A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

So this fucking happened today.

Me: *sees support ticket coming in about some kind of login issue*

Me: *opens issue*

"Hello, I can't seem to login. There's an error"

Me: *sighs and thinks "at least give me that FUCKING error message then." *kindly replies with asking if they could send me the error message*

"Here it is. I don't understand what is going wrong
and what I have to do"

Me: *looks at error message*

"Invalid customer ID. Please make sure that your ID is correct. You can find it in the activation email we sent you when you registered".

😐 😶 😦

Me: *thinking okay what the fuck, are you fucking retarded or something?*

Me: *kindly replies: "It seems that you are not using the correct customer ID. You might want to look for it in the activation email we sent you!"*

"Oh okay thanks, how did you figure that out?"

Me: 😵 😐 😶 😭 🔫

Seriously what the actual fucking fuck.

There's this guy where I work who's one of the senior linux engineers. To me, he's like a linux god. He knows how to solve the most difficult problems and somehow copes with all the stress/workload. Next to that, he's only one year older than me!

Whenever I'm at work, I consider myself a junior, which I actually am. I also, as said earlier, see this senior guy as a fucking linux god and consider myself to be an absolute newbie around him but he is the most kind/friendly guy ever.

But then, today, something happened which made me feel like a god in front of him, a very, very weird feeling.

For him, doing his stuff is the most normal thing in the world while for me, it's still a learning process.

For me, programming is the most normal thing in the wold, while for him, it's still something he just knows the very basics of.

He asked me if I knew something about javascript/jquery. Said yes as I often program/script in javascript.

Explained me what he wanted to get done, it was a very simple thing for me but after hours of online searching, his lack of javascript knowledge still got him nowhere.

Told him I'd give him a working script in 30 minutes. Emailed it to him in 10.

He seemed/reacted the way I always do when he solves something I have no clue how to solve.

It was really weird to witness *him* being amazed of something that *I* made/did.

Today was a good day where I saw that one person's limitations can be anothers' most easy thing, even if that another person sees that one person as a god.

3 years ago.....

*lunch break. In a table with 2 other co-workers*

Me: "I am going to quit today!"
Co-worker 1: "What? I am going to do that today too!"
Co-worker 2: "Are you serious? I was planning to do that too today!"
Me: "Holy cow! Let's do that today the three of us, but I am going last one. I want to see his face (our CEO)".

After couple of minutes and disagreement, we agreed to do that.

When I told him (I was the last to tell himm), he was sweating and his face was red. Started to throw offensive words towards me. I was expecting that and came prepared. BUT, in the middle of his words saying "I hire you because no one would hire you" etc, quietly and with a smile on my face, I interrupted him saying, "Look, is this going to take long? Because I gotta go somewhere and I am not in the mood to listen to you!"

He started to shake from that rage he had inside him. I know he wanted to punch me. But nothing happened.

I still remember his face like it was yesterday. :P

Epilogue:
My aunt's husband and him were best friends. He called him saying what happened. Of course, I was the one to blame. Since my parent knew what kind of guy he is, they told me "You did good for being quiet, not screaming and not acting like a child!"

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

So this happened today.

Client: hey I sent this ticket, what's the status/have you located the issue?
Me: well, it says it quite obviously in the error message...? (i actually said that, toned down afterwards a little)
Client: where's the error message then?
Me: 5th line....? It's literally there in plain english?
Client: ok so what does it mean?
Me:..............? "marked as spam by the receiving server"?!
Client: yeah ok but what does that mean?

😐

Thing to keep in mind: they're a web dev/email solutions company.

😐😩

My worst nightmare:

it's not the code what's wrong during testing.

It's the unit tests themselves

Today I met a girl who’s super cute, down to earth, smart, uses no social media, and games. I would normally wake up soon after such dreams, but this actually happened today. I asked her out before it was too late 😊

So this happened at work today....

/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

This actually happened today

Colleague: Hey man I think there's a problem with my computer.

Me: Alright, I'll check it out.

(I go to his desk and find that his screen was turned off)

Colleague: It just suddenly turned off.

Me: (presses a random key on his keyboard)

(Screen lights up)

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

So this happened today. I'm bad at remembering names so I always have to ask again.

for($i=0;$i<15;$i++)
{
Me: what was your name again?
Client: well, it still IS {name}. I'm still alive, you know.
😅😰
}

Colleagues noticed it as well 😅

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

Woke up super positive today. Felt like it’s going to be a productive day until this happened.

Co-worker: hey, can you create an email?

Me: yeah, who needs one? There are no records indicating any new people starting for another two weeks.

Cw: if for Stan, he started today. Also he needs a computer set up.

Me: who the hell is Stan and why are there no records of this person?

Cw: he's new, he started today so we didn't need an email or computer before today.

Me: I get that they're new, but what happened to giving the IT department at least 3 days notice on new hires so I can make sure things get taken care of?

Cw: you know how it is around here, nobody gets notice for anything. So can you get that email and computer setup for me, he can't work without them.

Me: I get that we don't actually plan for anything around here and that 90% of my job is fixing that failure, but hiring someone isn't like a system failing, people don't just show up and say "I start today" they have to go through interviews and background checks and other stuff, someone besides this person knew they started today so I don't think it's too much to ask that I get an email when the offer is extended to the person so I can prepare a system.

Cw: well we interviewed him two weeks ago and he accepted the offer last week, he's here and waiting so just as soon as you can please.

Me: well here's an email, the computer is gonna have to wait, I have a lot going on today and I don't have any computers ready right now.

*Seriously tempted to make them wait till next week to cover the 3 days notice I've asked for 100 times*

Today the inconceivable happened at the office. A rather attractive female colleague of ours asked if anybody could help her with a Java related issue.
Of course the majority of guys were more than willing to help.
A victor finally emerged. He went on to claim his prize by helping the fair maiden.
After a few seconds..."This is not Java. It's javascript'
I shit you not we just exploded in laughter 😂

!rant

So this happened in the zoom meeting today. 2 colleagues were arguing on something.

A : "Do I look like f**king joke to you?"
B : " No, you don't look like a joke , your camera is off. But you sound like one. "
A : "I am so tired of you , f**k you man"
B: " Hey you can't f**k me without my consent, I said I am not interested."

Me : "Uhm guys this is scrum meeting."
B: "No shit captain obvious, we all know that. "

I am so speechless.....

!rant

I feel darn good today! I caught some A-holes cheating the system on Stack Overflow.

So basically a question was asked with no code examples present and not a single reference to any framework being used.
The tag only had 'javascript', which probably limits to only 157.244.457 existing frameworks.

I'm commenting something like 'Show us your code so we can have a look'.

After 2 minutes, out of the blue, an answer appears. AND WOW! This guy had a Magical 8 Ball™!
He could predict the framework AND had a very specific fix. Just a one-liner! Go figure!

So I'm like thinking.. What the fuck just happened? Did I miss something? «Going over the question two more times»

All of the sudden, up-votes start popping up all over the place. The question was marked 3 times, the answer was marked an up-voted multiple times, and THEN it hit me (I'm kind of slow).
I checked both user profiles and instead of the usual 'air of mystery', these guys were actually dumb enough to include their company name.

AssertEquals == true.

So in the comment section, I raise my concerns on the legitimacy of the question as clearly this was 'telephoned' as we say it in Dutch, meaning as much as 'rehearsed' in this context.
But as if that was not enough, this another guy comes in and COPY/PASTED(!) the answer of guy #1. Again. Up-votes. EVERYWhere.

So I start going over some of the questions and answers of The Three Musketeers or TTM, as I'll refer them as of now.

TTM had posted over 15 questions combined, mostly crap and incomplete no-code questions. And they had answered most of their own questions.
Sometimes another guy's answer was accepted with zero up-votes as a smoke screen while the real winner was one of their own.

I marked ALL of these questions for moderation, left for lunch, and came back to see how far my blast radius reached.
Turns out, pretty damn far! Although their accounts have not been deleted, TTM have lost most of their reputation points.

They will remain on my watchlist for a couple of months. I know that is quite childish of me, but I just call it my 'guilty pleasure'! ;D
And besides, what else is there to do, instead of browsing DevRant?

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

So this happened to me today.

After spending the whole night coding / watching Netflix I was sitting in my chair and looking at my screen with VSCode (dark theme of course) open. It was pretty dark in my room because the only source of light was my computer screen, which was still pretty dark because of the dark theme.

So, while looking at my code I suddenly noticed that the room had gotten a bit brighter. I wondered wtf was going on.
I looked out the window and saw that the sun was rising. Then I looked at the clock:
5:30 am.

Me: 'oh, lol'

My words to live by...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

So...
I'm penetrationtesting a network and the servers on said network
The network administrator and IT security officer knows this, because they hired me..

TL;DR a scan caused the network to crash.

Today I received a very angry email going "Stop scanning NOW!" from one of the IT departments.

Apparently I crashed their login server and thus their entire network...
It happened d the first time I scanned the network from the outside and they had spend an entire day figuring out how and repairing the service they thought was the problem, but then it crashed again, when I scanned from within the network.

Now they want to send me a list of IP's that I'm not allowed to scan and want to know exactly what and when I'm scanning...

How crap can they be at their job, if they weren't able to spot a scan... The only reason they found out it was me was because the NA had whitelistet my IP, so that I could scan in peace...

Very funny/random/weird partly non-dev related story that happened today.

We're selling our coffee machine at work since the coffee is gross.

Someone wants to buy it and wants it to be sent.

Coworker: just the general way through a package?
Other coworker: hmm yeah through post is fine
Me: POSTAL PIDGIN
other colleague: BY PENGUIN
Another colleague: BY LIKE 100 PENGUINS FLYING THAT THING THROUGH THE AIR WITH LIKE WIRES ATTACHED TO IT
Me: just hold on for a second and imagine this graphically...
Colleagues: damn that would be fucking genius xD

Yeah we're quite random 😆

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

So this shit happened today...

We were asked to implement a functionality on the device that allows it to go to standby mode to save battery power. Once the device enters that state, it can only be woken up by actual bus-network activity, and usually that means connecting a shit-ton of wiring harness and network emulation devices... Before implementing and releasing the device software that does this, we told that fucktard customer how difficult it would be for him to connect to the device without such a setup. He seemed to be fine with it and said rather arrogantly that we should implement the requirement as asked...

Well okay you cock-sucking motherfucker, you'll get exactly what you asked for... We implement the functionality and deliver the software...

Now this pile of shit comes back running his mouth on how the device tears down all its interfaces (to reduce power consumption) and he can't connect to the device anymore.... Well what else were you expecting you dickhead.
To make things worse for me apparently he runs to the manager describing his apparent problem. Both of them come to my desk.. With that fucking Bastard hiding his smugly mug behind the manager's back... He thought he was going to have the upper hand... Well guess what fucked piece of shit, I came prepared... I showed the manager how this was a part of the requirements by throwing that JIRA ID in their faces... The manager seems to understand but this relentless fuck wanted me to implement a "workaround" that would allow him to connect to the device easily... The manager almost had me implement that workaround, when I expose a huge security flaw in doing so. Guess what, now the entire team comes to my desk and start supporting my statement... To make it better they also tell how doing so will violate other requirements...

I've never felt so happy in my entire fucking career, when the entire team stood by me and watched that asshole drag his sorry ass back to his place

A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.

This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:

B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)

Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.

Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.

"This is wrong!"

"What is this?"

"Change it!"

devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.

She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.

Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.

Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.

Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!

But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.

She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.

She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.

"Hello," said her boss.

"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"

"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."

"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."

Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.

She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:

*Important. Please read.*

She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:

*Hello.*

*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*

*-B/N*

Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?

That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."

Her boss didn't write this.

He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."

She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.

Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.

Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.

Had to switch to a MacBook due to my new employer and the layout is driving me crazy!

Almost 20 years I've been typing the @ by altgr+q (German layout).

At the same position is now command.

And command+q closes the current window instantly.

This happened almost 10 times today...

The Indian state of Kerala uses Linux(Edubuntu) in all the schools. This incident happened back in 2010. I was not that proficient in Linux but I liked it for some reasons.

So one day, one of my IT teachers was handed the responsibility to edit a video. Being the School Student IT Convenor, he asked for my help. I'm no Video Editor but this thing was so easy that Openshot was enough.

While I was at it, he said: "Why does the govt. want us to use such unprofessional stuff? If it was Windows we could do everything very easily. Who is ever gonna use Linux in a professional environment? The govt. is spoiling the children by urging them to use Linux, Free Software and Open Source."

I couldn't argue that day. But today I so wish I could go back and roast him!

Just wow. I am amazed by what just happened.

A year ago my parents decided to switch from desktop to laptop for convenience. Knowing their needs, i bought them one without an OS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. The thing is that if you do a regular maintenance of the laptop once a year at their partner company, you get additional 4 years of warranty (this offer is amazing).

So today was the day I brought the laptop for this maintenance for the first time. They make you a profile on their support website where you can track shit regarding your device, super convenient. First thing I notice that the login page was not https. Awkward, but there is no sensitive data here so i let it pass. Naturally i forgot my password, so I requested a new one and guess what? I recieved it in plaintext via mail. A tech repair oriented company does this, my god.

I went there, gave them the laptop in question and got a piece of paper, where they wrote that the laptop is in their hands now, and the current physical state of the laptop, and blabla.

I got home and I read what the guy wrote among other things: THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT LEGAL.

How the fuck is Ubuntu not legal??? What the fuck is this shit? I sure as hell didn't torrent it or bought a booteged copy on the streets.

Oh damn....I just realized that I am working with a scammers' company. They wanted us (new employee) to create an app behave like keylogger for Android(not in Google play , because Google with ban this one).

Today I asked the manager about our salary. He said that our salary are based on commission. So look what happened, one of my colleague disappeared since yesterday (as in not coming to work without warning)

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

Fresh internship story/conversation (Part 1)

Happened today:
- "Can you hack someone via cmd?"-cheap coworker at my internship workplace
- "Can you hack the NSA from any device?"-cheap coworker
- "Can the police identify me, if my face is on a Youtube video?"-cheap coworker
- "I can see all devices I have been through when I want to connect to a target as a route.
*talks about hops in a trace route, but uses non-technical terms for it*
*uses "ping host wikihow.com" instead of "tracert wikihow.com" to demonstrate it, besides of that "host" was not supposed to be there in that command*
*he had to google how to use the ping command on Windows*
*finally uses the ping command properly*
"Here, you can see all the devices our machine has connected to to reach the target"
ME: Aha. But dude... you know that all these ip adresses are in fact the same ip. These IPs are not any different. They are all the same. Besides of that this IP is the IP of this *points to domain name on windows cli* domain.
Him: Oh... I had a friend named ... *continues telling me some "hacker stories" from his past*
Me: *ignores him and always just responds with "Aha" to him* -cheap coworker

Happened yesterday:
- "You have programming classes? You must be an expert in Excel then, right?" -internship boss

So, I got bored today and this happened 😜

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Weirdest thing happened to me today.

My teacher spots me browsing "Hack This Site" and I'm sent to the tech lab for a "diagnostic test" ?????

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

I'm so pissed today .... As someone decides to drop the entire database and the backups intentionally because he is jealous of my department doing better .

While I was coding and accidentally punch against the wall and this happened

my boss have a weird habit of asking plan to us...this happened today

boss: What's the team plan today?
me: Not getting frustrated..
other devs: <claps>

This was a fun thing that just happened:

I was sent a timed questionnaire by a potential employer for a software engineer job. I'm like okay, I will do it on Monday (today) because that is when I will have a free minute.

Well I sit down to do the thing and I had had a few beers, because the Ballmer Peak is real to me when I have to answer bullshit programming quizzes.

Well F me right in the A, it is a 38 question true or false logic quiz. And I am no longer a college kid trying to get into grad school so I have no patience for that crap, and apparently less with a little beer in me. Long story short, there was no comment section for me to rant in so I decided to go on YouTube and watch cat videos instead.

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

This happened today...
Manager: how long this is going to take?
Dev: 3 months
M: cool! 3 weeks then
D: no.. This is quite complicated and most of us are unfamiliar with the topics. It'll take us 2 weeks just to get started
M: drop the unit tests then. Just get the features done in 3 weeks. We have customers waiting
D: that's a bad idea. We'll end up with unstable co..
M: oh we also need to complete documentation, release guide, and this [shitty feature no one care about]
D: but that is even more complex. We don't have enough ti..
M: just copy it from stackoverflow. It'll only take 5 minutes guys

Worst part? This guy is technically sound and understands our pain really well. He is just acting dumb and trying to put the blame on us when the higher management asks

Second worst part? The whole team keeps silent when I try to convince him somehow and starts ranting after he leaves the call

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

This happened via mail thread today.

Boss: we need this new brilliant feature I just made up and running asap! Top priority, it has to be done well, for my reputation is on the line!

Me: *looks at the specifics* 'kay, looks easy enough, this evening max and it will be ready. I just nees some extra info about what kind of data validations (I speak no accountant) are needed, and some other details (a total of 3 questiona).

B: Sure! Remember, it needs to be perfect, as my reputation is at stake. Call me on the phone and I'll give you the details!

M: Can't you answer via mail? Thua way both me and the other devs will have clewr guidelines

B: Just call me! Why do you need it to be written down? It's faster this way!

...Fine. I'll keep asking until you're ready to give me a written answer to my questions. No way I'll take security details via phone for something you want in production this evening. No chance in Hell I'll take responsibility for "misunderstanding" what you said on the phone. Why does it always has to be like that?

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

!dev

So, the house next door to me is being renovated into half a dozen apartments. This process has been ongoing for like 4 years of here-and-there houseflipper failboating, and if I had to guess, 3 owners worth of this fuckery.

The latest shitheel trying to polish this turd into something saleable has had it sit partially covered with plastic for months, mostly getting rained on. One crew came by last week and put half the thermal shielding up before something happened and they left. Then half of it fell off the house, into my yard. Nice person that I am I gathered it all up and left it in the various excavated pools of water on their property in which I can only imagine they are busily raising farm to table mosquitoes for the local market.

FF to today and I see a crew pull up to the house and start nailing plywood to the side of the house with no thermal pad underneath it. Which is a legit code violation and a mold hazard, but yolo amirite? I chat up some of the guys and find out that they were scheduled to install the plywood today (apparently he'd run out of money for the nice modular siding they used on the back half) and the owner didn't give a shit if the rest of the work was done. Meanwhile shit is still falling off the house onto my house, but also wgaf. 🚬

Tl;Dr the people trying to flip the house next to mine were obviously IT managers in a previous life.

Okay so this happened ages ago (nearly five years) but this suddenly came to my mind again.

It was in the first year of my study (currently in my 5th and last year).

I was experimenting around with php and mysql during some free hours. All the insert,delete and so on statements worked perfectly find except for one update statement. Started to debug of course and after a little while of no results I was like "oh yeah right, something like logs exists of course". Looked in the logs but nothing. No matter how I altered my code (rewrote it numerous times for some 'clean starts') it just would not run the update statement.

Alright, time for some class mate help. After multiple hours of debugging with a few classmates, there was still no result at all.

Time to bring in one or more teachers. After hours of debugging, still no result even with the help of a few good teachers.

Decided to give it a rest for that day.

Two weeks later it still was not updating anything/working and I finally gave up.

Till today, I still have no clue what went wrong and it still bugs me from time to time :/

Java script is like an angry girlfriend who won't tell you what is wrong.
This shit happened today.

Me: somearray.includes[stuff];
JS: I'm alright everything is fine.
Me: no it's not, Clearly the feature is not working.
JS:* silence*
Me: Fine be that way.. * spends lot of time debugging finally finds the issue*...oh shit.
Me: somearray.includes(stuff);
JS: I SAID NO TRAILING SPACE IN END OF THE LINE YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT NO TRAILING FUCKING SPACES AAAAHHHH!!!

My manager who promised me team change soon.....resigned.
I thought the worst had happened.

Then my team lead with whom I had issues was promoted as manager for our team.
I realised worst was yet to come.

And then today, in one day....I reached out to HR and then my Director and got my team changed

Now feels peaceful.

This is just temporary solution as I was mentally getting affected. I don't plan on staying in this company for longer....

It's finally happened. I've used my mail servers for about a year to give out different email addresses on my domain to things I sign up for online, and only used my "actual" email address that received all this email for the whole domain but the single one that I used outbound for private communications.

This worked well for a long time as I could see when spam comes in, where it came from by looking at the email address I designated it. Each company's email would be sent not only from an email address that they choose, but also to an email address that I choose. It allowed me to easily determine where there were problems. For example, on Freenode IRC my vhost happened to make my username@host there a valid email address. It eventually got blacklisted due to too much incoming spam as crawlers started detecting it. Another one was "nickname"@my.domain as I posted it a few times here. Got crawled as well. But it allowed me to easily blacklist each.

I'd never thought my actual outbound email address, my real one, to get crawled though. That would require the mail server of a company I explicitly communicated with to get hacked. But today that happened. I wonder whose it is, but I can't tell.

Time to make my outgoing email bound to a designated email address as well. I want to know which companies this happens to, even if they don't disclose it.

One of those things that put a smile on my face happened today.

I (like many devs) am fond of Linux. So I use Linux on everything.

I'm currently doing an internship abroad in Finland(Linus Torvald's country!) for my college.

So there is this Finnish student who uses Linux. And after a while he asked what I was using so I told him that I'm running linux(arch+i3 like all the cool kids).

So one day he was like; But can you game on Linux?
I was like, yeah sure, might not work as well as Windows but some games run native and some can be emulated through wine. He was like; Hmm maybe I'll try it out.

So he installed Linux mint on his laptop and came to work. I was rather proud (even though he installed the bastard child of Debian and Ubuntu).

So far I've helped him set up streaming games from his pc to Linux and port forwarding.

But then came the big boy. Since I always try to teach him some stuff since they don't teach him a lot at his school.

He asked me if I could help him set up a plex streaming server on Linux.

So we took an old computer and installed Ubuntu Server(Lot's of information for it).

Installed and configured plex server, qtbittorrent-knox and all kind of goodies.

I started showing him how to use ssh, how the rights system works, etc.

It broke my heart a little that he want to be able to teamviewer in it.(since it's running openSSH daemon)

So he installed Ubuntu's desktop ontop of it as well as teamviewer.

It ran slow as hell because the PC has an old crummy core2duo and ddr2 2gb of ram. It chokes when multitasking.

So seeing that as well as telling him everything that can be done with a GUI can be done in CLI.

I saw the lightbulb lighting up. He gets it now. He understand the power of Linux.

That just made me smile all the way home.

being told to lead a team of junior developers for a project when i was 18

i never had any formal CS education so i thought the management was joking, but a week after, i was called into a meeting with the junior developers and we were tasked with a project that needs to be completed within 4 months, with me as the lead

the project was successful and after that im occasionally given the task to lead a project every now and then

this happened a few years ago and its still the most confidence-boosting experience ever happened to me, the things i learned during those 4 months are still applicable to my career today

I watched today one of our devs working in Windows with a Docker Environment.

I think I'm pretty insensitive regarding pain, horror and morbid stuff.

But damn. I really needed to turn off the stream or else I'd walk to the company and rip his fucking workstation out of the server rack to put it out of his misery...

Errors? ignore them....

Weird python messages? Ignore them...

wild copy pasta between notepad++ containing shell commands and a git bash... Per mouse context. Yes. Move the cursor, mark the text, right click, copy, go to terminal, right click, paste.

Understanding of whats happening. Zero. Like literal zero.

He was wondering why there were strange characters when he pasted log output in a text file...

My question: How do you think colored text works in a terminal environment?
was answered by : "Don't know, never thought about it. But don't think this has something to do with the weird characters?"

I don't wanna talk about the rest.

Retarded humanity can please kindly kill itself so the intelligent above average nice people can live in peace...

The meeting was 2 hours. I drank 5 bottles of beer after it in1 hour and I'm please to announce I'm forgetting large parts of what has happened.

Cheers.

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

today is my first day using windows 10
and this happened

Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...

At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...

At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...

In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...

A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...

Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman

FUUUU!!!!!! 3h of colleagues work gone in sconds.. & yes, actually it is all my fault, even though I was not aware of being a totall ass at that time..

What happened?! You know the ctrl+s shortcut?! Yes? Weeeell...doesn't go well with oracle sql developer and packages.. o.O

I was totally unavare that I was typing in ctrl+s ctrl+s all the time. I know I do that with c# code.. Anyhow, when I first moved to sql developer from other tool I noticed that compile thingy.. Oooops, ok, let's remove that shortcut to not stab yourself absentmindenly and overwrite other peoples work.. OK that's taken care of, shortcuts removed and I go back to work..

It's been almost 6 months since the move & first incident and today I guess I did the same.. ctrl+s.. But this time I wasn't so lucky.
Coworker pissed off, that is not my procedure. When did you compile?! Someone overwrote my code..
Wasn't me.. Then I started thinking about ctrl+s.. OMFG!! I check this on another package, it compiled. O.o I almost died. I check the shortcuts. They are back! And even after removing them the package still compiled.. FML!! 😭😭😭😭
I removed them again & closed the tool. Reopended.. BACK!! We're back to fuck your life up!! Fuuuuuuu!!

Now I worry wtf else I fucked up without notice.. o.O hopefully not much.. I hope.. O.O boss will kill me...

BTW anyone knows how to really get rid of this feature?! Cuz for me its a bug (since I am buggy and press ctrl+s all the time.. )

!rant

Today was a lot. I heard water outside and some shouting, come to find out the upstairs neighbor’s pipe burst. Spent the next hour or two collecting as much water as possible in the coolers we have to try to move it to the storm drain and protect the downstairs neighbor’s apartment. You'd be amazed how much water can fish out of a broken pipe.

Spent a nice hour or two chatting with the downstairs neighbor after they asked what happened (having just realized the water was shut off and having missed all the activity).

Was just settling down from that when I heard a kid screaming for help and panicked shouting. Come to find out my favorite neighbor is unresponsive and can't breathe and her kids are all panicked and waiting for the ambulance. The 911 operator is trying to give them instructions but they're too panicked to listen. I get them to move her onto the floor, then finally get the oldest to do chest compressions until the ambulance shows up. The paramedics managed to get her back, she was breathing on her own and talking, and take her to the hospital but it took a long time to get there. Hugged the heck out of everyone who seemed like they needed it and tried to say comforting shit that it seemed like they needed to hear.

I haven't felt this emotionally tapped out in a long-ass time.

Got pretty peeved with EU and my own bank today.

My bank was loudly advertising how "progressive" they were by having an Open API!

Well, it just so happened I got an inkling to write me a small app that would make statistics of the payments going in and out of my account, without relying on anything third-party. It should be possible, right? Right?

Wrong...

The bank's "Open API" can be used to fetch the locations of all the physical locations of the bank branches and ATMs, so, completely useless for me.

The API I was after was one apparently made obligatory (don't quote me on that) by EU called the PSD2 - Payment Services Directive 2.

It defines three independent APIs - AISP, CISP and PISP, each for a different set of actions one could perform.

I was only after AISP, or the Account Information Service Provider. It provides all the account and transactions information.

There was only one issue. I needed a client SSL certificate signed by a specific local CA to prove my identity to the API.

Okay, I could get that, it would cost like.. $15 - $50, but whatever. Cheap.

First issue - These certificates for the PSD2 are only issued to legal entities.

That was my first source of hate for politicians.

Then... As a cherry on top, I found out I'd also need a certification from the local capital bank which, you guessed it, is also only given to legal entities, while also being incredibly hard to get in and of itself, and so far, only one company in my country got it.

So here I am, reading through the documentation of something, that would completely satisfy all my needs, yet that is locked behind a stupid legal wall because politicians and laws gotta keep the technology back. And I can't help but seethe in anger towards both, the EU that made this regulation, and the fact that the bank even mentions this API anywhere.

Seriously, if 99.9% of programmers would never ever get access to that API, why bother mentioning it on your public main API page?!

It... It made me sad more than anything...

In the 1990s code editors on the Mac could insert the omitted function prototypes into a header file with one command; and even automatically keep the header declaration updated when you changed the source definition (name, parameters, etc)

Today in Xcode you have to copy and paste the stupid function header definition from the source code into the header file. What happens if you leave the "{" that got copied accidentally? OMFUCKING LORD, it triggers all sorts of erroneous errors in all the **source code** files where it is included instead of the header with the stray "{"

I started to question whether nor not I knew C, if gravity worked, if the sun would come up. I wasted a day of dicking around in StackOverflow trying to chase down all these insane error messages which make no sense in Xcode.

I just **happened** to see at the bottom of one of the source files, after all the erroneous error, a very important error:

"};" Expected

So I started deleting code from the bottom up in this source file, same error every time. Got to the point where the includes were all that was left.

FUCK YOU XCODE and the hacks that designed that horrendous piece of shit

Xcode is only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.

So to start off this happened today while I was at school.

Each student gets a netbook for school and the amount of restrictions put in place are probably up to government spec. Well I brought in my personal netbook and a flash drive with a few distros of Linux on it on it to mess with during study hall(all on my own hardware).

I told my friend that about it and said I doubted it would boot because the bios is password protected and the IT guy probably removed external drives from the boot list but let him use it anyway.

5 minutes later he is showing me his screen with Ubuntu running on it, I was freaking out some and asked for it back and he gave it back to me.

About a minute later he shows me his screen. All black with white text shooting down it saying windows disk integrity check or something like that. All I see is "file xyz deleted" and was freaking out even more. I just sat there for the next 20 minutes thinking of how to explain this to the IT guy and hopefully get in less trouble.

Finally after the longest 20 minutes of my life as a student I see the windows 7 boot screen appear. Probably the one time I actually wanted to see it honestly but I was so happy to see the end of the situation.

Sorry this was so long but I hope it's fine for a first post here, I've been putting it off but after this decided to finally post.

Fucking Amazon rant again...

TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.

Me on the phone with their support...

Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.

Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.

Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?

Support: let me put you on hold.

.......

Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?

Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.

Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.

Me: The one by the airport?

Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.

Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?

Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.

Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.

Support: There is nothing I can do sir.

Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?

Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.

Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?

Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.

Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....

Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.

Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?

Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...

Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...

Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?

Support: sorry

Me: have a nice day.

————

Here are my thoughts as a student of business...

Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.

However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)

Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)

I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.

But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

This happened today
My Manager: How is the progress so far on the search module?

Me(After implementing some crazy shit requirements): It's all set. APIs are working well against the mock in-memory database. I need an actual database to run my unit tests. Where do we have it?

My manager: Let's pretend that there is no database at this moment. Go-ahead with rest of your activities.

Me(IN MY MIND): F*CK you a** hole. You don't know the first thing of software development! Which a** hole promoted you as a manager!!!

Me(TO HIS FACE): Ah.. okay!! As you wish!

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

Had my first car accident today. I was taking a friend to school, we were down the street from our school. Person in front of me slammed on their brakes for no reason (light was green, nobody was crossing), so I did the same. Almost fucking hit them, but whatever. As me and my friend started to recover from that, we get hit from behind.

I remember just looking over at her when it happened and going "DID WE JUST FUCKING GET HIT?", she looks at me and says "I don't know what else it could have been"

The guy that hit us was a really nice guy. When me and the person in front of me slammed our brakes, the guy behind us followed, but it was raining this morning and he slid into my car.

So the guy called the cops, had an officer come, we exchanged information and everything (wasn't a bad enough accident for an actual police report). I called my insurance company, they said to call his insurance company, so I did. Filed a claim, told them everything that happened, then they called the guy, he confirmed everything and said the accident was his fault. But since my car is fairly old (it's a 2001 model), they said it might not even be worth fixing and they'll probably just end up seeing how much the car is worth and sending me a check.

The fun thing is, my cousin is my mechanic and he can also do body work, and the damage isn't that much, so he said he probably wouldn't charge much. So I'll probably get to pocket a good amount of the money (maybe like $700 max but still)

So, fun day.

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

In the past, the company that i worked gave to all the employees usb to save whatever they want, after that, this happened.

Me: Hi, how can i help you today?
User: The USB that IT gave to us it's broken.
Me: Broken?
User: Yeah, i can't plug-in in my computer.
Me: Did you try turn around?
User: Of course i.. ah, f**k yeah.

And ends the call.

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

Have a couple I want to air today.

First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...

Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).

Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.

The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.

One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.

To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:

switchport access vlan add XYZ

My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.

Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...

Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled.

So, this happened today...

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).

I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.

Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.

Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.

And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).

This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).

What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

Probably a !rant, idk
Some background info, I barely watch / talk about watching movies.

This happened today

Me : Let's watch a movie, it's been a while. ×3

Google *listening to me through the phone.* : Aww, there you go ₹20 play movies reward

Thanks, I guess?

About a month ago I had looked up SMS gateway services.

I had checked out twilio few times then.

Today this happened. Coincidence? I think not.

I am curious whether facebook IS listening to conversations or not.
Living with my girlfriend in a small appartment, yesterday we were talking about some shitty game we both played around 10 years ago, I was wondering whether the game still exists and googled on my phone (via LTE, not wifi) - yeah the game is still online and still the same shit.
Today she saw facebook sponsored ads to this game on HER facebook.

Today we watched a movie (Valerian and the thousands planets) - and there was this ship which looked similar to Millenium Falcon. I noted that in the midtime. After the movie - guess what - opened the facebook abd there was a sponsored ad to buy Millenium Falcon miniature or lego figure.

How? Randomized events? I do not think so. This was not the first time it happened.

Note: we are not native english speakers, maybe "millenium falcon" could be the only catch fb could achieve?

Booted up my Windows VM today. I was nearly able to read an email before this happened.

Some things never change...

So this happened today.
Trying hard not to judge :/

Later the person also said and I quote:

"It is a markup language or what? We had PHP for that."

Our IT-Class project: Mathematics trainer in Java
Day 1 (was monday)

TL;DR we didn't save.

So we formed groups and I landed in the UI team with, let's call him Mage and let's call her Goth.

We had an eclipse project folder on our desktop (they said it only works when put on desktop) Btw they didn't even want to use a cloud or something (I wish we'd use git and I'd finally learn it). We should take the changes by USB from computer to computer.

So me, Mage an Goth are making a basic GUI for this Mathematic-Training App. We use this thing from Eclipse but I forgot the name. It has not enough functionality on surface and I hate things that break complex things up to ease things but leave away so much.

So after a productive hour of building a GUI and centering shit by calculating the top and bottom distance and use margins (hurts me really but Mage was designing, Goth intensively calculating on paper), the bell rings.

Mage wants to save the project on my USB-Stick and bamm💥
A black screen.
I don't know how it happened but it sure had something to do with the USB-port looking like you fucked it with a way to huge🍆. It looked damn broken.

So because we have a nice App called HD-Guard, which fucking wipes the desktop on startup and resets all but the documents/images/videos/music folder —

It's all's gone. Today is day 2 of this project so let's see how today turns out.

So, basically what happened today was:
A classmate asked me if I could hack him some money in online games. Later on he saw me using an FTP Client and saied: "Whoa, if I was as good as you I would totally use my skills to hack something!!!"

Yea... no.

(Writing this I turned of aurocorrect cause it's pissing me of when writing english)

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

This is what happened today in our dayli:

Lead: We need to profile our software

Me: You can use the chrome devtools as remote profiler, even on prod, or make HAR files for later inspection.

Lead: Yeah but no that’s just collecting data on every tick, we need something like “has been called x times”

Me: Yeah but you can filt -

Lead: Yeah no, so back when I wrote code in Delphi...

Me: *oh god no not this again*

Lead: ... We could have clicked a button in our IDE and it would wrap the function call with the API call to profile that function ...

Me, to the secret dev group in slack: doesn’t a simple method decorator and node performance api help with that?

The people in the group: We had this topic last Friday all day...

Me: oh well *get’s coffee and ignores lead*

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

So today I opened one Android app to check smog levels in my area and this happened (NaN %). Someone who made this app smokSmog probably didn't find out that NaN can happen. I am really interested if it is because sensor has no data or is it a problem inside the app

So this happened today

3 months ago our company moved 10km away from where I live. So instead of 10 minutes to work, I now have 50 minutes. Great!

The moving was so rushed, they forgot to order a fucking internet connection.. So they panicked and bought 4x 4g modems and a 50 Mbit connection. This connection was then shared by the whole office of 50 people. The connection could barely handle our needs, and for 3 months all streaming or unnecessary use of the internet have been prohibited..

But today! It finally happened!
We got our fiber connection!
No more streaming from my phone!

Bye bye productivity!
Spotify and YouTube here I come!

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

So this happened with me today.
Me: Will you be Gradle of my Android Studio?
Girl (Designer): I can't build you.
Despite the negative, my affection increased twice fold on her now.

Today in some onboarding meeting i was laughing my ass off.

We were setting up the development machines that we got from the client to work on via citrix.

You guys probably know, that when you put your npm projects too nested into your filesystem, that packages randomly start not behaving because of too long file names or path names and stuff like that. That seems to be a problem with all OS (to be fair i havent actively looked for a solution, but it happened to me on Windis and Linux, so i'm just assuming here)

but even more so for some packages on Windis, when the project is not running on the same fucking drive letter than where your OS is running on. Like... wtf?

Had two UI5 projects pulled, both of them on D:. The first npm install went through flawlessly, the second one has a number of random errors, me and the other dev didn't know what they were. So what i suggested is to move this project onto C: and try it again. Turns out that was exactly it. Et voila, npm install ran through without any hiccups..

You know how my 'about' here says I create features from bugs?!? Well if you didn't before, now you do.. :P

Anyhow, today the most bizzare thing happened.. Customer played 'reverse uno card' on me..

Meaning?!

They reported a feature missing on uat env, when in fact I fixed a bug they have on prod..

Not sure how I should feel about this, but it sure made my day! (: I just hope they will not open a bug report for this missing bug..

CSS, I fucking hate you.

I fucking hate my job, because of you. I'm pulling my hair out every day, all day because I have to put up with your bullshit. If it weren't for you, I'd probably enjoy design.

You're not even programming. You're the mistake that happened when web-design developed too rapidly for the devs at the time to keep up and produce intuitive, functional tools. That, or they were just fucking sadists.

You're a band-aid that's started to rot, but we just keep sticking pretty stickers over you and pretending like the wound isn't festering.

I wish I could spend more time learning C and C++. Then I could go get a real job as far away from you as is virtually possible.

. . .

Look, just this once - just for today - could you please do what I fucking ask you to. I mean, I'm just asking you to do your fucking job. That's all.

OH
MY
GAAWWWWWD

The funniest thing happened today. I was helping a teammate rebase his branch onto master. Since his root was a merged local branch with 3 commits already in master, but squashed, we had to do an interactive rebase. So we have 3 commits to drop, and one to pick. He was using vsCode on windows, so he got vi to edit the rebase. I told him to change the first three pick for the letter d (alias for drop). Since he was not too familiar with vi, he only changed the first letter. I was like : dick is not a valid command, it's just d. Then he removed it and did the same thing again! When he finally understood, we both died of laughter,and so my ghost is now writting this rant. In the bus. Laughing like a crazy person. 😎

!dev

This has been an eventful week I guess. Not a happy week, however.

A friend of mine passed last Thursday. We weren't too close, but we were still friends, and he was very close to a couple other friends of mine. He'd always had health issues, but he was only 19. He hadn't been out of high school for a full year.

Then I just found out today that another friend of mine got arrested for shooting and killing someone this past weekend. I don't know many details about what happened, mutual friends are saying it was self-defense. He's never seemed like the kind of person that would just murder someone, but shit happens.

Had to fix an git-error today when the coworker checket out the repository. The culprit was a "\r" (CR) in a filename. None of us knew how this could have happened, but we think it happened when files were copied from windows to google drive and from there to a mac.

I should've become a gardener, or a butler, or someone else who secretly kills people.

Usually my workplace is pretty chill, but today something rantworthy happened!

During code review, I found this guy had styled each element inside his components using nth-child selectors. For instance, in a card the heading was styled by nth-child(1), the text was styled by nth-child(2) and so on... No use of actual fucking classnames.

When I pointed this out, he told me it was actually the better way of doing things because classnames increase the size of the HTML document!

He also claimed proudly that nth-child() is more efficient in performance (idk - anybody can confirm this?)

I'm the only "css guy" there so nobody could second my views. Posting it here so that I can show this to him tomorrow by demonstrating what opinion other css devs have on this and prove my concerns / convince him to change his code.

You know, I really like my Redmi 4x. It's a nice and inexpensive phone and perfect for me. Now I wanted to get the most out of my phone by rooting it, which was going to be easy.

I thought. And lord almighty was I wrong.

First of all, to even get to root it you have to unlock the bootloader. To do that you have to use a tool that they've made. Good! An official way to do so would surely be good, I thought. But to actually use the tool you have to be logged in to their service on both the tool and your phone. Then, and get this, you have to submit a written application as to why you would want to unluck the bootloader.

Ohh but it didn't stop there. I did so and months passed without me getting any info from them what so ever. When trying the tool it would just tell me that they hadn't reviewed my application.

Today I tried again, and something new happened. It told me that I hadn't synced my accounts. Which I promptly did because it's progress.

I tried for what should be the final time, aaaand I get this. This according to the forums means I have to wait 72 hours to be able to do it.

But it's progress, right?

Uuugggghhhh

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

Ok everybody, listen up.
For a long time, even before I knew devrant, I failed an exam and had to retake it. It was, and I think this is fair to say without exageration, the worst thing that had happened to me. Put me deep into an anxiety crysis that it was very difficult to escape from. Months of hard work, at the sacrifice of many other valuable things, helped me to climb out of this hole. It was a struggle, but I finally made it. Earlier today I retook the exam. It was great. Thank you for standing by in this difficult time of my life. We live in a post-thisfuckingexam-time. Many of my rants on here were influenced by this issue. Now they probably wont ever be again. Thank god, and thank me for keeping it up.

Tldr: i wrote an exam today.

Today morning my sales manager calls me and tells there is a bug in one of the integration module and he tells the client has called us yesterday pls come early to office today and fix it. I asked which end point they have issue, he replies I don't know. I don't know what is the bug where is the bug, but there is a bug when they send data to us, pls find and fix it before 11 am. The worst part of this is that integration module I never worked on and the person who developed it has left the company long before and there is no documentation. when I go to that folder I see many controllers and many end points. now how will I figure out the issue 😂 I don't even know the work flow of that integration. the bug reporter (my sales manager) don't even know at what end point what issue happened.

About today when I was trying to migration 2 million+ records simultaneously!

Ran two migration @ once and this happened!

PS: On restart everything is back to normal but lost 2 tables data which needs remigration!

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

So today it finally happened.

Npm modules broke my system and / or endangered the security of my system.

Installed a global cli utility
That utility depends on package A
That depends on package B

That fucking install a bin called sudo

Yeah.. You heard it right a bin called sudo.

This bin goes in the global module folder that is piped in your path variable.

Now everytime you type sudo you are running somebody else code instead of your system utility.

I am shivering and at loss of swear words.

Opened an issue on the cli that started this matrioska game of horror.

Who the fuck tought that a bin called sudo would be a good fucking idea?

Oh and yes is even an harmless package that try to provide the sudo experience for windows (I went in to check the code of course..)

And I frigging need that cli for work

For now I aliased the sudo in my bashrc still i feel vulnerable and naked now.

Just a short "dafuq?" about VS Code.

I have a MacBook Pro from last year, so it's a capable machine. And there I was today, sitting on the train, coding some Python in VS Code.

Suddenly it got all laggy. Like, one second behind my typing, dropping keystrokes, stuttery scrolling... the whole deal. The system itself was perfectly responsive and the activity manager showed the CPU at 30%. After a minute or so, it magically recovered and worked as if nothing ever happened.

What the actual fuck was VS Code doing? I mean, it's a fucking text editor. In 2019 this should be a bloody solved problem! There's absolutely no reason to use around 30% CPU in the first place, and use that much and still *lag*. Holy crap, and people ask with a straight face "what's wrong with reinventing everything based on web technologies?" Fuck everything Electron-based. Make it ElectrOFF already.

*takes deep breath*

So, editor suggestions are welcome. I used Sublime Text 3 before VS Code, I'll likely return to that.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

Just found out today that may FINALLY be able to start charging for the development work our team does. 😎

Just have to wonder why this could have happened ages ago.

**Spoilers**
It was the sales team. That's why!

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

This happened today... Not my finest hour...

$.ajax({
url: "someurl",
type: "GET",
success: function(data) {
//do something
},
error: function() {
console.log(error);
}
});

...

Browser Exception:
Error: "error" is not defined

FML

!dev but tech related...

Got a device configured in a location that is fairly far away from me. It operates only through a cloud service specifically for these devices, with one of the most unreliable web interfaces and smartphone apps I have ever used.

I email my issues to the tech support who don't seem to understand the problems and can't fathom the difference between "reset settings" and "restart device".

Eventually they need to log in to my account to find out whats wrong. I explicitly state that under no circumstances should any settings be changed.

Today I find that the device has been removed from the cloud account. I physically must be near it to register it on the account again. Tech support don't seem to know what happened and the best explanation is that it is "a glitch". They have no way to add it back themselves. I have to travel to the device.

Funny how this happened after I let them access the account...

Fucking panic!
First thing I see when I wake up today is an email from my colleague. It says we've lost a hell of a lot of user uploaded files in ALPHABETICAL ORDER. Also, it happened TUESDAY NIGHT.

This will be fun...

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Happened today... one of the senior devs was supposed to take an interview...
After a while I see a fb friend request from him while he's taking the fucking interview...
I asked him later about this he said the candidate was taking too long to solve the problem and while he was at it, I was surfing fb 😂😂

!rant && !!happiness;

I told you some times ago that I was almost fired then put in a new position as tester: my goal is to test if the functionality asked by the client works the way it should.

Today, after 3 months of doing this only, I got to speak with the lead developer, who pretty much saved my ass back then, and told me that not only he was pleased by my work, but he looked at the code I did and liked the organization I set up to handle multiple projects in one folder (trust me, it was INSANE), but he was also genuinely happy about how I'm training the new dude.

And pretty much suddenly, he told me that my logic and knowledge about development was better than some of the colleagues who were there 2 years before I started, I just needed a bit of work to make people forget about what happened in January.

Life is currently fucking good, it's almost sad I have nothing to rant about 😊😊

I work remotely from the rest of my team and I just came back from a 1 week vacation. Logged in this morning and no one else was online...

My first thought was WTF happened... did something blow up do bad they all gelot fired???

Turns out today is a holiday for them. So now I've a whole day of peace and quiet to figure out what the hell in supposed to be doing again.

Just want to put it out here... reading this will waste ur time. :(

Having a serious crush on co-worker. I tried not to have a crush on him initially because he’s a colleague and he seems to be much older(max 10 yrs I guess). Age isn’t an issue but ppl say it’s not good to like someone from work.

But then he kept on glancing at me and caught him turning back to look into my cubicle at several occasions. Saw him looking at my direction across the room, hall, turning back to look when he was waiting at lobby, and all the way from smoking corner as well. Could be possible that he just happened to be looking in my direction several times.
Now, haven’t seen him since early feb because of the quarantine. Luckily, I chanced upon his number when everyone in the dept was put into the same chat channel for the Covid19 news. I had this urge to ask what was it all about because we’ve been told to wfh till further notice. Who knows what could happen to us during these period.

So tried to be brave and asked abt why he was looking into my cubicles several times, without coming out weird (I hope). His reply was “dont know”. I don’t know what to make of it. Could have been anything else but how could someone just reply don’t know.

Then came yesterday, my friend was telling me about her experience on tinder. Apparently she’s been using it for fun and she got funny texts from the guys there. So I decided to give it a try. Man, it was so fun swiping left all the way (cuz they couldnt be compared with work crush) till I swiped right for this older guy. We matched!
He was the first one to match, probably abt 5-10mins after I’ve finished setting up profile and all that. It was totally a new experience for me. I forgot abt my work crush in that moment. He had this minimalistic vibe. Didn’t smile much in his photos, gave me calm feeling and looked so cool. He put “Everything is good in moderation” in the bio. He’s the only one comparable for that work crush. Not sure who’s supposed to start saying hi. My friends said wait for the guy, so I waited.
Got a few other matches after him but didn’t like them as much as him. I finally decided to say hi. No respond till today. Given that he put Doctor for his occupation, I assumed he’d be busy. So I waited. Then sent another in late afternoon asking if he plays LoL often (he’s wearing LoL land yard in one of the photos). No reply.

I started to feel weird because this is supposed to be light and fun because who takes things seriously on tinder, right. They’re there to flirt and kill the boredom especially because of the lockdown. And I started to have serious feelings for this one guy whom didn’t even bother to reply. So decided to delete tinder for good. Sent him one final msg that I really wanted to get to know him and I thought he’s a really cool handsome dude. But now that I’ve deleted my acc, he wouldn’t even see my msg anymore.

His profile name is Randolf. I want to get to know him in real life. But is it illegal? :(

Thank u for read this far. I just didn’t know where to put all those feelings. And sorry for wasting your time with nonsense.

Man soo much has happened. I broke ( 2. Months ago ) my main phone = Oneplus 1. Then I proceeded to throw my sim card into my backup phone = iPhone 4. So within that time I've started working at the same remote company my brother/ I work for as a python dev. But I am deffinatly learning as I go. Been there a month this week! So with this being my second job. I finally had enough money to buy nonessential so 4 day ago I ordered a new glass and digitizer assembly for my main phone it came today I fixed in just under 2 hours as my first phone repair. Pretty proud

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

M so angry at one of my faculties today!!

Basically, the faculty is utter garbage ( although he is supposed to b the best and most experienced guy ). He teaches us data communication but all he does is start up a presentation, read from there and tell that to us adding a thing or two...
Well we have been tolerating him for the entire semester at this point so... whatever, we have come to peace with the fact that we simply attend to get attendance...

But, yesterday, there was a seminar going on and I asked a question to the speaker... the speaker started replying and the faculty interrupted the speaker to crack an ill joke about me... and started laughing... I mean what the hell!!! Ur supposed to be a faculty and THAT is how u behave?!
Anyway, many people laughed... more so because of the way he laughed than his “joke”.
Made me burn with rage but i forgot about it thanks to the seminar being decent.

Today, he was checking our assignments... he became angry and the reason being we didn’t write answers from the presentation and instead used the Internet.

This is what he said:
“ I have given u the presentation and that is exactly where u will write the assignments from... if u wanna use the internet to find the answers, then why do u come to my class!! “
I literally wanted to say - “ to get freaking attendance!! “
Somehow I didn’t... my assignment wasn’t checked today so nothing bad happened...

And btw, the assignments that he gives r 30 terminologies ( words and meanings ),
And nearly 25-30 question answers...

Just go thru the presentation to get all the answers... and this is called “teaching” and “education” !!!! 😠😠😠😠

No research, no understanding, simply do as he says, even in quizzes, even if ur answer is correct but it is not exactly the point he asks, screw u!
He will scold u...

I CAME TO COLLEGE TO LEARN AND UNDERSTAND!!! NOT MUG UP UR STUPID ANSWERS TO PASS IN EXAMS!!!!!!

M now imagining ways to kill him 😠😠😠😠🔥🔥🔥🔥

An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.

Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:

HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);

And magic happened! The output was:

{1=1, 2=, 3=a}

That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.

I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

Cant believe this shit happened in my country today

A mass school shooting where a 13 year old kid shot and killed 9 kids, teachers and a security guard. Several other kids wounded and one girl having brain surgery

All of this because he got an F in history class

He was a quiet kid, well behaved, got straight A's and very intelligent. But he was reportedly bullied and no one did shit about it

This the type of shit you see in america daily. But now Serbia marks #1 country in europe with a school shooting

The kid planned all of this attack for 1 whole month. He drew a sketch on the paper of the school's pathway so he can know where to go, from enter door to exit door. Even wrote the names of kids he planned to kill, sorted from high to low priority

Due to Serbia's law, no one under 14 will be held accountable or go to jail for any crime, and this 13 year old kid was so intelligent of knowing this dumbass law that he executed on this plan Now in May because he turns 14 in July this year

Ironically, his dad was a well known doctor, and now the dad is fucked. Dad's gonna go to jail. Because the kid stole his dad's gun with 5-6 clips of magazine

Very bizarre

I have been a developer in one company or another for over 27+ years. Today I had to dismiss / fire / let go of a recently hired developer (a Senior by career length) on one of the teams I now manage. Basically imposter syndrome compounded with an inability to communicate a need for support (even when we reached out daily to assist).

When I had to let this person go I felt all the times when it happened to my colleagues , and to me. Like a thousand knives stabbing . It wasn’t easy.

It’s of course not easy to be dismissed . But it’s also not easy to be the one to dismiss.

Today i tried made some finishing touches on my discord bot. After dome struggling i finally managed to host it on heroku.

This is what happened after I put it on a real server and my dorm shut down internet access

I'm quite shocked today after receiving an email which acknowledges me with so much respect that I cannot handle, I mean this has never happened in my entire life, I can't even handle it

I already wrote this story in the comments to some other rant, still it's pretty funny.

So, i was modding my wii u by messing with system files, the only way to do this is to run an homebrew that hosts an ftp server so you can connect with your pc, the thing is, this server was not protected and allowed anonymous login, not an issue if you have a firewall.
BUT i had this console in the DMZ on the router for online play.
~You can see where this is going~
While doing stuff from my pc i started seeing a lot of entries on the console's log and i didn't understand why, i thought filezilla was doing some shit so i closed it but the log was still going, then i realized and quickly shut the server down.
Then i disabled the DMZ and went back to check what happened (unfortunately the log was only shown on screen and not saved, by closing the server i lost it) so looks like the attacker uploaded a lot of files with random names in pretty much every folder.
Due to the random names, I don't know which are system files and which attacker's files so i just kept them there. And today they should still be there.

--Random thinking--
What if the attacker also stole some files, he was hoping to get photos or valuable documents, but just got the console's system files and he thought something along the lines of "wtf is even this".
Also, how likely is that an ip scanner script gets to my ip in the 5 minutes i run the server, and (on the attacker side) how likely is to hack a server just to find out that's a wii u (the least successful console in the last generation)...

Moral of the story: double check your firewall if you are going to run an unprotected server.
That's it, stay safe :P

So, this has happened to me quite a few times
I write about 100 untested lines of code (I know, bad practice) and then go ahead to test it
As expected, the program crashes
Spend hours debugging, to no avail
And then I add a print statement to check where the code stopped, and hey presto! The code completes execution
I remove the print statement, the code gets stuck

Also, the codes don't use any low level functions that might be interfered by print statements anyhow

Till today, never understood how a print statement helps codes execute properly

You know when you have a project and everything is fine. Then everything turns into this big mess that you have no idea what does. And then you don't even know how to continue on the project so you decide to just start from scratch after working on it for a year?

Well that happened today.

Sysadmin and an ex-employee couldn't fix an issue with an application for many months even with vendor's instructions.
Today the job is passed to me and I follow instructions exactly and resolve the issue.
The other two guys must have thought 'we don't need someone else's documentation, we can fix it ourselves'

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I guess some things just need a fresh perspective.

First day in school after the holidays today. But I've got a bad feeling.
So basically I've been coding till 3am this night. I became tired and shut down my PC. I then pulled out my USB when suddenly a spark was coming out of the USB port. I had a really bad feeling about that. All of a sudden my PC started booting. The fans started spinning and the GPUs LED lit up. Then it was all off again. Aaand it turned on, and off, and on..... I just pulled the plug and went to bed.

Now I'm sitting in school and can't think about anything else but what could have happened to my PC :(

I can't believe this shit happened in time for this week's rant!

Here it goes.

I have a table on AWS Athena which has partitions. Now, in the earlier versions of this project whenever I write something to a new partition a simple `MSCK` query worked (and keep in mind I am NOT deleting anything)!

Now, my so called Team Lead in the PR for the latest (major) release tells me to change it to an `ALTER TABLE`. I was like fine, but I did not add the s3 location to it, because it was NOT NEEDED. TL asks me to add location as well. I try to convince this person that it's not needed, but I lose. So there it is in production, all wrong.

Today I notice that the table is all fucked up. I bring this up in the stand up. The main boss asks me to look into it, which I do. Figure out what the issue is. This TL looks at it and says you need to change the location. I put my foot down.

"NO. What I need is to remove the bloody location. IT'S NOT NEEDED!"

TL's like, "Okay. Go ahead"

Two things:

1. It's your fault that there's this problem in production.
2. Why the fuck are you looking into this when I was clearly told to do so? It's not like you have nothing to do!

I come into the office today and a new guy is sitting at my desk. alright, I introduce myself and explain this is my desk (btw I work in an office where some workers share a desk, me being the most senior tech the desk is reserved for me) and he gives me a dirty look, gets up, and doesn't say anything. could you be more of an asshole?
has this ever happened to anyone else ?

Well here it goes,

I started out in customer support (A lot of stuff to tell here).

1.
One of my colleagues would come to work drunk, like every day he would smell of boze (the hard stuff 80%+). When a customer got on his nerves he endet the call and threw his Keyboard across the room. He worked in the company 3+ Years after I left.

2. Another colleague would connect to his Personal Computer at his home and play WoW while at work ( Allthough the man was a genius with a lot of free time, until a new task was assigned to him)

3. My Boss at the time did some really shitty things. I worked 17 hour days (while I was 18) for a week, and at the end of the week he shredded the accrued overtime with some Bullshit Explanation. (I did not stay long after this shitshow happened).

4. A dispatcher who sent our technicians out scheduled their tasks so that they were on the road for weeks and did not see their families. This led to a very strong turnover among technicians.

And yes, this company still operates today.