Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

boss: What the fuck guys! Why didn't you go to the meeting this morning? Have you checked your google calendar?
me: But, but it is scheduled to tomorrow, google calendar says that.
boss: Who put that date?
me: You
boss:....
boss:And fo you double checked it?
me: What do you mean?
boss: Double check! Check if what is in the google calendar is correct!
me: But that doesn't make any sense.
boss: No excuses!! Next time you must double check!

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Generic-IT
--------------
Client:"So we would like to found a new company and offer IT and network consulting. Would you be able to build our website?"

Me:"Absolutely. What will be the name of your company?"

Client:"The name is going to be 'Generic-IT'. The website is going to be 'generic-IT.com' . We checked that with google."

Me:"I am sorry to tell you that generic.com is already taken by another company. Incidentally that company offers the same services, that you intend to offer. They also seem to be quite big an have businesses in 5 different countries.
Because of this I advise you to pick a different name that does not get you into trouble and makes positioning your own brand easier."

Client:"We want to neglect that problem for now."

Me:"0.0 ..... -_-""""
"Well, listen. Apart from the possible branding and copyright problems imagine how people will find you on the web. ...What will happen if you google 'generic IT'?"

Client:"Yeah well, we want to neglect that. And with SEO you can do something about that."

Me:"..........Welllll, you that SEO is not a cure all, right? The older an bigger company will come up first. Why not avoid that missunderstanding and come up with a unique name?"

Client:"......"

Me:"Please tell me. Doesn't any part of my argument make sense to you?"

Client:"..."

Me:"Well, ok. I will send you the estimate on monday."

___________

Then over a back channel I hear that the client is ...bewildered, why I would not stick to my area of expertise.

There I was now. Left bewildered myself, being the one with the webagency that does frontend design and branding.

My tech stack progression:

Started with PHP without any frameworks, using a homegrown MVC architecture. Used to use `mysql_` functions everywhere. And only jquery + vanilla CSS in the front end.

Then moved to use PDO functions in PHP and Backbone.js + Less CSS in the front-end.

Then moved to Django in the back-end. Did not like Django very much as it is too opinionated and not flexible (although it's damn good for rapid development if you buy into their type of things).

Then moved to Flask + SQLAlchemy and using a home grown architecture. This is a sweet spot for me in terms of back end and stayed in this spot for the longest time.

Moved to Postgres from MySQL as I fell in love with Postgres.

Then learnt React+Redux. Liked it. Made most sense to front-end development this way. Moved front-end stack to React+Redux.

Learning Haskell and been working with Scotty and eyeing Servant for a while now.

Let's see where it goes from here.

PS: this is my personal journey through various tech stacks in various products at various companies I have worked. I'm not talking about moving a product through these many tech stacks. That doesn't make any sense.

Material-UI.

I'm exhausted, so I'll keep this short.

I changed a TextField to a TimePicker, and noticed my className prop didn't apply anymore.

I thought it was my mui/redux-form wrapper for that component since I had just written it, but that was basically a straight copy/paste from the other wrappers, and both receives and passes the prop just fine.

After a lot of fighting, I finally found a workaround: if I add a `data-work-you-piece-of-garbage` prop alongside it, only then will the className show up on the rendered element. Why? I have no freaking clue. I tested it three times and got the same results. I looked through the MUI source and it still doesn't make any sense.

Fucking whatever, only three hours wasted.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Did anybody else know that putting comments in your HTML creates an EMPTY TEXT NODE IN THE DOM?
REAL helpful information when you have to GATHER EVERY ELEMENT WITH TEXT INSIDE OF IT!

WHY WOULD HTML EVEN BE LIKE THIS? IT'S A COMMENT! WHY DOES IT HAVE ANY EFFECT, even if it's minimal, ON THE DOM WHATSOEVER, THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!

Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s

Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.

> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR

> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things

At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.

Ready?

3

2

1

> SAME FUCKING ERROR

In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.

If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

What the fuck is wrong with web designers these days?

Every fucking web page is white with black text. It's 2022, let's stop this paper bullshit and change everything to use colors that make sense on screens.

For fuck sakes, even monokai.pro is black on white. You know monokai, that dark colorful color scheme that most editors support. With a black background and white text.

I'm nursing the worst migraine in the world right now and all I want to do is smash people's faces into these shitty white screens.

It wouldn't be so bad if these fuckers would have a dark mode, but 80% of the documentation that I have to read doesn't support dark mode. Yeah I know about the browser plugins that do it for you, but I honestly don't trust any of them since most of them have been found to be spyware.

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

Building my own accounting software because everything else is overly complicated and is trying to compete with enterprise accounting tools. All I want is some budgeting, some bill tracking, and categorization.

Writing in Ruby because I'm a masochist. Using built-in minitest because again 😈.

I have currently around 62 assertions. As soon as I add ANY new test that's literally asserting true, everything comes unglued and 20+ failures pop up. Take it out, 62 passes.

I feel like I'm going crazy at this point. The errors also don't make ANY sense. Shit like, "that record doesn't exist" when it's clearly a part of fixtures and is only used in ONE test(the one that's breaking).

Installed minitest bisect, and it's like 🤷‍♀️"lol get fucked bro!"

So I came here to rant about this before my battery dies and I go drink myself to sleep.

Thank you for coming to my dev-talk.

Hey... to somebody reading this, most likely.

The problem, is that you put if($var = 'something')
You need ==, not =.
Php doesn't tell you that though. It'll just change the var to 'something'

That's why you're getting that really obscure, doesn't make any sense error.

You're welcome.

Katie, we get it, you know and like Scala. You mention this often.

It doesn't make you superior to everyone else. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to pretend every language is Scala, ignore any language-specific paradigms and conventions, and bastardise every bit of code you write until it's done in the most weirdly Scala-ish functional way possible even when it makes zero sense to do so.

Stick with the conventions of the existing language & codebase you muppet. Yeah, it's boring and won't turn you on, but it's a hell of a lot more readable than a random bastardised mixin in the middle of another existing inheritance hierarchy.

!rant

Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.

The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.

Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.

The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)

Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.

He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.

What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.

He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.

He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.

.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office

As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.

I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

This customer's dev is going to be the end of me. I had to explain to him why it doesn't make any sense to return a value after throwing an exception.

In a function that was supposed to insert a record amd return its id, in the error handling code:

catch(Exception ex) {
//logs the exception
throw ex;
return - 999; //this code will NEVER be reached, and why the f.... - 999?
}
The customer wants us to develop the project together, but he won't listen and always write whatever he wants. Some might be differences in taste. Like me preferring
if(condition) {
return a;
}
return b;

And him preferring :

Foo result = null;
if(condition) {
result = a;
} else {
result = b;
}
return result;

Ok, that I can accept. But things like the one I'm ranting about... I wont.

I'm starting to wonder what was he doing during his "9 years of coding experience"

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

SCStudentRant?

I have a subj called "Fundaments of Operative Systems" (or something along those lines), and I have 2 crappy teachers, one for the theory classes, the other for the exercise classes.
The exercise classes teacher is said to be the worst in uni and every time I think about that class I get a bit anxious because I can never do anything in it. Basically we don't get taught code in theory classes and he just comes and says "do this exercise" without explaining anything first. And when he does I still don't understand it.
I bet like 90% of us have no idea how to program in C and we need that for those classes. I hate C with a passion because of this.
In the theory classes, the teacher explains most of the things without powerpoints, and when we don't understand something (either ask about something he said or what's written in the board), he REFUSES to explain or say what's written, because he has "explained it before". He even chuckles as if it was really funny that we can't read his handwriting or just didn't listen because we were writting things down OH MY GOD. So most of the times when I copy things from the boards and then look at them at home I'm like "what the hell is this, this doesn't make any sense, what did he even write" (has some word that looks like what he wrote with ?? around it)
I think they wanna watch us fail. I really do.
I kinda understand the theory classes, but half the test is writing code. How am I gonna write code if I don't understand it? I have a work for that subj to deliver until monday but I can't make it work because I don't know the code I have to write. Damn it all to hell jesus christ

Additional note: they're both in their 60s and should be retiring not long from now so maybe that's why they act so carelessly.
Love the uni, not so much some of the teachers

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

'nother "teacher" story here.

Little background knowledge: I'm repeating the things he told us about at home and try to learn them by myself. I use the newest Visual studio and .NET framework version.
In school we have pretty old PC's and even older .NET framework. But let this insanity begin...

As normally i entered my classroom a little late (I have a dangerous habit of ignoring my alarms) and sat down on my chair. We were only 3 people including me at that moment so everything was pretty chill. I ask him what our task was and something along these lines occurred:
Me: what's our task?
Teacher: you remember your shopping list program? I want a textbox in it next to the listview and I want it to show every listview item
Me: that doesn't make sense
Teacher: yadda yadda just do it
Me: kaaaaay, anything else?
Teacher: actually yes! Please use inheritance.
Me: *baffeld* that doesn't make any sense at all. We have 5 different fruits; you tell me i should make a class per fruit!?
Teacher: yes of course! This is how professionals do it all the time. Please give them a distinct attribute, too.
Me: *angry* I'm. Not. Gonna. Do. This. This is total bullshit and also really bad coding style. I'm not going to teach myself something that doesn't make sense at all.
(Note: i know how inheritance works and he knows that too)
Teacher: You have to do it, you won't be prepared for final exams otherwise!
Me: leave my exam prep to me. I won't do this.
Teacher: *grumbles* fine

Later that very same lesson i got a .NET compatibility error. I couldn't work because I wasn't allowed to change anything on the installation nor to install a newer framework. So basically he told me I should've used 'sharpdevelopment' (which is not able to do windows Forms, but hey who cares) and this would not have happened. I was so furious at that moment i just took all my stuff, told him that I work 'from a place where i got decent software and space to think' and left the room.

Why did this person decide to become a programming teacher?

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

OpenCL...

Okay so I'm completely new to OpenCL and I just put some stuff together to get a simple GPU Kernel running. Well that worked pretty good.

The reason I got into OpenCL was because I wanted to do some simple SHA1 cracking on my GPU. What I did was, I got a fast implementation of SHA1 from the internet, which works perfect in normal C++, but for OpenCL I have to rewrite some things. So I replaced all the memset and memcpy and so on with simple for loops and it still worked. Now, this should work on OpenCL, too, I thaught. God I was wrong!

Somehow the clBuildKernel got executed normally, but when I try to access the returned value (the error code) I get an Access Violation? It just doesn't make any sense to me?

Well I will try some stuff tomorrow again and I will find a solution for sure, but still, until now I just don't understand it.

I'm working on a codebase that is terminally ill. It's split so badly into microservices that no matter what you do, every one of them talks to every one of them over and over. If there's any way they can avoid just invoking a method on a class and send themselves a message or make an HTTP request, they'll do it. One of the services just sends messages to itself for no apparent reason. Except it doesn't even send messages to itself. It sends an HTTP request to a controller in another app, and that controller sends a message which is received by the same class that made the request.

The point is that this application is screwed. The defects pile up and there is literally no one who can understand what it's supposed to do in any scenario. I'm good at this. I can follow confusing code and document it. But not this one. It's overwhelming. It's insanity.

When these defects come in we're told to just run the app from the UI, see what HTTP requests it makes, and start tracing the code manually. Running and debugging it locally would be a nightmare but it's impossible anyway.

They decided that we all need to understand the application better so we can work on it, so we were each given six poorly-define five-hour tasks to "understand" various things. Those things don't make any sense. It's like if someone gave you the source code to Excel and told you to spent five hours understanding columns, five more understanding rows, and five more understanding cells.

Here's the thing: I'm okay with learning and understanding some code. It's part of the job. But I'm not going to abandon my career as a software developer so I can become an expert on debugging their awful code. I didn't make this mess. I'm not going to live with it. I'm moving on as quickly as I possibly can.

I've tried to explain to them that if they want the situation to improve they need to improve the code. They need to learn how to write tests. If your plan is that people will study your code, know it inside and out, and then spend all their time debugging it, that's a plan for failure. Everyone who can will leave and take what they know with them.

These companies just don't get it. They need their software to work, but the types of developers who can help them don't need that software to work. No one capable of doing good work is going to spend several years debugging their awful code unless you pay them a crazy ton of money.

Just don't make a mess in the first place. Hire developers who can do a good job. If you hire the cheapest people you can find you won't be able to get someone else to fix it later. It's not personal but I wish failure on those projects or even those companies. I want them to fail because failure is so expensive. I want them to fail so that others learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes.

As an industry we're a bunch of genuine idiots. We just keep doing the same things over and over again no matter how much it hurts.

Can we please stop making everything in javascript? Pretty please?

Like, I get it, js makes it easier to find developers and speeds up development, but writing a compiler to run on node? That doesn't make any sense to me. Typescript is taking ~11s to compile a medium-sized project, out of which ~9s are just type-checking (if I disable type-checking it takes ~2s to compile). Even Rust, which is considered to have a slow compiler (because of the borrow checker I assume) takes less time to compile a project of roughly the same size.

This is getting very irritating. If I want to keep type-checking, every single time I make a change on a single file I have to wait 11s before any tests start running. This was heavily affecting my productivity (and sanity), so I decided to disable type-checking and threw out the window 90% of Typescript's advantages.

Why the hell wasn't typescript written in an actually performant language? Just so you could say that typescript is written in itself? I don't get it, I really don't.

For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.

This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.

Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it.

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

why is it everybody wants to hire a head of a department all the time

like that's just super weird to me

wouldn't it make more sense to hire someone into a lower position, have them learn from head of a department, then get promoted because you know they'll head the department to your standards then?

but most posts want you to already be head of a department... and it's like, I don't know your department. what the hell happened to the last head of department? why do so many people need heads of department? why the hell are they choosing to get them from outside the company?

somehow none of this makes any sense to me
like I'm literally just so confused why people hire seniors and expect them to automatically know the way the company does things
it just literally doesn't make sense

promote your underlings? then hire more underlings to sus them out?
WHY ARE YOU HIRING SENIOR STAFF FROM OUTSIDE YOUR COMPANY, LITERALLY NOBODIES, AND GIVING THEM TONS OF AUTONOMY AND CONTROL OVER OTHERS IN YOUR COMPANY, THATS SO CONFUSING

worse yet I hear most people just lie when they apply so it's like... are you rotating irresponsible lying people through senior positions at your company over and over again, as they attrition your underlings and eventually get fired for incompetence?

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THIS ECOSYSTEM

Well... not because of my work life.
More like due to incompetent HTC support and webhosting provider services.

I mean, I had to re-send my mails again and again and ... for 2 weeks. HTC, yes my friend. It's you again. Get YOUR FUKN SHIT DONE FFS!
BEING BIG AS A SHIT LOADED COMPANY DOESN'T MAKE YOU COOL! GET YOURSELF SOME COMPETENT EMPLOYEE!
HOW MANY WEEKS DO YOU WaNT ME TO SEND YOU MY PHONE'S INFORMaTION?!

ISN'T ONLY ONE SINGLE FUKN SHIT ASS E_MAIL WITH ALL REQUIRED ANSWERS ENOUGH FOR YOU AND YOUR HORNY EMPLOYEE?!
FUUCK YOU, BASTARD(S)!

AND NOW TO YOU netcup!
YOU FUCKING PEACE OF DOG SHIT!
HOW DARE YOU WANT ME TO PAY FOR CREATING THE WEBSpACE BUT THEN ALSO FOR THE INEXISTENCE OF MY WEBSPACE?!
THIS DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!

YOU ROTTEN AND FiSH-SMELLING SLUTS!
I HOPE YOU ALL DIE IN AN ORgY BY GETTING A TONLOAD OF CUM UP IN YOUR HAIRY ASS aaaaand GET YOUR SLIMY CUM ON YOUR ... nvm that's just too hard...

FFS
JUST FUCK YOU!

Why some (ok, a lot of) sales and buying guys are there just to transform any service experience in something bad?

In my experience, most sales guys promises anything, with absurd deadlines and it's up to you to make it work. Things never get good enough and, after all, the client doesn't like the work, you don't like and the sales guy doesn't like you could not make a perfectly task.

Buying guys are even worse when buying services. Email 30 developers in BCC: "Hi, I need this done by tomorrow morning and I would like to know how much you charge for it. I need your proposals in the next 30 minutes". He closes the deal with the fastest and cheapest proposal.

These things make absolutely no sense to me.

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius

He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.

So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.

I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.

Manager: We gotta new module to develop for our existing product. As I'm leading the team, I'll be involved in designing the module.

Me: Okay.

Manager: *Just after a couple of hours, sends me these lame block diagram which doesn't make any sense*
There you go, this is the complete architecture of the module. Start developing it.

Me: *Woah!!* 😵

Windows 10 is just a bad joke at this point. First it doesn't show any text in the menus, now it fucks up all the drivers. I really need to scrap it and install literally ANY other os in order to improove my experience but I keep telling myself that it doesn't really make sense until I have a new harddrive and I keep wondering if the Evo850 is worth it. Fuck the saturday night struggle.

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

Hey hey hey, stupid poll time! Yay!
Okay it's only the second one but let me dream

If you had one of each thing that makes your dev life what it is, which one would you pick?

Let me explain a bit: I mean IDE, drinks, language, coworker, project... If you had to keep ONE think in each "category" of your job, what would they be?

-----

Mine would be:

JavaScript (I know some others are better, it's just my most fluent one), Atom IDE, Orangina (drink, for the ones not knowing) and my most powerful laptop out of the two. Those would be the things I'd keep if I had to.

-----

Please don't bash me on my crappy question, I'm just wondering >.<

So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).

So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).

Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.

Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).

So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.

So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.

So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:

var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:

function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.

No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.

I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a very satisfying bug to fix.

Question for leads...
Have you found that it's possible to have a balanced leadership style instead of ruling with an iron fist?

Let me explain what I mean.

There's always going to be room for improvement, there's going to be at least the occasional issue that happens, etc.
As a lead, your job is to not have issues happen and to have the team work effectively.

Now, for me, my goal was to have a balanced style in the sense that if there's a small issue or small room for improvement, but the team is already stressed, I take the heat for it if necessary and let them relax so they're not stressed and they can focus on the bigger things.
For medium improvements, I essentially put it to the vote so the team can have their say in whether they agree with the proposal on improvement.
And so on, idea being to have a balance between "Do what I tell you" and "do whatever you want".

However, I have found that doing so does essentially nothing to improve team morale and team cohesion. Any thing that needs doing and I force them into it, any thing I don't protect them from, any thing they don't agree with will still manifest as problems in the team, a single "you have to do this" will make them complain about the leadership style being "force to implement".

Being completely hands off and essentially not a lead, just basically a support dev more or less, is not what I'm really looking for, but also isn't good for a team that does genuinely have things that need to improve (stupid errors not being caught in dev OR review, system not being fully testable because of external dependencies that are not really necessary for tests, etc).

So the only option I see there is simply ruling with an iron fist and leaning into being that hated lead that just forcea you to do things and "doesn't care about you".
I've already stepped down from this lead position because I don't want to be that guy, but if I'm looking for another position I'm curious if this is just universal or hae you guys found that it IS possible to have a "good team" where you can be adults and discuss things as a team and improve as a team?

Why on Earth is React.Component.state public? This doesn't make any sense. It has no significance, but it just feels so, so stupid.

Wait. Why does this work? It doesn't copy any of the frontend code into the deploy location.

I'm not sure how this works, but it does. Crap, there goes my morning tracking down this wretched spaghetti deploy code.

At least I understand how it works in production. Shit, why is it different between production and our integ servers ,that isn't good. Maybe I can just refactor it.

That was all on Monday. It's now Wednesday and I'm still fucking refactoring something that wasn't actually broken. It just didn't make sense.

Maybe I should just revert my last three days of work on this branch and move on. No! It's too late, I've invested way too much time into this project...

... and I'm almost done, just a few more commits right?

Fuck the bureacracy.

It's so difficult being an solo entrepreneur due to outdated bureacracy.

I just wanted to have a current/ business bank account to separate txns related to the business from my personal account and GST ID to officially register the business and also avoid headaches with taxes in the future.

However, If you want business bank account in the name of business, you have to have an official registration for the business and GST is the easiest and affordable way for sole proprietorship. Since my work is basically online and can be done remote, it doesn't make sense to waste money renting or buying an office space, getting electricity coonection or pay other related expenses which is necessary to have to show as proof of existence.

So I went ahead and purchased a virtual office plan and applied for GST with required documents. However, the bureacrat rejected the application. The informed about it to the biz where I purchased this virtual office and they had a meeting with the bureacrat and they were told virtual office address can't be allowed.

They told had no such issues in last few years and now on they are gonna have to stop providing virtual office to register GST. That was one of the main reason people went with virtual office.

Now I won't be able to open a business bank account.

I won't be able to signup for payment gateway networks. They ask for GST ID.

I won't be able to complete Paypal business registration.

I may have to expose my personal address on invoices or otherwise lie on it.

I will have to use my savings account for any expense related to it.

Also by end of this fiscal year, I probably gonna have to deal with tax issues.

context: Python Sanic Backend, Bulma Frontend
*this is a direct repost of my rant on my discord*

UGH WHY IS EVERYTHING TOO COMPLICATED FOR NO FUCKING REASON
I JUST NEED AN INTERACTIVE UI WITHOUT EXPLICITLY DOING IT MYSELF WITH TONS OF BOILERPLATE CODE
React - uses JSX
Angular - uses TypeScript

what's next? some weird fucking thing that's not even necessary for basic needs
And why the fuck does react need node.js or some JSX compiler to make things easier?
None of this makes any fucking sense
Why not just declare actual javascript objects and functions and that's fuckin it
I just need regex validation and sometimes, custom validation based on other things
Then when the user changes something a small modal shows up asking to save changes
None of this bullshit
It's deadass simple
I don't need routing
No need for your JSX fuckery
No need for your TypeScript shit
I barely would even fucking use those
REEE
Fuck react, Fuck angular
React would've been the perfect thing for this shit
but NO
they had to make things 100x worse
Fucking bitch
because react has event hooks
I can just listen to the changes
then display the modal and get done with it
All other processing is done in the backend
IT'S THAT SIMPLE REACT
Validation is provided by the backend, Just fucking use regex in the frontend and that's it
IT JUST NEEDS TO DO SIMPLE THINGS
IT DOESN'T TAKE ROCKET SCIENCE TO DO MINIMAL WORK

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

I recently got into an argument with a random person on internet about the new Corsair XENEON FLEX OLED, the new fancy one that you can make curved or flat…
In my opinion it doesn't make any sense, curved is better, in particular with a 45" display, so it's a cool technology but useless in this case.

Apparently this guy thinks "for work is better flat, for gaming curved".
It made me thinking… really?
There is someone out there (and maybe here) that uses huge flat monitors or when have 2 puts them parallels to each other and not turned towards himself at an angle?

It seemed a random bullshit, but maybe I could find some valid arguments why "flat is better for work" or not. 🤔

Imagine studying for a computer related course and to makeup for living expense, you go for part time jobs.

Now, is it just me or this is just a bad idea to get into a part-time job that is no where related to your study field?

It doesn't make sense to work in MacD or some retail outlet at all.

Any thoughts?

iOS Storyboards in Xcode feels like Dreamveawer. This Autolayout and Safe Area shit doesn't make any sense. As for Xcode itself it's a monstrosity, looking forward to purging that and reclaim my disk space.

Persisterising derived values. Often a necessary evil for optimisation or privacy while conflicting with concerns such as auditing.

Password hashing is the common example of a case considered necessary to cover security concerns.

Also often a mistake to store derived values. Some times it can be annoying. Sometimes it can be data loss. Derived values often require careful maintenance otherwise the actual comments in your database for a page is 10 but the stored value for the page record is 9. This becomes very important when dealing with money where eventual consistency might not be enough.

Annoying is when given a and b then c = a + b only b and c are stored so you often have to run things backwards.

Given any processing pipeline such as A -> B -> C with A being original and C final then you technically only need C. This applies to anything.

However, not all steps stay or deflate. Sum of values is an example of deflate. Mapping values is an example of stay. Combining all possible value pairs is inflate, IE, N * N and tends to represent the true termination point for a pipeline as to what can be persisted.

I've quite often seen people exclude original. Some amount of lossy can be alright if it's genuine noise and one way if serving some purpose.

If A is O(N) and C reduces to O(1) then it can seem to make sense to store only C until someone also wants B -> D as well. Technically speaking A is all you ever need to persist to cater to all dependencies.

I've seen every kind of mess with processing chains. People persisting the inflations while still being lossy. Giant chains linear chains where instead items should rely on a common ancestor. Things being applied to only be unapplied. Yes ABCBDBEBCF etc then truncating A happens.

Extreme care needs to be taken with data and future proofing. Excess data you can remove. Missing code can be added. Data however once its gone its gone and your bug is forever.

This doesn't seem to enter the minds of many developers who don't reconcile their execution or processing graphs with entry points, exist points, edge direction, size, persistence, etc.