I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜

Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.

First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.

Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.

Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.

Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.

Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.

linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)

How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!

One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)

Dealing with different kinds of attacks:

Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.

So yah, hereby :P

I find this quarantine threatening.

Me (5 days ago): A major, life-threatening hurricane is coming. I need to prepare. I know you have a need to launch so I will do my best to finish your project.

Client: Ok, stay safe.

Client (today): I know you're not done. You're late actually. To provoke you into further action, we went ahead and announced the launch and people will begin using the website now.

Me (at the store buying food for the next two week): What in the actual ... Here is your code. Finish it yourself. May God have mercy on your cold, dark soul.

Today.

Last night someone detonated an improvised nail bomb at a concert venue in downtown Manchester. 22 dead and 59 injured (many life threatening).

I'm working from home as my home is listed as a safe haven.

I'm not sure how much, if any, work I'll get done.

If you're in Manchester and need anything let me know.

It's all very much process:

Check everyone I know is ok
List house as safe space
Buy food
Keep passing information around to those who need it

No real time to think about it, just stay in the "response" mode.

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

!rant but a story

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

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

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

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

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

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

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

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

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

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

Just went to the new cafe next to me (all over the top fancy as usual around here), thought after a long time I could and should enjoy a nice drink, snack and a great view while coding.

Got two babies screaming out their internals right when I've paid and sat down, then an old guy started asking me to leave multiple times, threatening to call the police and trying to drag me off my chair, because I "shouldn't be breaking other peoples computers" - most likely because I was pulling+compiling evince via yay and he caught a glimpse of it when I checked if it finished or not.

One of the employees saw that happening and kicked the old guy out, then gave me a fresh donut as a "sorry", was for sure the best donut I've ate, not because of the taste, but because I saw the old guy then hovering across the street and occasionally giving me a look, as if he's waiting for the FBI to finally show up and he could tell where I escaped to.

tbh when the employee was approaching, I've seen this turn into a completely different rant, positively surprised there's still some sane people out there.

Alright, with all the horrible internet freedom and privacy threatening stuff going around I'm setting up a new tor relay, hopefully 2gb/s.

Already have one running with an average throughput of 2TB/day but another one won't hurt, would it?

Who else runs tor nodes here? :D

TLDR: Fuck you, Client A

1. Want to change the business flow during UAT and decide the deadline to be less than 4 weeks, even though that's how the business flow stated on the docs
2. He threatening us not to pay if it isn't done, even though he's not the one paying us
3. He said time isn't a problem because he can provide a table and chair that is put in front of his table

Fuck you, Client A

ANTI VIRUSES AREN'T ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND!

So I'm under a little pressure to get an assignment done so I came home an was planning on working on it but Windows had other plans and decided to finish its update which I suspect copied my hard drive and uploaded it to the NSA at dial up speed because it it forever!!

But anyway back to the text in caps lock... I started working on it then when I hit compile I got an "access denied" error in the console and didn't know what the f*** was going on. So I decided to copy my filed to another directory and tried again... amazingly this worked so I carried on and after about 2 hours I get the same error -_- So instead of messing around and loosing my work I decided to commit it... but I cant... again "access denied" error.

After threatening my computer with a trip out the window, I finally decided to reboot it... cause "have you tried turning it off and on again" kept on rattling in my head.

After logging in I tried again and still the same error... Then I opened up my anti virus dashboard and went through the logs and found the screen shot attached.....

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

Microsoft Internet Explorer is my least favorite enterprise software. We are forced to use it. I hate being forced. This is like being asked to climb a mountain with a broken leg...not fun, painful, hopeless, threatening, discouraging, slow, and ugly, and infected...it is downright evil corporate bullshit.

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="styleshit" type=trash/css" href="die-die-die-you-evil-bastard.css"/>
<![endif]-->

Just push it over the edge with a chrome sword stuck in its back. I will just sit here by the fire with my pet fox and watch the opera as I listen to vivaldi.

A few years ago, I used to work at a very small company. It was a compact team, we all got along quite nicely and work was very good too, but the salary was very low.

Then I got an offer from a big company in the big city for thrice the pay, and I understood how great an opportunity this is, and I knew I would get a lot to learn from this. So, I decided to take it.

So, when I went to my boss to hand in the resignation, he turned red and started tearing into at me and threatening me. And I was taken aback, because, he was usually so nice. He even threatened to have me kidnapped, and I was so dumbstruck, I couldn't even understand what the heck was going on.

I didn't even finish my notice period. I just went home after that, and never went back.

Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:

You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.

Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?

My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.

This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.

--- iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia" shuts down ---

This Friday, Jay Freeman, the maintainer of the iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia", announced that he will shut-down his services.
"Cydia" is a app store for people that jailbreaked their iPhones and allows them to buy and download apps. Apple's AppStore doesn't allow jailbreaked apps, that's the reason it was created in 2009.

Jay Freeman, also known as "Saurik", explained that he wanted to shut down the service at the end of 2018 anyways.
Now, a recent security issue, threatening the data of all users, caused that the store no longer existed with immediate effect.
In addition to the security issue, "Cydia" was said to be no more profitable.
To calm you breakers down: Previous purchases can still be downloaded!

The software itself will continue to exist, but without a back-end for payments and stuff like that. Users are still able to do payments through third-party repositories, which already happened anyway, so that lowers the impact of the shut-down.

Just like "Cydia", other services are shutting down too.
One of the three big Cydia-repositories, ModMyi, said they wont allow any new apps and archived all existing ones.
ZodTTD and MacCiti will also be discontinued.
"Bigboss" is the only repository remaining.

Jailbreaks just lost their popularity over the last years. There's still no jailbreak for iOS 11! This shows that Apple is getting better and better at preventing jailbreaks.
On the other hand, it shows that the need for jailbreaks is not quite as high anymore and therefore the developers don't spend too much energy for breaking up iOS anymore.

Did you use Cydia, or any of the other services? Write us in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

First junior software dev job, asked what I wanted for hourly pay, replied “I need at least $13/hour to survive.” (This is in US, 2007, I was almost done with Bachelor in CS, single mom with two little kids, was also in the army national guard at the time)

I grew up poor, and was very ignorant about salary negotiations. So of course they offered $13/hour. I accepted, thinking it must be fair, and was glad to be making more than minimum wage. Six months in, I’m doing the same work as their devs with 2-4 years experience, find out they are billing clients $100/hour for my work. Then, to top it off, the COO makes a joke in a meeting about how it’s not a big deal for their “technical assistant” to be doing lackey work because he’s only paid $13. Fuuuuuuuuck. That comment still makes my blood boil.

I had a nice manager at the time that explained how salary negotiations worked, but I still think it’s lame as hell. I ended up getting put on salary, $50k/year, after threatening to leave.

AWS just sent me an email threatening to terminate my account because I have a $0.18 pending bill. Wow Amazon! Just wow! How many years does it take you to make $0.18? 5? 10?

How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?

My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.

He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.

I want him to learn JavaScript.

He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.

Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?

He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.

What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.

Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.

So finished a project for a client, the client signed a contract. He signed off that all milestones where reached. Text me that he was very pleased.
We give 30 days to pay. 8 days before the due date he asked for a meeting, telling us he wants to go another direction and he wants the source code to show the new development team he's going with to get a quote from them. I tell him that, that's fine he can have the source files once he pays for the product which was in the contract they signed mind you!! And this FUCKING DICK FART threats to sue, saying he's calling his lawyer, threatening me and my development partner with physical violence, and saying he's going to sue me personally not because me work was bad but because I refused to give him the product before he paid. I was calm we offered to meet his new dev team explain the code, and show them what they needed to see to give the clients a quote and they would not allow that, saying how now I'm not getting paid instead I'm getting sued and that he will publicly shame my startup company. Just complete bullshit, good thing I saved the original contract he wanted me to sign which had threats of physical violence I. His contract... Which in retrospect should have been a hint, but it was the highest paying contract we ever landed. Seems he never planned on paying. What's a guy to do?

Elon's threatening to take Tesla private!

Man, what a way to start the week. Our mailserver went nuts (something about a Shellbot virus, I don't know) and we were forced to migrate to a new one. Clients calling in panic and threatening to sue us and shit. I was the one tasked to fix the problem (I am a developer mind you, my sysadmin knowledge is limited to google searching and contacting support). At the same time, Turkish hackers attacked our other server and forced me to fetch backups and clear spamming scripts. And to top it all, I was forced to answer the phone calls and respond to the threats. Man, I must have been a complete prick in my previous lifetime to deserve this.

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

!rant

“Are you drinking my soda?”
“Statute of limitations!”
“Did you know in some countries there’s a statute of limitations on murder?”
“And?”
“And that means sometimes it can run out.”
“And?”
“And that means you can’t be tried for the crime.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“What? No. Why?”
*gestures at soda* “You literally told me that after I took your soda.”
“Oh! Shit. You mentioned statute of limitations, _that_ was the connection, it wasn’t a response to you stealing my soda.”
“You looked me right in the eye and told me that some countries have a statute of limitations on murder.”
“I looked you in the eye because we were having a conversation!”

There's an evil virus that's threatening mankind

And now they are threatening us... Brilliant!

- they refuse to sign a legal agreement with us [for our services]
- they only gave us a verbal promise they will pay for our services
- they revoke lots of our accesses
- another company is taking over their product we were hired to look after before. Now they demand us do things for them for free
- a few integrations are malfunctioning with premature EOF [while reading a response]. I had escalated this with the most throughout case analysis I have done in my entire life. Three times over the last 2 years. Explaining every single detail that needs to be done, how, by whom and how to interpret the results. Escalations went to their high level mgmt. And directly had been rerouted to /dev/null...
- now they asked us to fix this whole shit. For free ofc, they have no money to pay us..
- they begged
- when that didn't work - they started threatening to route all their customers' complaints to us and flood us with them

at first I was proud to work on their project. I didn't want to leave it when my manager asked me to. A national level project, making a difference for my own country. But now.....

that's gov, my friends. That's politics and power games.

Annoys me so much how obviously lazy my department has been with one of its products. We have an iPad app that does document management and eForms and stuff. Its not perfect but not the worst. Then they decide they need to build an app to handle a specific kind of eForm. They just went "well this app already does eForms so lets just adapt it".
Worst. Decision. Ever.
the app is simply a branch off the original app. despite being a completely different product which isnt even concerned with the same business objects. it has been hacked until it does what it needs to. And i have to somehow maintain this trainwreck.
As a result we have a branch in our main Git repo that contains a completely different product, which is basically an iOS wrapper for an HTML eForm with ~5000 lines of jQuery to further hack on the functionality that the eForm provides.
And they wonder why iOS developers have been leaving and some keep threatening to leave. Even the Delivery Manager wants us to just do what is needed and get it out the door and never look at it again. How are we supposed to care when thats the attitude of the people who are supposed to be invested in it. Im surprised the client hasnt told us to get lost the app is so hideously broken and unmaintainable. Performing an action on the form can break a completely unrelated section somewhere else. We have lost control.
And they just keep adding more scope, ignoring our concerns cos hey its too late to just start changing the whole approach of the solution.

I almost died of hypothermia as a kid. My drunk grandpa went out to drink even more with his friends, forgetting about me and leaving the stroller with me sleeping out there on the street. It was negative forty-two degrees Celsius. I was one year old.
I made it, but developed an awful pneumonia. By some kind of miracle, I made it again, but at the expense of becoming a really weak kid. I had two more pneumonias during high school, plus one case of sinusitis.
Told my grandma I got ear pain in the morning. We went to our local clinic. The doctor there said I have to be hospitalized RIGHT NOW, otherwise it might turn into a life-threatening meningitis. By the time we’re in the hospital, the pain is already unbearable. My vision becomes blurry and dark, I hear my pulse in my head, I lose the sense of time. At that point I’m laying on the hospital bed, motionless, quietly sobbing while the terrible pain is swallowing me, a tiny kid, whole.
I’ll never forget the sound of a sinusitis needle crushing through a porous bone inside my head. A glass worth of pus rushing out. The pain immediately going away.
All that because of one man addicted to alcohol. This is why I don’t drink.

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.

Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:

Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.

Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.

Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.

Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.

Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.

And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.

So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.

Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.

Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.

Do any other devs here have serious entrepreneurial ambitions and the drive to achieve them?

How do you manage the conflict between your day job and your ambitions.

I find every employer is looking for someone with just enough ambition to “move up” in their company but any ambition of your own outside that seems to come off as threatening.

I try to keep the 2 separate but I have always thought that by not wanting people with actual ambition a company is only hurting themselves.

Thoughts?

Did some freelance work off the books and now the guy is threatening to sue me .. nice

I just read Jeff Bezos' article on Medium about how the ones at American Media are threatening him of leaking his private pictures.

As I was reading it, I felt, "Man, how low has journalism come to these days. Here is a guy who's worked so hard to build one of the world's biggest companies, and here are the ones at the National Enquirer trying to bring this man down."

To be honest, who gave them the right to indulge in a person's private life? Why do they have to say, "A nude selfie with his wedding ring on?" Maybe, he sent that image to his wife. This makes me wonder, "Is this the way we treat humans?"

Why are we concerned about what a man does in his personal life? What impact does taking down a man in public bring?

Thoughts, please!

Ok I will wear my face mask .... But this sound super life threatening what is written.

I came up with what I considered to be a brilliant approach to a festering internal knowledge management problem using a third-party SaaS. I rolled it out and it was very popular. Weeks later, after my profile had become the "linchpin" by which hundreds of other employees had joined the service, I was told that a female employee (yes, gender is important to this story) had produced a proposal for a more in-house solution that used a different company's software and that I would be on the team to roll it out. I thought it was a great idea and I deferred to her on pretty much everything.

Months after that I was accused, by several other female managers, of trying to take over the whole leadership of the project just because of one minor suggestion I had proposed. One day, after a lengthy interrogation about their take on my emails on the matter (lacking only the bright, hot spotlight in my eyes) I was booted off the project and the woman who had proposed the project was promoted. She then proceeded to lord it over on me and treat me like crap.

This type of thing was a general pattern within the company that amounted to a form of a reverse discrimination "policy" (unwritten). The effect was that the ratio of men to women in upper management was not equal but completely flipped. Way more women than men had upper management positions and higher pay.

In their eyes, the ends (women broke through the glass ceiling) justified the means (discrimination and bullying) which I guess is good and "equal", again in their eyes, in terms of the overall perception modern feminism has about men needing a comeuppance.

But in the context of HR's stated policy on equality, meaning 1:1 men and women in position of power and pay and a non-threatening work environment for all, which we all (men and women) were forced to sign every year, it was an utter fail as far as the math and intimidation went.

My friend alfred who is a C# programmer, has got a threatening letter from some feminists. Apparently he's treating women as "objects" recently. :/

hmm..

1. coronavirus is threatening the world
2. food delivery companies have no free slots for the next 3 days at least
3. the winds are so strong that they make windows seriously bend. Spooky stuff - haven't seen anything like this before in my life. Feels like one more gust and the window will break (wind speed -- 33+m/s)

well.. time to charge all the batteries in the house and find my zombie-apocalypse survival kit

P.S. any chance Corona is what's gonna make zombies?

P.P.S. tomorrow is Friday, the 13th and a full moon. Yiippeee!!!

Got a PROD issues caused by missing data from upstream. Told them about it last week. 3 days of no replies.

Finally got a reply that they will look into it. It's been almost a week since I first told them but no responses and no solution yet.

I couldn't fall asleep because I guess I drank too much coffee but also cuz the thought of this pissed me off.... So got up and sent a work email basically threatening to escalate this all the way up, put their asses in hot water.

Though not sure if I can but.... Maybe I can take a disability leave for needing to mentally recover from going mad at other people that can't do their jobs but aren't fired...

pacman -Syu often can be life threatening.

"Hi X,
Y stepped down from organizing meetup Z.

You are one of the top members of this Meetup, so I think you have what it takes to be a great organizer. Stepping up would help ensure that this community continues to survive past [date in the near future]."

Third time I get a message like this from meetup. Usually followed up by threatening to delete all group data forever if no one "steps up" (e.g. pays their bills). F***ing vendor lock-in! They have been colleting and publishing data for years only to blackmail people to continue using their services.

Some meetups (at least in my region) have switched to LinkedIn, so we will surely receive messages like above from LinkedIn in a couple of years.

Is there some basic guide to privacy for (android) phones?

Like where you flash some secure ROM, get timely updates , no gapps or privacy threatening app, use secure services and alternatives mainstream ones, and use foss s/w.. And something like fdroid instead of playstore store or something..

Ignore the badly framed idea, but you get my point..

Every time I read someone reply to a post with "lol" I stop for a moment and imagine myself actually laughing out loud to that post. I've got to say, only under ~1% of such posts were actually worth lol'ing. Other times laughing out loud to whatever is there would be retarded at best.

So either I'm a bum with only notions of a sense of humour OR there are far too many retards laughing out loud to basically anything.

Or perhaps there are too many idiots who use 'lol' without knowing what it means.
Or those people so desperately want others' attention that they lie to others pretending to like what they say/do/write by saying "what you did there made me feel so good that I burst in loud laughter".

This is stupid.

If you don't laugh OUT LOUD - then don't say that you do.
If you are not in immediate danger threatening to your life - then don't say you are LITERALLY DYING.

FFS, is it THAT hard?

I'm not usually a believer in anything paranormal, and I know there's no rational basis for this, but I reckon threatening to beat the computer with a shovel genuinely seems to work quite a lot of the time.

Former co-founder is harassing me and threatening me with lawsuits.

Get the f** off my face you fucking scammer.

#rant

Apple is really a rotten company.

They have a deal with Chinese government, so they are basically helping abuse human rights.

Recently they disabled AirDrop in China, to further prevent freedom of speech during protests. And they are threatening to remove Twitter from app store, since it Musk is ramping up free speech.

So, might be the first time ever but I have a reasonable client. Oh wait, life isn't that nice!
Boss, stop picking fights over stupid shit with the client!
Boss, actually show up to meetings you called!
Boss, do you want to get us fired from the contract?
Boss, stop threatening the client! They hold all the chips here!
Boss, actually listen to my technical advice since you are not technical!
Boss, go die in a hole!
Boss, I want your job and paycheck you do nothing!
Boss, don't tell me you are tired and we can talk tomorrow when you kept me up until 3am the previous night then called an 8am meeting!
Boss, give everybody, including the client, more than 2 hours notice for a meeting, then get pissed when the client doesnt show. They have other meetings!

What a life threatening caption

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:"

A forum admin started requesting donations and threatening to kill the site if nobody pitched in because it was much too expensive and stuff. The classic wikipedia strat.

The thread was pinned and it was the first thing anyone would see when they'd go into the subforum.

Someone asked the admin how come he needed that much money monthly to keep the forum alive and asked if he could provide a breakdown of the things that needed to be paid.

Admin unpinned the thread and went silent. The amount he was asking was about $80 per month. Is that normal?

There are few layoffs in my company due to COVID-19 and so now there's 3 times more work then usual per employee and fucking senior manager keeps on threatening that if we don't meet the deadlines, they will get us fired as well!

Have to do overtime every fucking day, also even on weekends, my life has got all ruined and couldn't do anything about it as getting a new job in this time is going to be a pain in the ass as well!

Work keeps getting worse. It seems someone ratted me out to the boss after I complained how it is unfair that I'm going to lose my bonus over an impossible deadline. Ok so I probably shouldn't rant in the workplace but still. Now I'm told my negative attitude affects my co-workers and that I certainly won't succeed if I am so negative. Then I got told I instead need to work overtime to make things happen, and when I argue that I can't do that because I need my spare time because of my health I'm basically put on the spot that either I make it happen or I get booted with a negative reviews. You bet your ass I'm in contact with my union over this, because that is just wrong imo. I know they can fire me any time for any reason, but they need to give reason. But threatening an employee who disclosed health issues to you and claiming you will see it as sabotaging the company? I'm sorry I'm not the superhero dev that you want but it hurts being told you're not good enough because you don't go the extra mile, regardless of if you even can or should.

Tiny little upside though, scored more interviews, speaking to a company tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed hard. There's gotta be sane places out there.

Now that prick that was my business partner did something really really stupid: he hired a collection agency to make me pay an invoice that was not even due! Of course, this is completely unlawful but this agency is now threatening to sue me if I don't pay because I promised to pay a part of the costs. Well, that promise was indeed made however at a later moment in time mr. Prick signed a contract at the notary office agreeing to take all costs on him. Collection agency says my earlier promise is what matters but I don't believe that is true.

Oh well, mr. Prick's website has been unreachable most of the day. This unreproducable, weird behavior will keep on popping up the next couple of days, weeks or even years. That happens when mr. Prick doesn't know the domain is still owned by me. So yeah, go fuck yourself, prick.

To ship a package of two USB cables from one US city to another. What could be easier for a large company? Well, hold on a little.

I ordered two fucking cables from fucking Nomad at 15TH OF FUCKING JULY, and they are still not shipped. Here's how their customer support works: you send them an email, they reply in like a day or two, and that's it, that email thread is abandoned. They won't visit it again. You should write a whole new message where you say "hey, the previous time you said me X, so I want you to do Y then", and the message title should be different, otherwise they'll ignore it.

My roof is under construction now. When it was raining and there was a rain both inside and outside my apartment, I filmed it and an article about the situation was in my local newspaper in like 20 minutes. Russian government organizations are notorious for ignoring people's requests, shutting down their telephones and doing other shit like that, but in one day I managed to collect the foundation of overhaul, my utilities provider, the foreman of the organization responsible for roof repair, his supervisor and the actual guy that did that job. That same day, they all was at my doorstep, collecting the evidence, signing papers, apologizing, threatening to sue each other and collectively signing a document that states that they owe me either a full financial compensation or an overhaul. I managed to do it in the country where you throw an empty plastic cup at a cop and go to jail for it for five years.

Nomad, tell me, what exactly is stopping me from going full Jackson Pollock with a .45 on your company all over the social media (props to @SortOfTested)? You think I can't handle a mediocre iPhone case manufacturer?

Think again.

So, firstly allow me to start with I'm not one to use my phone, so the idea that I'm not allowed to doesn't actually bother me, but the threatening tone really does drive me insane. The corporate office environment here is quickly getting old. Am I wrong to be annoyed by this?

[To IT Department Group]

Remember these emails?

PUT YOUR PHONES AWAY. Next one I see I will confiscate until the end of the day.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

[Head of IT footer]

----
Forwarded email.
----

[To IT Department Group]

I see mobiles starting to creep out onto desks and people with heads down texting/looking at their phones.

Please stop.

What I said previously still stands.

Put them away, or I will.

[Head of IT footer]

I really want to know the thought process behind this PMA error simply saying "Failed to import file".
It's bad enough when user-facing software hides error details to seem less threatening, but PMA is literally designed exclusively to be used by technical people, who know how to handle an error message.

So some notes
First
When he walked up on the one guy he was likely trying to turn the tables so the guy would taze him
Second on arriving and determining he was drunk I'd have determined how drunk
The guard might have been able to say the approach was mildly threatening
They did ask where he came from and how he got here which wouldn't matter if they didn't test his level of intoxication
Additionally he has no id
And he doesn't speak English very well
That would have resulted in me demanding records from his supposed employer
Basically a bit more digging to ensure this wasn't an imm issue
He is asking the correct questions and they did call in an interpreter
So. Overall.
However I wouldn't have let a bystander sit back down until I moved him further away and I would not have turned my back on a perp

He didn't do anything confrontational to the cops so it's not unheard of to cut him a break but I'd follow up with the employer to make sure he isn't an illegal and didn't have any pending warrants or a history of drunken behavior or probation or parole

Apparently not that great of an interpreter and suddenly he speaks better English lmao