now isn't that jolly...
I've found my stuff of joy not so long ago (not advertising here, but depending on flavor it has only up to 3 g (!)) of sugar per drink)...
It just annoys me and pisses me off how much money is made - in my opinion deliberately - on the suffering of other people...
Most laws by the way end up being blocked by lobbyists - most nutrient scores etc are just "wrong" or better to unspecific... Making exploitation pretty easy.
It's funny how everyone has an opinion on obese people, everybody is pointing fingers and explaining how stupidly easy it is to take off... And at the same time no one gives a damn about shit like that.
That's all folks. Feeling better now.
By the way, I'm doing fine. I lost 7 kg already, though the train wreck of body was pretty pissed the last two weeks as everything hurts.
Another reason why motivational speeches are dumb in videos: Pain isn't fun. :)1 -
Reply to my 2018 version: https://devrant.com/rants/1346392/...
Dear holodreamer ( version 2018 ),
I'm just glad that I'm still alive now. You won't believe how terrible 2020 is at the moment! Anyways, a lot has happened since you wrote me and I'm gonna reply it all to you.
Thanks for noticing. I really like my hairstyle now and my insecurity of going bald have gone. I couldn't be more happy.
Unfortunately, I'm not financially independent yet. Thanks to the crypto crash, the crypto ban in the country and some bad calls on my end. :/. But the good news is that we are back on the crypto market as the ban has been lifted recently. I don't have enough crypto to buy a lambo or go to the moon, but I have something that I could give to my grand kids. At this point, I don't really care anymore how much the value it is going to be, I have come to learn to think them of as a souvenir.
Your prediction of me preparing to move out of country seems to have come true. Honestly, I had given up that dream, but thanks to one of my best friend for reigniting those dreams - I may be moving somewhere really better by next year. I hope that I get this financial independence thing figured out before I move there. I don't wanna live there paycheck to paycheck.
Fortunately, I'm not getting any pressure to get married yet. I think I'm heading the way to a better life filled with some travel and adventures. I had a great opportunity to attend Google I/O 2020, but it got cancelled. Hopefully, covid19 will be over in few months.
Yea, I remember her. I got really carried away to the point that things she said started to hurt my heart. But eventually we had some argument and we stopped talking last September and I cut all contacts with her on the new years. If it makes you feel any better, last time i checked, she looks quite plumpy and totally different.
Thankfully, I'm not that lonely to need a chat bot. But I found some good online friends. They are fun to talk to.
No, AI didn't replace developers yet. Calm down! Javascript seems to be the most popular programming language now. But I hear there is a new contender to JavaScript that could change everything. It's called WebAssembly. Maybe in few years, we will see the decline of JavaScript.
Thinking about you, I feel some guilt for wasting your potential. I could have done much better if I was little more careful and responsible with you. I don't wanna make 2022 version of me feel bad for me.
Regards,
holodreamer ( version 2020 ) -
Critical Tips to Learn Programming Faster Sample:
Be comfortable with basics
The mistake which many aspiring students make is to start in a rush and skip the basics of programming and its fundamentals. They tend to start from the comparatively advanced topics.
This tends to work in many sectors and fields of Technology, but in the world of programming, having a deep knowledge of the basic principles of coding and programming is a must. If you are taking a class through a tutor and you feel that they are going too fast for your understanding, you need to be firm and clear and tell them to go slowly, so that you can also be on the same page like everyone else
Most often than not, many people tend to struggle when they reach a higher level with a feeling of getting lost, then they feel the need to fall back and go through basics, which is time-consuming. Learning basics well is the key to be fast and accurate in programming.
Practice to code by hand.
This may sound strange to some of you. Why write a code by hand when the actual work is supposed to be done on a computer? There are some reasons for this.
One reason being, when you were to be called for an interview for a programming job, the technical evaluation will include a hand-coding round to assess your programming skills. It makes sense as experts have researched and found that coding by hand is the best way to learn how to program.
Be brave and fiddle with codes
Most of us try to stick to the line of instructions given to us by our seniors, but it is extremely important to think out of the box and fiddle around with codes. That way, you will learn how the results get altered with the changes in the code.
Don't be over-ambitious and change the whole code. It takes experience to reach that level. This will give you enormous confidence in your skillset
Reach out for guidance
Seeking help from professionals is never looked down upon. Your fellow mates will likely not feel a hitch while sharing their knowledge with you. They also have been in your position at some point in their career and help will be forthcoming.
You may need professional help in understanding the program, bugs in the program and how to debug it. Sometimes other people can identify the bug instantly, which may have escaped your attention. Don't be shy and think that they'll make of you. It's always a team effort. Be comfortable around your colleagues.
Don’t Burn-out
You must have seen people burning the midnight oil and not coming to a conclusion, hence being reported by the testing team or the client.
These are common occurrences in the IT Industry. It is really important to conserve energy and take regular breaks while learning or working. It improves concentration and may help you see solutions faster. It's a proven fact that taking a break while working helps with better results and productivity. To be a better programmer, you need to be well rested and have an active mind.
Go Online
It's a common misconception that learning how to program will take a lot of money, which is not true. There are plenty of online college courses designed for beginner students and programmers. Many free courses are also available online to help you become a better programmer. Websites like Udemy and programming hub is beneficial if you want to improve your skills.
There are free courses available for everything from [HTML](https://bitdegree.org/learn/...) to CSS. You can use these free courses to get a piece of good basic knowledge. After cementing your skills, you can go for complex paid courses.
Read Relevant Material
One should never stop acquiring knowledge. This could be an extension of the last point, but it is in a different context. The idea is to boost your knowledge about the domain you're working on.
In real-life situations, the client for which you're writing a program for possesses complete knowledge of their business, how it works, but they don't know how to write a code for some specific program and vice versa.
So, it is crucial to keep yourself updated about the recent trends and advancements. It is beneficial to know about the business for which you're working. Read relevant material online, read books and articles to keep yourself up-to-date.
Never stop practicing
The saying “practice makes perfect” holds no matter what profession you are in. One should never stop practicing, it's a path to success. In programming, it gets even more critical to practice, since your exposure to programming starts with books and courses you take. Real work is done hands-on, you must spend time writing codes by hand and practicing them on your system to get familiar with the interface and workflow.
Search for mock projects online or make your model projects to practice coding and attentively commit to it. Things will start to come in the structure after some time.4 -
!rant
Right now i'm working as a volunteer developer for a discord server. I've recently been learning JDA (a Discord API java wrapper) and I wanted to get some experience in a more real world environment by working on a Discord Bot. What a mistake
The owner of the server has written some pretty messy, but solid code, and I was asked to build as sort of “punishment system” (warns, kicks, mutes, bans, all of which timed). It started off fine, me doing some work, getting some critic, all good. Soon, it started to get worse. At every point of the way, while i’m working I have him trying to make me add new features, and change massive existing ones even after i’ve done them and moved on with his permission! I keep telling him, “it’s a work in progress, please wait”, but it never stops.
I’m planning to resign, but I have to continue to dodge him and his “suggestions” as I simply want to finish my work, and get out. The reason I need to avoid his as, I feel that if I was to alert him I was to leave in advance, things would only get worse in the time while I stayed.
:/5 -
I hate Pull request system!
Plot twist: I just put it in place in my organization because I see the benefit.
Just spent 4 hours (Note : delay was because git refuses to write to stdout and writes everything in sdterr. And couple other things) developing a helper “powershell” script for “small tasks”. It sits directly in the project and as of 30 mins ago available to all devs.
Let’s say you need to change a typo.
Normal process:
• Create a branch
• Fix problem
• Commit/push
• Create pull request (This one was NOT easy. I’ll explain why if someone is interested)
• Switch back to master to fix second bug
Script does exactly that now. ./CreatePullRequest.ps1 <tmpbranchname> <Comment>. (The target for pull request will be the original branch, not limited to master)
Now I’m trying to find what I missed. Because I missed something, 100% guarantied.14 -
floating point numbers are workarounds for infinite problems people didn’t find solution yet
if you eat a cake there is no cake, same if you grab a piece of cake, there is no 3/4 cake left there is something else yet to simplify the meaning of the world so we can communicate cause we’re all dumb fucks who can’t remember more than 20000 words we named different things as same things but in less amount, floating point numbers were a biggest step towards modern world we even don’t remember it
we use infinity everyday yet we don’t know infinite, we only partially know concept of null
you say piece of cake but piece is not measurement - piece is infinite subjective amount of something
everything that is subjective is infinite, like you say a sentence it have infinite number of meanings, you publish a photo or draw a paining there are infinite number of interpretations
you can say there is no cake but isn’t it ? you just said cake so your mind want to materialize something you already know and since you know the cake word there is a cake cause it’s infinite once created
if you think really hard and try to get that feeling, the taste of your last delicious cake you can almost feel it on your tongue cause you’re connected to every cake taste you ate
someone created cake and once people know what cake is it’s infinite in that collection, but what if no one created cake or everyone that remember how cake looks like died, everything what’s cake made of extinct ? does it exist or is it null ? that’s determinism and entropy problem we don’t understand, we don’t understand past and future cause we don’t understand infinity and null, we just replaced it with time
there is no time and you can have a couple of minutes break are best explanations of how null and infinite works in a concept of time
so if you want to change the world, find another thing that explains infinity and null and you will push our civilization forward, you don’t need to know any physics or math, you just need to observe the world and spot patterns10 -
Somehow mocking xhr requests (?) for Axios is really hard to make it work. I use React Cosmos as I'm re-doing the frontend of this already running in production and works great, but when my component communicates with the backend it breaks and I'm unable to test the full behavior.
Then, it occurred to me that trying to mock Axios may not be the best. So I came with this scheme where I would have a configuration variable with a default value and change that when I need to work with React Cosmos, which in turn changes the behavior of `/auth` to return a valid JWT in response to a GET, put an Axios interceptor in my outermost Cosmos decorator and BAM! suddenly was able to develop and test my React components closer to how they would work in production.
It surprises me how simple this endeavor was, and because everything runs orchestrated by docker compose things run smoother.
(this is not an excuse to not to learn how to deal with the mocking issues of Axios, after all I wont have a working backend every time I work in some frontend application)5 -
Just some figma improvements from the perspective of a new customer:
* Copy/paste is broken. If I want to make a change, I have to create a whole new
component. They recommend cmd+c/v for copypaste but as far as I can see it does nothing
* Needs to be an explicit component drawer button instead of hiding it under assets. Through me for a loop for a couple minutes.
* Empty textboxes shouldn't vanish because you happened to click in the wrong location
while setting your properties.
* Text should start big enough to actually see.
* "send to back/front", "hide item", "change transparency' all need to be prototype actions and more, give us access to object properties both by parent/sibling/child, and by
object id
* create a new frame based on a specified size is non-obvious and if you're creating
a lot of frames, what with copypaste being non-intuitive, it can become laborious.
This is especially so when you're copying frames in order to make minor changes and observe the differences side by side, instead of potentially destructive edits.
* I see no obvious way to manage transitions/animations between frames.
* The difference between frames and groups isn't sufficiently explained. The words
frame, groups, and layers all appear to new users to be used interchangeably, even
if they are distinct things.2 -
My best friend (a consultant in salesforce) told me that he feels that software development is becoming like a blue collar casual job that anyone who has enough IQ can just pickup and start working. Have in mind that, he doesn't even have coding basics so I take his opinion with a grain of salt (since his work is just knowing the salesforce framework and teaching his clients what button to click where. He spends 80% of his day in business calls or meetings).
Personally I think that anyone can learn coding basics, but only certain people can stay in this field because you need to constantly grow, change, learn new things, have a huge treshold for failure and also somehow motivate yourself. Only 20% of my unversity peers are actually coding nowadays. Also only around 2-3 people out of 10 people in coding bootcamps actually become devs. So for me dev job is clearly not a casual job.
What are your thoughts on this?14 -
Generally speaking Microsoft's documentation has gotten extremely good.
Generally speaking.
I have projects that, at this point, would get considerable benefit from being able to write parts directly in IL. Sometimes this is for performance, sometimes this to be able to express things that are valid IL, but not expressable in C# or VB or F#. If you work a lot with language you probably know what I'm talking about.
Microsoft hasn't just not documented anything for doing serious IL development, they straight up haven't provided anything to make it easy. No IL projects. No IL syntax/intellisence in VS. Nada.
There is ILSupport, a third party extension which does offer this, even mixed language/IL projects which would be perfect for what I need.
Except Microsoft made a change in the newer SDK's which broke the extension. Where ildasm and ilasm use to be, isn't where it now is.
I'm working with the extension author to come up with a new solution but the lack of documentation and easy/reliable access to those tools is irritating. -
I need help.
I don't know if I can do this anymore.
As much as I love coding, what I do and making new things, I feel like I can't handle it as well as I used to be able to. I was diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression and anxiety (amongst other things) and it's taking a toll on me. I can't work on problems as well as I used to. I overlooks simple errors and typos and spend hours trying to fix it. I can't focus on anything or even remember what I was doing a minute ago. I seem to constantly miss deadlnes. My performance has taken a nose-dive and I'm in constant fear of losing my job. I'm the breadwinner for my household (dad doesn't work, mom doesn't make enough) and much of my salary goes towards my family and rent.
I have a couple of attempts, and one of my recent ones got me fired from my previous job. I've tried to get help. I've gone to therapy, I'm on a shit-load of anti-depressants and trying to change the outlook of my life, but nothing seems t work.
I don' know what to do. I needed to vent out. What do you think I should do?4 -
People, help me out.
(first some abstract thoughts)
I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.
As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.
My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied
------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)
I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.
for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.
1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )
2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website
BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?
2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2
2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.
Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.
But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.
What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?8 -
Pretty niche tool, but Sencha Architect!
It is a wanna be GUI-Builder/IDE for ExtJS, but neither works properly.
This rant is not about ExtJS, just about Sencha Architect, which my coworkers and I were forced to use.
If you want to join the ride, here an excerpt of just some of the issues:
- installation: already the setup is more of a gamble than an actual setup, either it works on your machine or it doesn't, plain and simple
- GUI Builder: just drag and dropping components is actually nice, but the editing capabilities are frustrating, you can't edit the UI code by hand at all, just through pre defined properties. If there was the need to really mix things up it wasn't possible, I couldn't even rebuild shown examples of their ExtJS documentation. Furthermore the property editor was data type locked, which means if you want to enter a string which ExtJS already supports, but architect locks the value as a boolean, you can't edit it at all, while still using Architect
- code editing: well it is a colored texteditor, which is fine, and I could live with that, but Architect let's you just edit areas where it allows you to - want to change something else? Nope not allowed
- autocompletion: there is none at all, same goes for refactoring, multi highlighting, string replacement, and others
- code storing: well now some may think edit it somewhere else, well no, also not possible... Architect not just only saves simple js, there is also a Json formatted file for everything you have created, which is needed so the tool can actually load it for further editing. They possibly never heard of DRY. But the worst of this code storing was actually using git along with it - have a merge conflict? Merge both files! Every single time, it was so damn tedious
There are a few more, but these were the worst I can remember.
Luckily I don't have to use it anymore!
Maybe they have fixed or changed a lot of it, because the developers were aware of the issues and eager to resolve them, as far as I was told on a roadmap presentation. And some of the tools they had released in the end of my time using ExtJS were actually really good, like an IDE plugin for the framework, and I liked using it. -
Working along side another consultant house for a client, we have our shit ready weeks ago for integration testing (as was the deadline) against the other guys. We tell them we are ready, but we need them to be ready too, there are some tricky format things and we basically let them spec it out since they integrate further down the line.
They come _NOW_ way over deadline with change requests in message formats, like MOTHERFUCKER, IM ON MY WEEKEND NOW. We KNEW the client wanted it ready next week, thats why we were ready in time. You are not gonna cost me my weekend.
(is what i wanted to say, the devs on the other team are super nice and just absolutely overloaded with work which i cannot help them with)
One thing is certain, tonight my internet access mysteriously dissappears and wont open until monday morning. Such a shame -
Visualize the entire complexity of the content within the project so that you know what data users will need to access, and compartmentalize those in to separate modules that you can build on over time. Think about any limitations with accessing that data (does the user have that role, what if the data is accessed simulateously, how to handle the same user accessing from different devices etc).
Think about the devices being used - is it going to be a website, an app, both? How best then to access the data? Direct access to a database, or an API system?
Then think about the front-end design and how to simplify the view right down as much as you can. Again, break it down in to modules.
Then decide on the technology you want to use, and what libraries would help simplify things.
These days I like to use JSON API's to access DB content because app and web technologies change quite often but the API will be accessible to whatever I use to build it.
For websites I love using Laravel, which simplifies the back-end tasks, and mdbootstrap which simplifies the front-end tasks and looks "appy". -
Design Decision:
We have an API and a lot of microservices based on that API. Additionally we have a store of protobuf-templates (files to automate serializing certain events etc).
Currently for each service we have the API with general stuff (connection stuff etc) and then copy the 5 or 6 proto-files we need for that service, they update sometimes, so does the API, for each service, two things that need to stay updated. Which option would seem more logical to you?
a) Integrate all proto files into the API. The services then only need to update the API but they also have access to many proto files they don't need for that service (which are required for other services however)
or
b) Keep them seperated and keep manually updating the proto-files for affected services
Disclaimer: our proto files are always backwards compatible by design, both the API and protofiles change fairly frequently.
Ty -
So a few notes.
"I" am a failure and a thief and a mimic
"I" never have any actual ideas
"I" tried to distance people from their knowledge base and expertise to make it look like they didn't have any skills and it blew up in my face
"U" are not like me and "U" are indeed skilled and intelligent
"I" spread my legs for a whole generation to keep "U' idle. "I" must now lose my resources and hand over what "I" stole from you
Had "I" not been a nasty little fucked up psychopath, none of this repeat crap wherein "I" act like a fucking hamster with an exercise wheel pellet dispenser and water bottle would be happening.
Just setting the record straight
Distancing people from their skill base and introducing emotional troubles and repeating a loop that had been manipulated does not change the truth. "I" need to do the honest thing and restore all the original people to a state of financial well being and security or more of "Me" will fucking die.
Anytime "I" sabotage "U" to keep you unproductive and underpaid "I" am guaranteeing "I" will be sucking more dick and often asking if you want fries with that
I think using their retarded nomenclature this about sums things up
Also "I" should stop pretending to be the desirable one. Nobody wants "Me" who knows what I'm really like. "I" always mimicked the best and worst versions of "U". Because "I" am not real and noone could ever love "Me" who ever knows "Me"4 -
There's time crunch already, we need to finish this feature, this stupid fucking feature, quickly.
We design, and then code and obviously because of Murphy's law, our code doesn't work. Why, you ask. Because some shithead was modifying arguments behind the scenes and it took us fuckload of time to reach this conclusion.
Out of frustration, I made this.
https://github.com/iostreamer-X/...
It's a tiny library which helps you log every single change done to your object.
But seriously, fuck that shithead who modifies things without a care in the world! -
If there's one thing that gets my goat it's "voodoo debuggers."
There's no actual need to dig into the root cause of a problem if you can blame the new thing you don't understand. Especially when later, after someone competent actually looks into it, the bug turns out to be a change in the old stuff that did it.
If there's two things that get my goat, it's people who fix something caused by human error or negligence and then don't write an automated test to catch it the next time it happens. -
One day the full stack developer knows to explain angular in great detail really clearing things up for me. Lately he has a go f* attitude. Basically refusing any explanation at all. Not that he owes me, but he is the chosen one. The one with actual angular experience. And the only one.
Other teammember isnt doing or caring shit at all but is screaming about senior skills any way.
I need to get out.
But there are no jobs :( feel like ive seen it all and seriously thinking about a career change. Maybe start my own business. Who knows. -
How to Create Beautiful and Durable Pie Boxes
Whether you are looking for a unique gift to give, or you are looking to protect the delicate items you hold, there are many ways to do so with the right pie boxes. By using a custom designed box, you can capture the essence of the delicacies you are storing and protect them for a longer period of time.
Protect delicate items
Using pie boxes is a good way to protect delicate items such as pies, cakes and desserts. However, you need to be sure that the box is the right size and shape to ensure that your item is safely packed. If you don't pack your delicate products properly, they could suffer from moisture and change in temperature.
Before you begin packing your goods, consider whether you should use bubble wrap or paper. While bubble wrap provides an extra layer of protection, it can also leave your product vulnerable to scratching. Choose paper to wrap your items, as it will prevent scratches and will keep them from shifting during transport.
When wrapping fragile items, you need to use a lot of packing tape to secure your package. You should also fill any empty space in the box. You can do this by using bubble wrap, or by adding extra padding. Make sure to mark your box as fragile and to place a label with your name and delivery address on all sides of the box.
Once you've completed the packaging process, you need to seal the box and place it in the shipping box. Besides bubble wrap, you may also want to include ice packs to add extra protection. A cushioned ice pack is another option for additional protection.
You should also use quality packing tape, and make sure to cover all the openings of your box. You can also use zip-up bags to help you keep your things in place.
It is important to know the best way to protect delicate items, so you can prevent them from damage during the shipping process. There are many ways to do this, but you should use the right tools for the job. Purchasing a box that is the right size and shape for your items is the most effective way to do it.
When you use custom pie boxes, you can rest assured that your pies, chocolate pies and other edibles will be safe. They're manufactured with modern equipment and environmentally friendly printing techniques.
Make a gift
Whether you are giving a pie for a birthday, wedding, or as a thank you gift, you can make pie boxes that are beautiful and durable. Several pie box designs are available online, but you can also create your own. Here are some simple instructions to make a simple, yet elegant box.
The first step is to print out a template of a pie box. You can use a piece of scrap paper or decorative paper for your design. If you are using decorative paper, cut out a rectangle the size of your box. If you are using colored cardstock, you will need to cut out a pie filling layer. Once you have a pie filling layer, copy it for several boxes. You can also add other designs or embellishments to your boxes.
Next, place your colored cardstock on your cutting mat. With your x-acto knife, cut out a rectangle that is as large as your box. You will need to fold it on the dotted line. If you are using an x-acto knife, it will be easier to fold the box. Alternatively, you can use a scoring stylus. If you have a Cricut, you can score the cardstock to make a scalloped box top. You can also use burlap ribbon or twine to wrap your box.
Once you have the box finished, you can decorate it with other decorations or embellishments. You can even use calligraphy or other techniques to make the box more special. To close the box, you will need a sticker or piece of tape. You can decorate the lid with patterned paper and a clear plastic screen. This will allow you to see the contents of your pie. You can also use embellishments such as ribbon, glitter, or other materials to make the box more fun.
If you are giving a pie for a holiday or party, you can decorate your box with a festive theme. For example, you can have a holiday tree on the front of your box. Or, you can dress it up for a tailgate party.2