The worst bad practice I do is I keep going to work.

Many years down the road I will probably look back and say I should have spent more time with my wife (who are you?) and children (wow, you are tall).

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

The more you know, the less you need.

Equality

Duolingo is teaching me some really important sentences

Freaking genius dev made a system access password @$$Monk3y1

Had to share that with a vendor...on a conference call

Happy Halloween!

Swim Away

Humans!

The amount of sensitive, private, and secure information you can get just by asking someone for it is truly astounding.

Mornin' geeks!

"I am Rubber Ducking Batman"

Fun fact: The word "sudo" in Spanish means "I sweat", which, in colloquial speech, can also mean "I don't give a fuck"

There are a lot of things that could rank up as the worst about being a dev, such as recurring meetings, documentation, shitty requirements, pm gnats, Monday, etc...but something that truly ruins it all is NO INTERNET CONNECTION.

If I had a dev superpower it would be the ability to generate 3D printed objects at will so I could have more cool shit on my desktop.

!rant

So this year I had a subject at university called "Linux internal architecture", and for the last assignment I had to write a kernel module and interact with it with a separate program written in C.

Once I had finished and tested the driver, I went on to write the other program, which was supposed to use system calls to read and write data to the module. While debugging this program (~500 lines of code) I reached the level of frustration where you just start printing absurd messages everywhere in your code to see what's wrong. So for example instead of printing "This error happened in this function", my error messages were more like "Fuck this fucking function it doesn't fucking work".

Guess who forgot to delete all those messages before sending the code to the teacher...

Also, if a specific mode is selected, the program enters a while(1) that, apart from doing what it's expected to do, also creates a file in the user's home directory called something like 'motherfucker' and appends the words 'fuck this shit' to it. INFINITELY.

I really really hope this teacher doesn't try to run the program in his own computer, or he's in for a big surprise.

Installed Arch. Failed. Tried again. Failed. Went back to Ubuntu. Tried again the week after. Failed 4 more times. Finally installed it correctly. Tried it on my desktop PC and failed 2 more times until I figured it out.

I'm never formatting my hard drives again.

Am I the only one who reads mysql as "my sequel"?

When you're so tired that you forget to put coffee in the coffee maker and get a cup of hot water instead.

I'm supposed to be a techie and prefer all the digital stuff, but this is by far the best Christmas present I'll be getting this year

So much swag arrived in the mail today.

It's funny how I end up paying for more stuff from a free app than from one of those freemium games that are so popular right now.

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.

My dad has been using android for about 4-5 years now. I just showed him how the notification drop down works.

The original idea is not mine, but I can't tell you how much fun I've had with this

My dad has been using a Windows computer every day since 95. Yesterday he discovered that if you click the little tabs in the "details" view of the file explorer, you can sort the contents of a folder by name, date, etc.

I also tried to show him how to scroll with the mouse wheel, but he said it was too complicated, and he preferred to drag the scroll bar every single time.

*dad's w10 computer running super slow*

*checks task manager*

100% disk usage

*checks whatever-the-advanced-system-monitor-is-called*

*Compattelrunner.exe is at the top of the list in disk usage*

*searches online to find what the hell that is*

"Compattelrunner.exe collects program telemetry information if opted in to the Microsoft EatASackOfDicks Customer Experience Fuckup"

Telemetry is supposed to be disabled on this computer.

What the fuck Microsoft, if you want to straight out lie to my face as a customer at least try to not be so obvious that you basically lock down my computer with your telemetry shit.

uuuuugh, bllllaaa, grrrrr....<ding>...and,focus.

Duolingo has some secret plans for world domination

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

.stickers {
dfox: thank;
trogus: thank;
community: epic;
share: yes;
}

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

Best advice for dev job hunting is work on your soft skills. Don't be a fucking hero, prove your teamwork ability.

Remember all the rules of all religions and social communities can be summed up in one line: "Don't be a dick!"

Chuck Norris, Sr. Software Engineer.

You know it...from the introductory page of "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin.

Which door represents your code?

We have a ver crappy Internet connection at my office (I believe it's 100Mb/s for 50 people to share), so when somebody starts downloading a big file they pretty much hijack all the available bandwidth and fuck up everybody else.

Now, we have ONE, just ONE SINGLE FUCKING COMPUTER RUNNING FUCKING WINDOWS 10 AND EVERY WEEK IT FUCKS UP THE ENTIRE OFFICE'S INTERNET CONNECTION WITH ITS STUPID FUCKING UNCANCELLABLE MANDATORY UPDATES.
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.

humans and technology...the struggle is real my friends

Using a copyrighted image on a website not knowing it was copyrighted. That was stupid and humbling. So caught up in the roots lost sight of the leaves.

Lesson learned: Assume nothing, question everything.

Seems legit

This happens quite often in the trains of my city. I still wanted to know what the next stop was, btw

Hands down biggest coding distraction has got to be Project Managers.

One of my coworkers just had a baby, so he left work today and won't be back for a month or more.

We (accidentally) took the client's website down for 3 hours, messed up our git repo and when we finally fixed both things, I had to spend the rest of the day editing fucking vector graphics (which I had never done before and completely suck at).

I never realized how much work this guy does or how important he is until now.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...

I have been learning how to dockerize entire projects this week, and I have to say, Docker is the best thing I've come across in a long time.

That is all

In my country, almost every college student is expected to finish their degree and apply for an internship, with some universities forcing them to do it and making it a requirement to finish their studies.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad if almost every internship employer in the country didn't expect you to work for free. Seriously, I can estimate 80% of the internships pay you NOTHING. WTF.

Fortunately this is not the case for CS, but every time I tell somebody I recently started an internship, they will ask me: "Oh, but they don't pay you anything, do they?". Of course they pay me! I wouldn't be going to an office every day for 4 hours to do someone else's work if they didn't!!

Why the fuck is it even legal to employ somebody and not pay them a cent, just because "it will look good on your resume"?? And why do people still accept this shit??

Is is like that on other countries as well?

@trogus it would be pretty rad to have an avatar option that would add a devRant sticker to a laptop.

btw: I love the Rubik's cube chillin with the rubber ducking debugger.

Think Different?

This mission looks pretty interesting

My dad has had an android phone for about 3 years now. He just learnt that the big circle at the bottom takes you to the home screen. I love my dad.

Biggest hurdle I have overcome is <b>myself</b>.

All my expectations, worries, fears, and doubts definitely caused major hurdles I had to crash through, trip and fall into, or they downright exploded into balls of fire as I would stand dumbfounded and burned by flames of regret.

Learning I was the blocker to greater achievement, success and ultimately happiness was a very hard lesson for me to learn, and a lesson and discipline that I still battle with today.

It is difficult to climb the seven story mountain of madness with heavy burdens, plodding with little progress.

Free the weight, and the natural warm air currents will lift high the spirit, and the body will follow.

"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly" ~GKC

"Oh, we do our daily stand-ups on Friday's at 3PM for half an hour or so"

:/

I don't know if this brand is popular outside my country, so I thought you guys should know this is a thing

Power metal

Today I had to explain to my sister why I want a rubber duck with a cloak for Christmas

I am well done, burnt and carcinogenic. The constant pressure to always produce, always post a profit, always increase, always commit, always stand-up and succeed is fucking exhausting and ultimately and totally unsustainable.

There are never any fallow years anymore, or days of rest...our dirt is dying...and the earth is weary and worn out. Antartica is getting green...grrrr, and my head is melting too.

Why the fuck can't we slow down a little bit?

#hatehashtags C#needtheocean

// allow

Dammit. I guess I will have to be a Project Manager.

It will truly be the end times.

Who is the smartest person you know personally, and why?

I finish sentences with semicolons.

I type 'exit' in whatsapp conversations when I'm done sending messages.

I tried to :wq from Google docs the other day.

And most importantly of all, coding got me into tech in general, made me switch to Linux, start a thousand personal projects at a time and is now the thing I dedicate most of my time to, both in and out of work.

Today I spent several hours arguing with a client. Why? Because she's seeing an error on her website, and no matter how many times I explain to her that she's the only one seeing a css misalignment that was fixed this morning, and that she should clear the browser's cache or just use a different one, she refuses to understand that it's not my fault and that the website that's in production is working just fine for her users.

FFS I tested the same thing on Firefox Chrome, chromium, edge and even fucking IE8 on as many OSs as I can, namely Windows 7, Windows 10, Debian, Ubuntu, Android and OSX.

WHY DO YOU KEEP BLAMING ME FOR YOUR BROWSERS CACHE. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT YOU WERE WRONG FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE.

Uffff, that feels better.

One of my coworkers calls Firefox "Google". Oddly enough she also uses Chrome but calls it "Chrome". I get confused every time she asks me to help her with her computer.

So much debugging

Best: Got my first real job

Worst: Had to maintain an 8 year old java/jsf nightmare of a project

What is your most effective "soft skill"?

Dad: Hey, how do I make a program work when it's not working?
Me: Guess what, I've looking for the answer to that exact same question for a while now, but I still haven't found it. I'll make sure to tell you when I do.

(Clarification: He's not a dev, he was actually talking about some 10 year old version of some program not launching in Windows 10)

My main area of focus is consistent therapy from working with PM's.

In other news, I work on the frontend design and development of internal web applications, good times.

Guys, I need some advice.

A couple of weeks ago I finished my internship as a sys admin in this medium sized consulting company. When my "contract" was about to expire they offered me a real job doing the same thing I've been doing for the past few months, but I turned it down.

The reason why I did it was that I wasn't really happy with the job. I mean, the people were... fine, the management team was... fine, the actual work I needed to do was... fine. I think you get the idea. The problem was that I never really enjoyed it all that much, and even though I didn't hate it, I wasn't really happy with it, so I turned the offer down.

After giving it more thought and listening to what some of my friends and family members had to say, I started thinking that maybe it was a bad idea to do so. Many people have said to me that I'm making a mistake, that I shouldn't leave a job before I have a new one, and that I should take the offer, work there for a little while and then look for something else.

I always answer by saying that the job market in this field is much more simple, and that it's much easier to find a new job than in any other, but yet again, I'm not sure if I'm making a big mistake with this decision.

Thoughts?

PS: I'm 21, this would be my first job ever

Time blocking my calendar with busy items so I can limit the amount of meetings PM's can invite me to. Works well and helps me stay of task.

Employee timecard management, ugh.

I've been reticent to chime in on this weeks group rant, feels too personal...but it is what is is.

Most emotional was losing a dev to cancer, and an analyst to an allergy, and an engineer to an accident...ugh.

Most intense was probably losing servers and hard drives without recovery, not being able to get databases back online because they went down so bad, websites being down, not meeting some quarterly goal, shit not building, email campaigns that go sideways...fuck...anything involving reactionary leadership...unrealistic expectations.

But all that shit, while seemingly important or "stressful", pales in comparison to someone you fought with in the trenches not being there anymore.

restore -if friends

TL;DR: Have you ever been on a serious company where you have to DRAW a high fidelity mockup of the software in the design phase?

So I'm in my last year of college and I have a class called Interactive systems design, which is basically about usability and how to design the frontend of your app so it's intuitive, pretty and easy to use.

So we work in groups to design a project for the entire semester, following a long and tedious process of research and planning which includes writing absurdly long documents, doing interviews with potential users and more.
Now that we've done all of that, the teacher insists that we make paper mockups of our app before we do a digital one using Balsamiq or other programs. He wants the paper mockups to be "interactive", so we have to draw them and then record a video where someone "clicks" on the mockup with their fingers and another person moves the papers around to make it look like an actual app that's doing something.

The teacher still insists this is something almost every company does when designing a project, so it's very important that we learn to do this kind of stuff. He's kidding, right? Have you guys ever drawn a mockup of an app instead of using some mockup software?

Always double check the code you're sending to the teacher after finishing a school project.

I once sent them an old version of the code that had useless comments and debug messages everywhere. Some of them "politely" pointed out the fact that I really hated the subject, that it was pointless and that the assignment was way overcomplicated for first year students.

AHH!!! PM talk is melting my brain...nodes are...collapsing...

"We need to post-mortem our lessons learned and level set our expectations so we can define quick resolutions and set tollgate approvals, at a very high level."

# clear my head of beastly things
def cls():
print ('\n' * 666)
cls()

I was assigned to maintain a legacy project today. I downloaded the source code, configured the database server and imported the project in visual Studio. For a tiny, blissful fraction of a second, I expected everything to work on the first try.

(a bit late for wk73 but I wanted to post this anyway)

Back in my first year of university, we had to write a relatively simple (though it looked super complicated back then) C++ console application. I don't know what it's called, but it's that game where the computer generates a random 4 digit code and you have to try to guess what it is. Every time you try, it will tell you which digits are correct, which would be correct if they were in a different position and which are outright wrong.

Anyway, the program had a main menu with a help option that would output a short guide on how to play the game. Instead of hard coding it into the source code, the "guide" had go be written in a separate text file and then read and dumped to the screen when necessary.

Here came my great idea on how to read files. Instead of looping through the file until I reached the end, I counted the number of lines my text file had and wrote some gem of a piece of code like this:

for (int i = 0; i<11; i++){
line = file.readline();
cout << line << endl;
}

My teacher obviously took points off for doing such a stupid thing, and I remember complaining A LOT about it. I argued that 11 was a constant because I didn't plan on changing the text file, and that the teacher had no right to take points off for only reading 11 lines because the file only had 11 lines, so it was read in full.

Goddammit, what an innocent little brat I was. I'm glad my first programming teachers were good enough to stay firm and teach me how to do things the right way, even if it's the hard way.

I had to contact my ISP's tech support because I suddenly lost my Internet connection. I explained to the guy who answered that my router was working fine, and that my devices could connect to my WiFi network, but they didn't have Internet access.

He was so confused because he didn't understand that WiFi and the Internet are not the same thing. He then made me reboot my router and reset my configuration (like I hadn't done that before) and eventually ran out of ideas and scheduled a technician to visit my house next week. What a moron

I am lucky that my family has always supported and been interested in whatever work I have been involved in. But I am definitely the family 'IT Help' guy which is fine...but sometimes excruciatingly annoying and requires vast amounts of patience.

<!-- KHAN!!!!!!! -->

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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="all-ie-only.css" />
<![endif]-->