An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

You know what?

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

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

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

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

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

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

"Just run "npm install" he says".

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

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

We'd been played.

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

I rewrote the app in Swift.

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

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

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

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

Mine are still working.

Customer: I need a program that can do this.
Me: Okay. We can do this. But we recommend you a gui.
Customer: Oh I don‘t need a gui. We have Windows.
Me: you will need a gui. Here you are a dummy programme without a gui. Try it out. Find out yourself.
Customer: I trust you. Dummy is fine. But it’s not ready yet, right?
Me: It’s just a dummy to show you what it means, having ni gui for that.
Customer: all fine i need this programme. Go ahead.
Me codes and silently makes one build with gui... ;) xou know what comes:
Me: here you are your programme.
Customer: how to use it? It is cryptic. A black window opens. I cannot click. The manual is full of text i habve to type. I don’t understand!?
Me: you need a gui.
Customer: Oh. I thought since windows 3.11 everything has one...
Me: pay me bucks I make you the gui.
C: meh. Okay here you are bucks.
Me: take this
C: wow so fast. This is cool. Take my money.

This sort of cognitive dissonance I will never understand. In first case ignoring my hints. In second recognizing my hints were true. But in third forgetting own stupidness and paying me extra-extra for what you ignored? Ethically I hated you so much for ignoring me, that I took your money, but you could have gotten me blaming me not selling you a gui... :D

Have a nice weekend

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

/*
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

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Client : your design is not cool. See this ^
*showed me some pretty neat designs pattern*

Me: which type do you want for your application.?

Client : All are pretty cool. Isn't it?

Me : Yes. But you do not need all of them. Right?

Client : Yes.

Me : So, which one.

Client : I'm confused But, this will do.

Me : Sure?

Client : Yes, very much.

After 3 days.

Client : you know what, earlier one was simple one but, best one. Easy to understand. This is (new design) making it complex. I need previous one.

Me : (I knew you'll say that, a**hole.) Just go to setting and select theme section to earlier version.

Client : thank you man.

Me : (You are red listed in my book you a**hole. Say anything else to add/edit and then see.) You are welcome.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Act I

Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO

> enter stage left CEO

CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"

Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"

> exit stage right CEO

Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit

Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"

Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"

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

The following has played out at more than one company:

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

*msg service team*

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

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

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

It's funny to see how a coworker of mine and me are very similar minded on some privacy stuff. He's a very cool/open guy and just a regular consumer (used the default services etc) but he shares quite some of my views. This is a convo we had today:

*got to the WhatsApp subject somehow*
Him: oh right, you didn't use that haha
Me: yeah 😅
Him: why was that again, privacy reasons or something, right? xD
Me: uhm yes *help*
Him: Well fair enough.
Me: so you'd think I'm right? I mean it uses end to end crypto... (I'm entirely with him in the next few lines but I always approach it carefully)
Him: they veeeery probably have some kinda fucking masterkey.
Me: why'd you think that?
Him: it has over a billion users, the owner is facebook, fb is directly integrated with several mass surveillance programs, they are known to work closely with one particular one, the intelligence interests are way too high for letting such an opportunity pass and after all, THE FUCKER IS CLOSED SOURCE AKA NO ONE CAN FUCKING VERIFY THE CRYPTO NOR THE APP ITSELF.
Me: I agree haha 😅
Him: it's not rocket science, it's modern day mass tracking/surveillance logic :)

I like that guy.

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Gotta love well meaning juniors with completely misplaced intentions.

Nathan: "Hey, do you want a quick 5 minute demo of the code we've changed to move to library version x?"

Almond: "Sure (I wasn't that fussed about moving to library x, but he seemed determined and there's some nice to haves with bumping the version, so we approved it.)"

Nathan: "Cool, so we have this built here, and..."

Almond: "...wait, that's not our CI system!"

Nathan: "Yeah, so I moved to a new CI system too because we couldn't get that working in the old one"

Almond: "...right, we'll need to discuss that, because..."

Nathan: "Sure, we also moved the templating engine as well as there were more examples using this one with library x"

Almond: "...yeah, so I don't think we're looking to switch the templating engine because..."

Nathan: "...and you guys also need to change a bunch of your code as it's all broken since we put the new version in, most of the tests fail..."

Great... so we've got a branch that breaks a bunch of code, switches the templating engine to one we don't want to use, and switches the CI to the one the company is trying to actively migrate away from...

Almond: "We're going to need longer than 5 minutes. I'll put something in the calendar."

🤦‍♂️😬😠

import LongRantKit
import NonRantKit
import TldrKit

I don't like stickers on my laptop because it clutters it up. But today I realized the importance of them.

A few months ago I was sitting at a coffee shop working on a paper and I noticed a guy with this cool sticker on a MacBook Pro: it had the integral symbol to the left of the Apple logo, and to the right of it a lowercase d and another Apple logo. It took me a few hours to realize what it meant, but I finally did and at that point I also guessed that not many people know what it is.

So I, as antisocial as I am, I finish up my work and before I leave I walk up to him and say hi. At this point I'm a senior in high school and I learn he's a junior in the same college I plan to attend. We talked a little before I had to leave and got to know each other somewhat.

After I leave I find him on Instagram and Facebook and friend him and such.

Recently I posted a picture saying I had recently joined the Apple Developer Team, and also recently reposted a memory on Facebook from 5 years ago that was a screen capture of an iPhone 4 simulator running iOS 5 showing off one of my first apps.

Then yesterday I get a message from the guy I met at the coffee shop asking for some help with an iOS project he's working on. We decide to meet today and I spend the entire morning showing him the basics of Swift, Xcode, Interface Builder, etc. I feel like I really helped him jumpstart his app and helped him understand the basics of different concepts.

If he didn't have that integral sticker on his laptop I would have never had this opportunity to finally share some iOS development experience.

For this I would like to thank my high school calculus teacher, with whom I spent many classes at Starbucks because I was an only student. I'd like to thank laptop stickers, and finally I would like to thank the coffee shop.

TL;DR: Said hi to a guy with an integral sticker on his laptop, a few months later he approaches me for help understanding iOS development.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

cw: I need a server to put my node backend

me: sure, I'll run a docker container for you

cw: nice, I've never worked with docker but I learn quickly, I'm already reading the Docker file docs

me: no wait, you don't need to learn anything, you'll be inside the container, so you only need an ssh connection and that's it

cw: this Dockerfile stuff is really complicated, it'll take me a while, but it's ok you don't have to worry, I like learning new things

me: you won't need that, just imagine it's a cloud server with Ubuntu installed, you only have to use it, I'll put node, git and ssh there for you

cw: ok got it, I'll have to learn the commands to run the docker, I'm on windows but I can use PowerShell and stuff I'll figure it out

me: ...

cw: ssh is a linux command right? does it have a push or publish option? how do you upload files there

me: ...you can use a ftp client but you'll need ssh to run the node server

cw: ok, I'm almost done with the Dockerfile, I only need to add git and nodejs, I'm starting to understand this thing...

me thinking: yeah keep doing that, you're such a crack, such a quick learner...

This son of a bitch is either a retard or is doing it on purpose and laughing at me the whole time, making my life so miserable, but I'm about to go insane with this dude, I'm proud of how I've been able to control myself, BUT ONE OF THESE DAYS I'LL LOSE MY COOL AND FORCE THIS MOTHERFUCKER TO DRINK A BIG POT OF BOILING, SALTY AND STINKING VOMIT WITH A SIDE OF STEAMING DIARRHEAL GREEN DOG SHIT WITH WHITE CHOCOLATE CHIPS WHILE I PUT MY OLD CRT MONITOR TO GOOD USE BY BEATING HIS FUCKING HEAD WITH IT!!!

!rant

I met my old school friends today. One of them was apparently showing off his programming skills too much(let's call him X). So much that he(friend X) was comparing Linus Torvalds with himself. And he was telling us that Linux is best because there are so many DEs and customisations and blah blah.

So one of my other friend Y(who's not into computers much) asked him to install Ubuntu on his laptop while we were sitting in cafe.(Y wants to play with command line mainly this semester according to him) So he started complaining that he does not have ISO with him and trying to avoid it.

I said I have kubuntu iso he can flash it right away. Then he(X) said "Kubuntu is too complex for him(Y)".(me in mind : " yeah, just because its a. DE, it becomes complex") So I searched in my phone (faked the search, basically renamed kubuntu iso to Ubuntu iso lol) and gave him " Ubuntu " iso

And this "pro developer" installed that on his laptop and after installation was completed he said that "OMG DUUUDE UNITY IS DEAD, EVEN UBUNTU SWITCHED TO KDE AS DEFAULT DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT, ITS COOL".

FFS

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


RANT TIME!

Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.

I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!

I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

How my year has gone so far...

Management: Bobby, we are replacing your old hammer.
Me: Ok cool.
Management: Well actually there's so much going on...here is a wrench instead.
Me: But, this isn't a hammer.
Management: Yes we are aware but we are busy and cannot buy a hammer for a several more months.
Me: How the fuck am I suppose to hammer nails with this?
Management: Oh gosh you are right. That sounds difficult. We will grind down one side of it so you have a flat surface to hammer in those nails.

Management: Oh and by the way, those nails are super important so don't screw anything up.

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

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.

It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.

The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.

They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.

The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.

All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.

It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month.

Programmer 1: We have a problem
Programmer 2: Let’s use RegEx!
Programmer 1: Now we have two problems

!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)

I'm not having a good time.

I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.

I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.

I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.

Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.

I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.

I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.

I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.

I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.

Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.

The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.

But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.

The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.

Fuck nurture, rule competition.

What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.

You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.

Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...

!rant
Just started working for a new company. Super cool. Just like the last one (as far as perks), except they actually trust their devs.

Old company: Make sure your code is extensible
Devs at old company: You know it's not written in stone right?
Old company: Does that mean you can make it do this?
Devs at old company: No. That's the wrong code base

New company: I need a feature. Get it done when you can
New company devs: Well, guess I'll take some time to refactor all this stuff while I'm at it
~Some time later~
New company: Thanks, that feature works great!

No staring over shoulders, asking when it will be done. No asking why we want to refactor something. As long as work continues to flow, there are no issues. It's great!

Also, if we want to try a new tech, we just have to put together a short paper explaining why it will work better in that situation than the tech that's already in place.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"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."

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Navbar is cool now, better than the older one. But can you please move this circle for creating a new rant to the right? Actually it's all over everything and really disturbs. And possibly also fade it Out when you scroll.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

This is something I'm proud of about myself as a developer, which is rare.

My setup with the Alt key.

All the keys in my left hand (as in, for all the keys in my left hand region, qwerasdfzxcv)
have their Alt and AltShift combinations mapped to (almost) all the special chars related to programming.
For example:
Alt + z -> /
AltShift + z -> \

Here's me typing them in 2 seconds.
{}()_-'"/:+=<>[]|#~`\;*!

And, on my right hand, I emulate the arrow keys movement:
Alt + hjkl moves chars
AltShift + hjkl moves and selects chars
AltCtrl + hjkl moves words
AltCtrlShift + hjkl moves and selects words
Alt + n. backspaces/deletes chars
AltCtrl + n. backspaces/deletes words

And the best of them all:
Alt + space -> <return>
AltShift + space -> Shift+<return> (which does a newline in chat editors like fb messenger)
AltCtrl + Space -> Ctrl+<return> (which can do the submit in some forms, like send email in gmail)

Now, my hand sits for real on the home row and rarely moves because it's not there just for vim, but for the entire system as well.
This setup is very compliant with my little mouse use, since I use vim, and the vim extension for chrome.
I still use and need the mouse for some tasks.

Another one huge benefit is that I don't have a problem remembering where the keys are. This is a problem I can have because I go between different keyboards because of having used different keyboards: argentinian, american, japanese and now brazilian (I'm not trying to be cool, it's just a series of circumstances that led me to using different keyboards).

At the same time, this thing might have become a hinderance because it's not as easy for me going to a different keyboard.

Regarding implementations, when I used MacOS I used Karabiner, insanely clean interface.
On linux, I have to create my own mapping in X.

Central team: No, your team must be doing something wrong. Our pipeline is super-configurable and works for any situation! You just have to read the docs!

Me: Where are the docs?

Central team: Uhh, well, umm... we'll hook you up with a CI/CD coach!

Me: Okay, cool. In the mean time, can you point me at the repo where all the base scripts are?

Central team: Sure, it's here.

Me, some weeks later: Yeah, uhh, the coach can't seem to figure out how to make our Prod deployment work either.

Central team: That's impossible! It's so easy and completely configurable!

Me: Well, okay... but, here's the thing: your pipeline IS pretty "configurable", in the sense that you look for A LOT of variables...

Central team: See! We told you!

Me: ...none of which are actually documented, so they're just about useless to me...

Central team: But, but the coach...

Me: ...couldn't make heads or taisl of it either despite him literally being ON YOUR TEAM...

Central team: Then your project must just be architected wrong!

Me: Well, we're not perfect, so could be...

Central team: Right!

Me: ...but I think it's far more likely that the scripts... you know, the ACTUAL Python scripts the pipeline executes... while it took me DAYS to get through all your levels of abstraction and indirection and, well, BULLSHIT... it turns out they are incredibly NOT flexible. They do one thing, all the time, basically disregarding any flexibility in the pipeline. So, yeah, I'm thinking this is probably one of this "it's you, not me" deals.

Central team: Waaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: I've not done this before, so any guess would be pure assumption.

Client: Okay, but still, you would have some idea, right?

Me: It might get done in 3 days or may take even 30.

After 3 days:

Client: But you said that it will be done in 3 days. Now you are saying there MVP is not ready. Do you even know, your part is the most critical one in the project. We believed in you. We trusted you. This is insane. It was a wrong decision to choose you.

Me (in my head): Didn't I say, this is the first time I am trying to scrape Coles? It might take time?

Me (in actual): I understand, it is getting delayed. Am trying to get this up ASAP....

Anyone else experienced toxic clients but still didn't lose their cool?

*sighs heavily, utters a few profanities, starts updating resume*

This one is on me. I thought I had vetted this place well and asked the right probing questions during the interview, the core product is very cool but the company is too functionally immature.

it feels like Im in a relationship with someone who is really nice, very attractive and clearly very book-smart but has absolutely zero emotional intelligence and even less of a clue in general about what they actually want and need from the relationship. And to that I say:

“…yeah nah.”

oh FFS my university pissed me off so bad right now that I had to wait 20 min to cool down to be able to write a rant about it...

so, one of the university department offer an email address which is the official university approved email for student packs like jetbrain's. I wanted to renew my jetbrains subscription, but for that I have to get a verification email on that address..
But since the only time I use it is this annual renewal I dont know the webmail's url..
So I search for it on the department pages, services and its nowhere to be found. Finaly I found it on a student maintained wiki page.
I try to log in.. no luck. try another password, still not it. Try all of the passwords that I remember using in the previous 3 year and no luck.
well fck it the password change is managed by a website where I can log in with a different method, so I change the password and try to log in again.
No fcking luck! And at this point I bashed my head against the wall because I found out that the password change takes them about 1 or 2 hours... hours! wtf...

More of a rave than a rant.

My Dad was having some trouble with a game disconnecting on the PS4 and he read somewhere that it might be a problem with our home router. I didn't think it would be, as every other game works fine. But there was no talking him out of it. And to be fair the current router WAS kind of old.

So I have a look at the one he's decided to buy and it's some massive triple-antenna beast for well over a hundred pounds. I felt like such a weapon might be overkill for 2 people in a house, but did say that it would definitely help with connection issues in some rooms and I kind of wanted to play with it.

So he got it and oh am I glad he did. It has so many fun toys, including a built in VPN. Right now I live abroad so there's a few services I used at home that I can't access, I was literally just considering buying a vpn the other day. I found this while setting up port-fortwarding for my Raspberry Pi to run a discord bot I'm building. I had condisered putting a VPN server on the Pi but this works too!

It also has built in DDNS from ASUS, which IS cool, but our IP hasn't changed in years so I'm not sure we'll need it. I set it up anyway just in case though!

Cocktail Development #1 - Codename: Devjito

Hello fellow developers! I was enjoing some sweet selfmade cocktails lately. One of the commentators shouted out for me to "don't stop the cocktail rants!".

But, because I didn't wanted to just "Post random cocktails", I tried to develope my own cocktails. Afterwards I will share my experiences while creating these with you, and of course, the recipe!

So first we got my Experiment: Devjito - A Cocktail for all of you fellow programmers!

What we need:
- 4cl Tequila
- 4cl Wodka
- 4cl Dry Gin
- 4cl White Rum

- 2cl "Grenadine" Syrup
- 2 teaspoons of white sugar
- 8cl of Orangejuice
- Sodawater
- Icecubes
- Mintleaves(?dunno if right? Me German don't hate)
- Orange for decorational purposes

Recipe:
First get a tall glass, pour the sugar in it, wash the mint and stick it in there.

Get your favourite cocktail shaker, pour all the liquor in it (the Tequile, Wodka, Gin and Rum) + the orangejuice and icecubes. Shake 20 seconds and dance while shaking, also don't forget to try out eating your devRant Stressball (Leave note in comments who gets this reference).

After shaking pure the "semi cocktail" into the glass with the mint and sugar. Get your masher (I guess this is the right word?) and mash your mintleaves with the sugar and the cocktail. Afterwards, fill the glass mostly up with sodawater.

Now the trickey part: to make it look cool, get your Barspoon and the Grenadine Syrup. Stick the spoon in the glass and let syrup slowly flow in the cocktail, this will make the "red shine" shown in the image attached to this rant.

Finally, stick an orange slice on the glass and enjoy!

My Impression: It's a bit stronger than a normal Tequila Sunrise, but better for the people which don't like sour or "liquor only cocktails".

Thanks to @cafecortado and @CoffeeNcode but also the other commentators!

(An image of the ingredients will be attached as comment)

EDIT: @oudalally mentioned it correctly JES it tastes very sweet!

!rant
today at work i (frontend dev) had an argument about some scss mixins issues, with my boss (senior dev). Not going into detail, I really thought that my method was a lot more efficient and defended my argument strongly until the end. In the end of discussion I saw/accepted that boss' method was better and he said he's nevertheless proud of me for defending what I believed was right. (it's been 2 years since I moved into this country and its language is my 5th one, so I'm only level B2, most of the time I back up from having a deep discussion knowing that my language skill won't take me that far) I really appreciated that feedback from him and it truly made my day. Thank you boss! You're cool!

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

I dunno if you gents remember the Nickelodeon show known as Drake and Josh.

It was pretty big in Mexico and the U.S.

Well, one of the characters from that show is the singer/actor Drake Bell.

For a while, Drake Bell would **constantly** tweet about how much Justin Bieber sucks.

I aint denying that Justin Bieber sucks, i don't like his music at all.

But the constant attacks came out as jealousy, at least to me.

What does this has to do with development or even computers? Well this is EXACTLY how I feel about Louis Rossman CONSTANTLY making videos about apple products.
We get it man we really do, sadly for a lot of us the only way to get ios development done is through a fucking Mac

EVEN if his whiny ass is right about the hardware not being top notch and all that shit I AM still not able to explain a 2013(early...as in january) macbook pro still working with literally NO fucking problems. Before that the other macbook was just changed because we wanted the 2013 model. The thing worked, the one before did so too and the 2017 model that I have works, amazingly so i will add.

Still, the army of dell,hp and lenovo laptops that I've had before just died or are not functioning properly. Either it is my shit luck or Apple's "shitty hardware" got something really fucking right.

I think its retarded really. If you don't like them then fine, you don't have to, personally I fucking love all computers and os, but I don't get fanboys hating for the sake of hate.

the fuck you care if I spend 2500 on a computer? I would the same shit for your mom and the computer would last me longer.

Does owning multiple macs make me better than you? No

Does this mean that you are piss poor and can't afford shit and that is why you are hating? No

Will I call you <insert number of insults> gor your choice of pc or os? No

What is retarded is this: you all are DEVELOPERS(at least a good chunk) and your ass better fucking know that some people USE a certain tool because IT IS THE RIGHT ONE FOR THE JOB.

It is a damn fine operating system, a really good computing experience. It ain't your taste? Fine, das cool, but for fucks sake it does not mean that the other people are idiots or whatever.

Grow the fuck up and get yourself an opinion.

Stupid stupid stupid API that returns a 204 on failed validations.

Informative docs? Hell no! Here's a few hundred long-ass field names that you need to pass as a JSON.

Doesn't work huh? Yeah, you're structure's all wrong. Some of these are grouped in vaguely named keys like "Wholesale".

Oh you need those as well? Yeah, you can see the whole structure if you try to GET an object.

Oh you need an ID to GET an object? Yeah you can just go ahead and create as many as you want. This is just a sandbox API, it's cool.

Oh that's not the point? Ahh you need the structure to be able to create one! *haha* Right, I'll get back to you on that.

* Email correspondence over 2 weeks time. I have still yet to be able to make a an actual successful request. The fucking 204 doesn't count if it doesn't actually create the resource.

Fucking fucky fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

I swear to god if I ever meet this guy in person, I will probably buy him coffee or beer and have a long talk about how to build proper REST APIs.

Because I'm nice like that.

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.

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

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And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
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Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

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(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

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trying to get into gamedev is usually a shitty experience to me...

being a web dev OTOH feels like the opposite. There are css libraries that can make your site beautiful for you (albeit kinda generic).

so when you look at the screen when working on something, you can see something pretty, and it feels like progress.

you can show this to people and they'll be like "wow, look at you and your fancy site".

Show an expertly coded but cssless site to people and they will ask you if you did it with digital crayons.

That's how it feels when I try to get into gamedev, shockingly embarassing.

If I do my own assets, it looks like shit and takes forever. If I use other people's assets, it feels unoriginal.

I used to believe that gameplay is everything, graphics are nothing. But I'm not certain about that right now.

A very common advice to get into gamedev is to start with games that are already made. Like doing a tetris.
Great, that's exactly what I need. Doing a game that looks like shit, with a gameplay I'm not dying to program.

Another thing that makes me feel incompatible with games is the possible reality of that saying that goes "art is never finished, only abandoned", and games being art in a sense.

I'm not sure if I have that mentality. I think I am more of a results type of person, and doing games feels a bit opposite to that.

All of this is making me a bit sad, because video games have been and still are my number one interest, and there has been countless times where I wished I had the role of game designer so I could define in actual projects what a game would be. Like all those "wouldn't it be cool if you could remove X and add Y to this fame" feelings.

Sooooo this is the thing.

For a stupid fucking project at work we basically have to scrum manage a bunch of individual components on a rather large web app.

We start with the html and css and js bs and we all have to work on different sections of one page at a time. Large blocks right? Ok cool.

Originally I had suggested to build everything inside individual php files and then stack them up with require(). As fucking simple as fucking that. Except that the manager does not have php on her pc. The other two developer don't either. I am the only one that fucks with php OUTSIDE our fucking servers.

Go fucking figure...the lead developer does not fuck with php outside the servers.....man

So, because i know it would be a shitstorm with something as basic as installing i dunno...fucking xampp my manager said that she needs a different solution.

Fuck it...fine...whatever. i know go. So i make a fucking server wich upon being fired you can just code the templates and paste them where they need to go. Docs and everything..a sane folder structure and everything and a fucking pipleline for the assets and everything. I would have thought that shit was good enough but I even added a cmd tool that merges all the fucking html files together into one html file with all the shit included.

All in Golang. It works, its fast and i can just give them the fucking folder with the exe and it will work.

I dunno if this was the best way to do it. But it took me maybe 20 mins to do it and it works.

I would have expected our manager to be impressed but she legit did not gave two fucking shits about the fact that one of her developers is able to create this mini server for static sites shitstain project in 20 minutes.

Man I don't want praise. She thinks that jquery is the best thing in the world so I don't expect much. But shit man.......a better reaction would have been better. She basically went meh ok as long as it works.

I also showed them a demo of a flutter project to replace the shitty ass webview filled school app that they have for android and ios. Shit is native and it looks beautiful. Ask me what she said.

Go on, fucking ask me.

She said tha if it would take me much time to continue on that the she would rather leave it to the third party vendor that currently makes the app.

I told her that such shitty app costs the school 40 fucking thousand dollars a year that I could do in a fucking month, which would also be better since it would raise the salaries of me and the other 2 developers and will more importantly make us more valuable to the school.

Said that she would think about it because we have a lot of projects.

I
Fucking
Hate
It

When someone fucks with my ability to make more money. I hate it fam. And i fucking despise being limited by other people.

Fuck this week.

I am never gonna grow in here. Ever. But it pays the bills so fuck it.

Hey everyone!

This is really two things in one:
1). Asking about a good gaming laptop.
2). Follow up on a post I made a while back asking for suggestions for new programming languages to learn

So right now I have a surface pro 3 i7 256gb, it's great for development, but not so great for gaming (Overwatch).
Saw the Razer Blade Stealth and thought it looked pretty nifty. Suggestions?

Also I would like to say a big thank you to all the people who told me about some really cool new languages, like Crystal, Elixir..etc.
Thanks everyone!

Try to finish some of the projects I've started in 2018. Right now I have a todo list text file, along with multiple written lists (the written ones are more focused on a single project normally).

-Finish the startpage I've been doing off and on for at least a month now. I ended up making a lot of it command based (just need to write the scripts for the commands..). I had a little config menu but I just got tired of it and the text box is autofocus anyways, so I figured I'd make it command focused.

-Nice little root safety script as I call it. I've made very stupid mistakes as root before. I once made a typo and ran "chmod --recursive 644 /" while half asleep. I believe I was trying to run that on the current directory I was in, but as you know, the . and / are right next to each other. Basically the script would see what you're doing and echo "you're about to do x, are you sure that's what you want to do?". Something I know I could knock out in a day, but I've been putting it off for at least a year now.

-Compiling notification. I saw something similar once a few years ago, and it was so fucking cool. I remember it being a Mac, and it had a notification that would basically tell you how many files and shit you had left to compile if you were building something. Kinda want to build something for polybar.

-FUCKING RUBBER DUCK DEBUGGING TO THE EXTREME! This one was inspired by a comment someone made once months ago. Might have been here, or reddit, or in real life, not sure. Basically a big ass fucking rubber duck with LEDs in it that will like glow red if your code wouldn't compile (I think Visual Studio has like an automatic error detecting thing in there?? Maybe something similar if I can figure that out). Honestly not sure how the fuck I'd do this one, but I love the idea and I really want to fucking do it

There's more shit. These are just the main ones I want to attempt sometime in the near future.

Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.

The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.

I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.

Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?

However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.

Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.

Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.

Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.

is soo cool when people is up to joke around with my bad jokes.

-- Talking with a coworker about a new button in a results table --

dude: hey jhon, I'll name the button 'SHOW RESULTS' and the endpoint will be named that too. cuz there is a 'SHOW STATS' already

me: dunno, use something more meaningful, this is about unparsed results, right? so what about...

me: unparsed results ? unparsed stats ?

me: another one bites the dust? show must go on?

me: innuendo?

me: pick one 8D . But I think innuendo is pretty descriptive

dude: ok

me: seriously, 'show unparsed stats'

dude: got it

-- then the dude sends me the screenshot --

me: LOL, 8D

me: you got my respect man (_ _)

A long time ago you sent me an email with the subject 'I love you', I then got so excited that I forwarded the letter to all my contacts, and they forwarded it too.. I can't describe the words for the feelings I had back then for you. I felt into love with you, really. But there were always troubling moments for me.

For example when 'Code Red' showed up and found your backdoor. Man I was pissed at that time. I didn't know what to do next. But things settled, and we found each other again.

And then that other time when this girl named 'Melissa' was sending me some passwords to pr0n sites, I couldn't resist. She was really awesome, but you know, deep in my heart that was not what I wanted. I somehow managed to go back to you and say sorry. We even moved together in our first flat, and later in our own house. That was a really good time, I love to think back at those moments.

Then my friend 'Sasser' came over to us one night, do you remember how he claimed that big shelf in our living room, and overflooded it with his own stuff, so that we haven't a clue we are reading yet offshelve? Wow that was a disturbing experience.

But a really hard time has come when our dog 'Zeus' got kicked by this ugly trojan horse. I really don't want go into details how the mess looked like after we discovered him on our floor. Still, I am very sorry for him that he didn't survived it :(

Some months later this guy named 'Conficker' showed up one day. I shitted my pants when I discovered that he guessed my password on my computer and got access to all my private stuff on it. He even tried to find some network shares of us with our photos on it. God, I was happy that he didn't got access to the pics we stored there. Never thought that our homemade photos are not secure there.

We lived our lives together, we were happy until that day when you started the war. 'Stuxnet..'! you cried directly in my face, 'you are gonna blow up our centrifuges of our life', and yeah she was right. I was in a real bad mood that days back then. I even not tried to hide my anger. But really, I don't know why all this could happen. All I know is, that it started with that cool USB stick I found on the stairs of our house. After that I don't remember anything, as it is just erased from my memory.

The years were passing. And I say the truth here, we were not able to manage the mess of our relationship. But I still loved you when you opened me that you will leave. My 'Heartbleed' started immediately, you stabbed it where it causes the most pain, where I thought that my keys to your heart are secured. But no, you stabbed even harder.

Because not long after that you even encrypted our private photos on our NAS, and now I am really finished, no memory which can be refreshed with a look at our pictures, and you even want my money. I really 'WannaCry' now...

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

Interesting...

On Friday, I was playing with the ChatGPT integration in DBeaver. I was using the DBeaver sample SQLite database. This database has a couple of tables, among them Album and Artist, where Album has a foreign key into Artist.

So, I asked it:

"give me a query that lists all albums from artists who's name starts with s"

The query I got back was:

SELECT * FROM Album

Uhh, okay.

But then, I noticed that I wrote "who's" instead of 'whose', which would be proper grammatically. So, I changed that, and then I got this query:

SELECT * FROM Album WHERE ArtistId IN (SELECT ArtistId FROM Artist WHERE Name LIKE 'S%');

Hooray, that works! I'm not sure it's the best way to write the query... I might have written:

SELECT * FROM album a, artist r WHERE a.artistid=r.artistid AND r.name LIKE 'S%'

...I'd have to check to see if one performs better than the other, and consider which syntax I find clearer, but that's a separate issue, it's just nice to see a working, reasonable query generated because that's the point, after all.

But I found it interesting that such a minor error would cause it to not work, that's my main point.

Interestingly, it seems to have learned: I just tried the same thing, and I got the right query either way. So that's pretty cool.

It's a pretty neat feature and I can see some legitimate value in it. I'm pretty good writing SQL myself... I've managed to write some truly hideously complex queries over the years... but there are definitely instances I can recall where the query didn't seem obvious at the start, and having an AI that can MAYBE produce something that is AT LEAST a starting point is definitely something I can get onboard with.

This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)

TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days

So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.

I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)

So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).

So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap

"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."

Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add

"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"

....Okay....shots fired. So i respond

"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"

"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"

"With one wfh day?"

"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"

"Oh... I hear that...what day?"

"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"

".............................I'll think about it"

"There's nothing to consider"

*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."

So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "

Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"

What kind of Godfather comment is that?

Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."

.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:"

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

//long rant ahead!

I need to plan a Wiki with SharePoint for not connected Sites.
Im now in dispute with my CoWorker since 3 Months, this is how the conversation goes. My two bosses are involved in this and also unhappy about SharePoint.

[C refers to CoWorker, M for me]
C: Hey, we finished SharePoint with Selfservice Storage Rooms. They even have a Wiki.

M: Okay cool, will check it out

C: Well we need to also plan the Wiki inside, I already asked our Department Head and he agreed, that you will be the one.

M: Okkkkaaayy, normaly it's your job to do such things, but welp, I will look into it, if we can work with it.

(2 Weeks pass)
M: I checked SharePoint out and tested everything. The Wiki is a Nogo, we need a other solution or programm for ourself a Wiki Integration/Engine. Did you maybe check out Confluence? It has also a SharePoint integration plugin.

C: We wont do Confluence, too expensive (already overspent the budget for SharePoint in six digits 🤬). Also we wont add to SharePoint Custom Code, it needs to stay standard.

M: Thats impossible, SharePoint Wiki is shit and also handels sites just like documents, no brain behind! Also you overspent the Budget and now it's my Problem?!

C: You need to do the best out of it.

(3 weeks passes and we get a meeting with the department heads)

M: Alright I made a UseCase and documented where the essential flaws are in SharePoint Wiki and why we cant use it.

Boss: Ok if it's impossible to use, then we will stay on our Fileserver for Documents and wont use SharePoint.

M: Thats not my Point, my statement is, as status today, SharePoint Wiki is not the right solution, code or buy software to it.

Boss: We will do a Prove of Concept, if it doesnt work then we will aboard it.

M: Well it is only some missing essentials, like hierarchy and Groups for the Pages, Example Confluence has this. If we could built in this features in SharePoint, everything would work out.

C: (angry) I told you that we wont use Confluence!

M: (calm) I said we need Features, not Confluence. Please mind the consent.

(3 weeks passes, and one more meating with bosses)

M: alright here again is a analyses, why already in Theory the current SharePoint Wiki wont work. It's already flawed in the core.

Boss: Yea SharePoint is crap, I checked out confluence and thats a real Wiki.

C: Well I dont know anything about Confluence and never looked at it. But if SharePoint is a fail we need the Proof of Concept.

M: Why do we need to do a Proof of Concept, when it already doesnt work in Theory! Thats nonsence and unlogical.

Next meeting will be in 4 weeks and I will give him the FUCKING PROOF OF CONCEPT. I will be a Bastard and build behind CoWorkers back a Confluence Wiki to show the Departmentheads how to built it right.

I hate CoWorker now, he makes a part of my loved Job a hell, I will goddamn cuk Coworker to space, that fucking Cukatron of lazyness and shit 🤬. I provide the Solutions and you just say no, how dafuq will the project advance, if you always say NO! Are you so unflexible and fixed on your Castle of Ignorancy!

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

!dev philosophical

Quality vs Opinion

I have a feeling that these things have always been at odds with each other and now with the constant connectedness it has just become more apparent that most people don’t understand the difference (or even realize there is a difference for that matter)

Let’s face it. Most people have awful taste. They listen to whatever new music their radio station decides was hot. They watch whatever show everyone else is watching. They are manipulated by large scale news organizations...

Basically, most people are sheep.

The problem is that sheep are a dangerous combination of loud and stupid. Giving these loud stupid sheep a platform to amplify their voice is a bad idea for a society, but a great tool for the pigs to manipulate them.

“Frightened though they were, some of the animals might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion.”

This isn’t confined to one political party or view, it isn’t geographic, it isn’t based on education, it isn’t based on wether a person is ethical or not...

It’s universal.

You can translate “four legs good, two legs bad” into Agent Orange and his followers chanting “lock her up” just as well as it could be translated into the angry leaders of the modern feminist movement.

In both cases (both on opposite ends of the ethical spectrum) you have the loudest dumb, angry sheep getting the even dumber sheep to chant along, wether it is good for them or not.

Now to loop this back. The problem is that dumb sheep are emotional. They truly believe that they are NOT dumb and that their opinions and emotions are a measure of quality.

I FEEL bad, and you are talking to me, so you must BE bad.

I don’t LIKE this amazingly well made movie, so it must BE bad.

And anyone else who has a different opinion is just wrong. Anyone who try’s to explain the merits of the other side is either my enemy or is stupid.
^^^
Their opinion, incorrect.

————

Now for the tough part...

Most likely, based on probability, you are a sheep.

Yes, you! The smartest person you know. The guy/girl who has a degree or masters of a PHD. The person who builds amazing software. You! Are. A. Sheep. And you are dangerous to the world.

To put a cherry on top.

No, you opinions are not important. Your feelings are fucking meaningless. Your morals are worthless. Your voice has as much value and a loose asshole fart from a fat guy trapped in a deep well in Siberia.

But don’t get down about this. It’s doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that almost every person who has ever lived in history has been a sheep. They have chanted one useless, dangerous, misguided, harmful chant after another through the ages.

————

To those of you who try not to be sheep. Just keep trying to get a little better every day. When someone says...

“We do it this way because we have always done it this way”

... be skeptics. Explore the merits and logic of the situation.

And if you are tired of being led by stupid sheep then save some money, build something cool and start your own business.

Just remember, you will always need the sheep. They will be your employees, your friends, your bosses, your investors etc.

Treat them well, don’t hate them, and if you ever find yourself leading a pack of sheep then try to keep a healthy distance from their chanting while leading them down the right path.

They will thank you for it in the end.

———

PS. For those of you thinking “this is very judgemental and self centred”

All I can do is to try to speak your language....

Baaaahhhhh, baaahhhhh, bahhhhh

Which translates form sheep to human as...

“Eat a dick. Have a nice day”

So a bit ago I posted a rant saying that I would be getting ElementaryOS onto my computer and trying it out, buckle up kiddos because this goes to shit in just a moment.

I did everything right, used Rufus correctly and didn't destroy my computer nor my installer, good! I set it up, get everything going and everything is running smoothly. One problem... I couldn't download **any** programs that weren't from the Ubuntu Store, which really annoyed me because I like to use Brackets, and I couldn't find it in the UStore...

So I messed up **really** bad here... I didn't *format* my Elementary Installer, but tried to delete the files like a pleb and stick an Ubuntu ISO in it's place, I didn't even think on going through Rufus again, I just slapped that shit in there without a thought.

I restart my computer, I read a forum stating that I would get an option that allows Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) to take over the partition of a previous distro. Neat! Another bloody problem is that I decided to use "Win + R" and manually delete the Elementary partition **myself**... What is even wrong with me...

So I restarted it, and before my father left to go shopping, he said I should go into the BIOS to change the boot order (Now this is where I **really fucked up**. Thought what I said before was bad?).
Cool, so I boot my PC and go into the BIOS, now I couldn't figure out on my computer where the boot order was, when it was right in my face the whole damn time... I managed to almost destroy my entire BIOS with the fucking file in my USB stick, because I was being an idiot...

I restart, GRUB opens up with a black screen and white text in the top left corner, know what the most important line is in that small block of words? "unknown filesystem"... Of fucking course I fucked it that bad, GRUB didn't even give me the option of just using Windows 10 instead, just quietly gave me the middle finger since I basically nearly fucked everything.

What's funny is that I had someone (who lives with us, let's call him Jeff) look at my computer because I was done being a dumbass.
He told me that I still had my BIOS (which was a bloody relief, because I thought I basically destroyed my computer doing what I did) and that all I need to do is fix the installer I tried to use.

I gave him the USB and just started to play on my phone.
Then I remembered something maybe an hour or so ago... I had an older installer that I used on my shitty laptop awhile back, if I can find it again I could just use that instead of waiting on Jeff. I dug around my room and found the USB that had a working Ubuntu ISO on, correctly placed inside this time.

I basically walked up to my computer, plugged it in and started it up, and it worked. I got Ubuntu and Windows 10 back, and I was basically laughing like I just saved a man's life.

Moral of this story: Don't be like me and do something stupid, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're attempting at...

!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore

I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing

So I'm building this environmental monitoring system for one of the Labs to monitor Temperature and Humidity. the "software" that comes as part of the package with these sensors is really just a website you host yourself if you don't choose the cloud option. No big deal really, (see my previous rant about getting windows server through SSC) I setup IIS and get the "software" registered get a couple sensors running looks good. However I don't like the error messages that popup because it's unsecured. do some reading and I find out that most browsers will give you a warning if your not using HTTPS even if it's for internal use only. OK we'll how hard can it be in implement encryption, turns out it's not that hard and you can do it for free how with letsencrypt and other places. I like free, now i have to use SSH to get into the server and run an ACME client. Hey open SSH is part of windows now cool, download an ACME client SSH into the server and nope doesn't work. Oh right I'm behind a corporate firewall and a bunch of other shit I can't control. Why is so damn arduous to setup this god dam internal website and the problems aren't even the site. Now I'm playing with AWS spinning up an instance to be able to try and get an SSL certificate just so i don't have to tell people it's OK to trust this site ignore the big angry warning.
Best part is other similar internal sites don;t use SSL and all have big messages about someone stealing your soul if you go there and these are commercial systems that run all the HVAC for all the campuses across Canada.
I need more Tylenol.

Don't you love the neverending sprint?

You know the one that just inherits all the tickets from the last one? Each sprint packs on new cool features but along the way bug tickets come in for code you haven't even touched or wrote and you deal with them because they are blockers.

before you know it, sprint is over and ok to the next one. I'm pretty sure that is how this is supposed to work right?

I wish I could invite the me of 3-4 years ago to my room and prove him wrong.

Basically, the me of 3-4 years ago thought: "What do I need a home PC for? I got a laptop."; hell, he always forgot to put the laptop with the plural 's', because understandably, for his study life, he took low-cost PCs that would only last like one year.

But my boy, laptops are cool and all, but have you ever experienced the complete comfort of a proper desktop? In addition to the bonuses of a home PC in terms of performance, it leaves a much better space for work than just a portable terminal in front of you and pretty up close to compose. The accessories didn't even cost me much. And it feels great to have everything in its own, right place: the screen at the bottom, the phone standing on its holder, the earphones on your head, your left hand on a mat with papers potentially on it, your right hand on the mouse, which is on the mousepad and also on that mousepad, that character you adore so much, when both said hands are not on the keyboard, beneath the whole table, or on it when no papers are on the way.

Seriously, that pleasure I longed for was something you could have started, me of 3-4 years ago, right when I began with my studies.
But I have no rancor over you, I'm still onto my studies, so this is still something I can take profit of, during my student life, thankfully ;)

I'll just take note at your stead, of not being too stubborn over things that can do oneself a greater good, objectively. :)

Who amongst you remembers Ultima Online?

At one point probably one of the best games ever made. Even wrote the record for most players online and got in the Guinness Book of records for it. This was during the dial-up days. You kids these days have no idea how slow internet was or how cool it was to hear those three special words, You've Got Mail.

Everquest and WOW dont have shit on this game even if it never really went 3D. There was a sorta blocky 3d but it sucked which is why it failed. Everyone was content with 2d because the blocky 3d was trash in most circumstances.

With Ultima it made you feel like a kinda second life. And it wasn't a chore like Life Is Feudal or many of the other grundy games of today.

My 80 year old grandfather played it all day everyday. That's how fucking good the game was.

I would still be playing the official servers a decade plus, later if they would stop adding unnecessary dlc and they wouldn't have added a pay store.

It seriously pisses me off that I spent years collecting and hoarding rare items that I actually fucking earned and the assholes add a pay store that lets these new players buy the item I fought a boss four hours to get.

It ain't fucking right. It literally makes the rares worthless and my efforts pointless.

EA also rushed Ultima IX so it was buggy as hell and technically unbeatable unless you edited the game to let you cheat. Richard Garriott made the game and bugs and all is a masterpiece. His new game Shroud of The Avatar, not so much but that's a different rant.

I honestly wish EA would go out of business. They have ruined enough of my favorite titles with their incompetent bullshit and greedy cash grabs. If they would just make UO the way it was around the second age or Lord Blackthorn I'd guess a lot of us old-school vets would come back.

But as it is our only real option is to build our own servers or play someone else's which is what I do. Fuck EA!

Right, budget constraints, in out project. Shop site. Lets go with a good online shop system (shopwired) and just brand up a suitable theme. Client wants to see design flats prior to starting. OK brief designer. Pick one of the themes that is close to their current brand styling. Grab the theme pages, set your browser to 1280. Mock up over the top with brand colours/fonts etc in Indesign and png the pages over to me (make sure we have them on google fonts). Designer comes back a few days later with branded up theme page visuals. Cool, they look great, shouldn’t take too long to rework the css and get this thing working. Client approves mockups. Great, so open the theme files and realise the designer has fucking moved stuff around. This has turned into something more than a styling job. Fucking hell. there goes my budget and deadline. Why don’t you designers ever fucking listen!!!!!
I should’ve done it myself but needed to save time as I’m already busy. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

Hello guys, i need some advice:
Our school is having a "auto-management" (idk how to translate) period, it lasts 3 or 4 days just before christmas vacation, and in those days students get to organize courses about pretty much everything to teach stuff to other students (exept stuff like video games cuz the principal is closed-minded), some friends asked me to make a course about programming in c# because they are interested, i thought it was cool so i said OK.
Now i'm thinking how to structure it, it's going to be 2 "lessons" of 2 hours each, and it's open to everyone in the school.
I don't want to do a full blown course explaining everything, i just want to give them a kick start and point them to the right direction, I thought about explaining some "theory" in the first lesson, I'm assuming almost everyone that will come never did programming stuff, so i'm thinking of explaining stuff like how a computer works, why you need a compiler, etc.. maybe based on the introduction from learncpp.com without getting to much into the details and then explaining how c# works and its grammar.
Then in the second lesson i'll try to code togheter some stuff (We'll have just one pc attached to a projector).
So, how would you do this ? I mean i never tried explaining programming to someone else and i'm self-taught i looked at the guide on msdn but it starts directly by giving you an hello world, should i follow it ? I fear i'd get too thecnical and they wouldn't understand me, do you know some good guide i can use as a reference ?
ps: there's going to be max 30 people

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.