"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

If restaurants functioned like Microsoft:

Patron: Waiter!
Waiter: Hi, my name is Bill, and I'll be your Support Waiter. What seems to be the problem?
Patron: There's a fly in my soup!
Waiter: Try again, maybe the fly won't be there this time.
Patron: No, it's still there.
Waiter: Maybe it's the way you're using the soup; try eating it with a fork instead.
Patron: Even when I use the fork, the fly is still there. 
Waiter: Maybe the soup is incompatible with the bowl; what kind of bowl are you using? 
Patron: A SOUP bowl! 
Waiter: Hmmm, that should work. Maybe it's a configuration problem; how was the bowl set up? 
Patron: You brought it to me on a saucer;what has that to do with the fly in my soup?! 
Waiter: Can you remember everything you did before you noticed the fly in your soup? 
Patron: I sat down and ordered the Soup of the Day! 
Waiter: Have you considered upgrading to the latest Soup of the Day? 
Patron: You have more than one Soup of the Day each day?? 
Waiter: Yes, the Soup of the Day is changed every hour. 
Patron: Well, what is the Soup of the Day now? Waiter: The current Soup of the Day is tomato.
Patron: Fine. Bring me the tomato soup, and the check. I'm running late now.

[waiter leaves and returns with another bowl of soup and the check]

Waiter: Here you are, Sir. The soup and your check.
Patron: This is potato soup.
Waiter: Yes, the tomato soup wasn't ready yet.
Patron: Well, I'm so hungry now, I'll eat anything.
[waiter leaves.]

Patron: Waiter! There's a gnat in my soup!

The check:

Soup of the Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $5.00
Upgrade to newer Soup of the Day. . . . . . . . $2.50
Access to support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.00

Boss: We are using Angular 1 in our project, right?
Me: AngularJS, yeah, we are using it.
Boss: I heard they have AngularJS 4 now and it's faster and better.
Me: Angular, yeah that's much better.
Boss: So shouldn't we upgrade it? Can you do it this week?
Me: Erm... It's gonna take more than a week.
Boss: How much time do you need?
Me: 6 months, at least.
Boss: What if I put one more guy with you on this? How much time will it take then?
Me: Let me rephrase. It's gonna take 6 months for the entire team to upgrade all the modules in our product to Angular 4. Not including the time to train everyone on Angular and TypeScript.
Boss: Oh, Angular 1 is suddenly seemed to me a better option now.
Me: Smart move 😉

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Developer: Can you upgrade my machine to Windows 10? I need it for SQL server 2019.

IT Guy: Sure.

Some time later...

IT Guy: Good news, Windows 10 is loaded. Bad news, I need to update TPM to enable Bitlocker but the firewall is blocking me from downloading the update. I will need to download it from home tonight.

Developer: But you're the IT administrator...

IT Guy: Yes...

Developer: ...

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

This fucking customer...
I've told that person so many times that they need to FIX THEIR CODE, because it get's pwned all the time.
To make stuff worse - they are still using Debian 5, and we are unable to upgrade because all their shit will break.

I found his fix today - he installed an old version of NGINX because it is "better".

No fuck you.

Hello Monday:
0.Arrive late due to traffic.(Apparently a car hit a cow crossing the road)
1. Try upgrading php5 to php7 and break stuff in the process and waste 2 hours fixing things.(Poor connection so ssh sessions hung occasionally)
2.PHP fixed,open Gmail and get over 100 emails from clients about the server being down(because of (0)).Ignore all.Find a snaglist of over 20 TODOs.
3.Open Android Studio, update to 2.3 and everything becomes broken.Each time i open it ,it crashes and i have to "Report to Google"
4.Spend the next 1 hour reinstalling AS.It finally works.
5.Open Project and the libraries are broken.Spend another hour upgrading build tools.
6.Leave SDK to update and decide to check my Google Cloud console.$50 bill pending.Shit.
7.Try XCode. Remember the project is still in Swift 2 and I have to upgrade it(Would take eternity).Immediately closes xcode.
8.Gives up on life and decides to log into Devrant.

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Story time!

So me, alcoholic I am, went to a local cafe because I didn't have enough booze anymore at home. Turns out that there were quite some people that wanted to get to know me!

And most importantly, there was another sysadmin (that likely saw through my funsies with some people there that I displayed termux' apt update and apt upgrade to as "evil hacking" 😜) that actually wasn't a bluff - he pretty much interviewed me on the spot and was apparently pretty impressed by my skillset. And so am I by his - he asked some pretty techy questions that only a fellow technologist could come up with. In a local cafe of all places!!! Who would've thought?!

I'll probably be going to that cafe some more 😋

8:30 - get into office, boot windows
Windows: "Oh man, here's this update. If you're not doing it now, I will start in 15 minutes. No questions asked!"

9:45 - checking update status
Windows: "Well i'm nearly finished, just give me a sec..."

9:55 - whats's my pc doing
Windows: "Hey mate, I did it! I also restored those neat shortcuts to MS EDGE for you. Please use my browser"

10:00 - Well i can finally start working
Windows: "Yeah... you would. But i had to remove theese few applications, because they are not compatible anymore."

11:00 - Okay, installed all my stuff, did some coding. Time to test it. Lets boot up my VM.
Windows: "Oh so sorry mate. Not gonna show my network devices to Virtualbox anymore. Have fun reconfiguring your connections without them."

Fuck this fucking Windows 10!

The only reason we have Win10 on our machines, is because people in my office panicked the last day of the "free upgrade period" (and i was on holidays)...

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

I decided to setup a little server on my local network just to make use of a 2TB harddrive I use to store videos.

Told everyone in the house I planned to grow the library over time and that they could access it all in a browser using my system name. It's become quite a fun venture and my video library is shaping up nicely.

Using nginx on a Dell XPS 17 with Ubuntu 16.04 to host a server that just auto indexes a shared directory on my external 2TB harddrive. Kind of an embarrassing rig, but it's just a hobby activity and I do plan to upgrade shit later.

The real fun has been getting to understand a bit more about video files. They used to be magic to me, as complex as their file extension. Now I run a script on all of my torrents which checks the video and audio codecs, converting them if they aren't supported by Chrome's and Firefox's web players, and outputting mp4s using ffmpeg. I feel like I have this stuff down fairly well now. Becoming more and more automated.

Next step is to port forward so I can access it from anywhere, but we'll see about that later down the line.

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

November 2022

*Wife*: What do you want for x-mas? A new phone maybe? Yours has lived through a lot already - perhaps it's time for an upgrade?
*I*: Naah, thanks. My trusty S7 still works incredibly well. I also have all those 2FAs set up there and stuff I'm too lazy to transfer over to a new device.

*Parents*: What do you want for–//–
*I*: Naah, thanks. My tr–//–

*in-laws*: What do you want for–//–
*I*: Naah, thanks. My tr–//–

*Siblings*: What do you want for–//–
*I*: Naah, thanks. My tr–//–

January 2023:
*My phone*:

Just my $.02:

One thing I think a lot of students/schools miss when learning/teaching, is that your code has to be *maintainable*. Your code is (hopefully) going to be used for a long time, so program it to make it not only easy to upgrade and maintain, but easy for SOMEONE ELSE to upgrade and maintain, too.

The best code to work with is the stuff that's been coded with maintainability in mind.

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.

Dropbox TLS 1.0 & 1.1 is deprecated
Dev: we need to upgrade our projects
Manager: we don't have time for that. can you call to their helpdesk, so we can keep using our projects w/o upgrading?
Dev: ....
Manager: call them!
Dev: ...

Story time! This happened several years ago, back when I didn't have a computer and I was just using the computers at the university. They had 8 iMacs all in a row, and I would sign into one and do my work.

Now these computers have Deep Freeze on them, which is a fancy hard disk driver that treats the entire drive as copy-on-write, so when anything writes to the drive it makes a copy of the block and writes to that instead. That way all your changes are gone when you reboot. It's a real nifty idea, but it's annoying that you have to reset all your settings the way you like them.

So as part of my setup routine I signed into iCloud. This automatically synced my browser history and my email, and various other things I didn't really care about.

One of those things I didn't care about was Find My Mac. I found this out next time I signed into iCloud and saw the university computer on the list. I had never seen these computers on the list before since normally the computer reboots and forgets everything when you log out. What I think happened is the sysadmin forgot to check the "reboot on logout" option in Deep Freeze. So I was like "I wonder what would happen if I passcode locked the computer?" I clicked the passcode lock option and entered 5555, and it seemed to work.

The next day I come in and the particular computer I locked was gone. I thought "oh God what have I done". So I inquired with the sysadmin (who I really hope is not reading this) and he said "oh, someone got into the Find my Mac thing and locked it down. We were trying different codes, since if we couldn't unlock it we'd have to send it to Apple and provide proof of purchase and that could take weeks. We had tried all the obvious ones like 1234 and that wasn't working so I was about to give up, but then I tried 5555 and it rebooted! So yeah, it'll be back soon, and I decided to try installing OS X 10.11 on it because we'll all need to upgrade sooner or later eventually and it's best to have tested a bit first."

So in the end I somehow made it out with my skin still on, and also with El Capitan on one of the computers, which was the only one I used after that. Not so bad! Oh and if you've manged to read all the way through you deserve a cookie 🍪😄

!rant ~dev

I use my headphones religiously every time I code, as well as for things like tutorials & courses.

I was devastated that the slider switch on my pair of H8s snapped and I could no longer use them wirelessly.

I didn’t want to be without headphones for weeks while they were replaced abroad, so...

Hello upgrade. Hello business expense.

Lovely new pair of H9is.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.

Worked today… At Saturday.

Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....

*rolls eyes*

We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.

Guess why I got called...

Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.

It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.

*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*

The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.

Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.

IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...

*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*

Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.

Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...

NOTICE SOMETHING?!

Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.

After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.

Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…

*turning into antichrist*

I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.

Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...

Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.

But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.

Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.

Just one hour implementing shit.

*goozfraba*

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

I booted up the biggest windows VM azure could have and posted this on facebook saying something like "it's about time i make an upgrade"

Time for a upgrade

Guess it's time to upgrade our office servers.

Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:

"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.

"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.

A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.

When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.

When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.

People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...

When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

DEAR CTOs, PLEASE ASK THE DEVELOPER OF THE SOFTWARE WHICH YOU ARE PLANNING TO BUY IN WHAT LANGUAGE AND WHAT VERSION THEY ARE WRITTEN IN.

Background: I worked a LONG time for a software company which developed a BIG crm software suite for a very niche sector. The softwary company was quite successfull and got many customers, even big companies bought our software. The thing is: The software is written in Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2. Even some customer servers are running debian squeeze... Yes, this setup is still in production use in 2022. (Rails 7 is the current version). I really don't get it why no one asked for the specific setup, they just bought it. We always told our boss, that we need time to upgrade. But he told every time, no one pays for an tech upgrade... So there it is, many TBs of customer data are in systems which are totally old, not updated and with possibly security issues.

I was part of a on-call rotation. We had ~800 microsites with decent traffic on this one box, because that's a good idea...

One day the box was experiencing kernel panics and causing core dumps. After exhausting every possiblity I decided it was time to restart the box:

sudo shutdown now

Missed the -r and the box was not accessible remotely. Had to wait for someone at the data center to terminal in.

Downtime was ~2 hours.

This was caused by a crontab that automatically ran apt-get update & apt-get upgrade... Also made by me... None of this should have worked or allowed to be done!

When you fix your mates PC and upgrade windows on it and month later he comes back because his scanner is really slow, his wife doesn't understand English anymore and cat decided to leave his cat life to become full time florist at local bakery shop.

Sometimes I really fucking hate this company

The code is an absolute shitshow filled with static classes, untestable and duplicate code, on top of that my boss doesn’t like open source

Yeah so i’m not allowed to use a mapping library or something because “Uhhh like uhh we don’t have a contract with the company so who knows what’ll happen when the maintainers leave the project”
I understand his reasoning but it’s an absolutely retarded reasoning especially considering most of the .NET platform is open source nowadays

Writing a webapp from scratch now as well and I HAVE to use vanilla javascript and AngularJS 1.5 even though all the developers here told me they would like to upgrade to Typescript and Angular 2+ but it’s never gonna happen I suppose

Oh and he doesn’t like TDD and our only product is SAAS so imagine the amount of bugs being pushed simply because we don’t have time to write tests or even manually test, let alone refactor our horseshit codebase

AND i have to pay for gas myself which takes 200€ out of my bank account a month just for driving to work whilst I’m only getting a mediocre pay

Have a job interview tomorrow and another one on tuesday

Office laptop takes one hour to boot. Reason why we can' t upgrade is to save money..what about my time...you pricks...

So here's my setup.
Minimalist and clean, the only environment I can work in.

My laptop spends way more time at home now-a-days since I bought the iPad Pro 12.9 2017... It's just so practical to take to lectures.

As for my desktop... well my keyboard definitely needs an upgrade... Any suggestions on a good keyboard?

My alcohol shrine, keeps me sane 😂😍. Let's see your setups.

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.

MacRant: was waiting for a new macbook pro release for awhile to upgrade by old laptop (not mac). Watched the release, had very mixed feeling about it, but still ordered (clinching my teeth and saying sorry to my wallet). Next day looked into alternatives, cacelled the orded to have more time to think, now deciding... I mean cmon, no latest 7th gen processor, no 32gb memory option, 2gb video is ok for non gaming, the whole "big" thing is TouchBar that I DON'T F* NEED. They should drop the "Pro" and name it "Fancy Strip".

So I looked into alternatives, and Dell XPS 15 with maxed spect is twice as juicier, and has not a touch bar, but the whole touch freakin 4k screen, for the less price :/
Just wanted to rant about the new macbook's spec and price and see what you all think of macbook vs alternatives?

Everybody atheist until it’s time to upgrade bios.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

That moment when you execute "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y" just because you need time to think about how to solve the real problem.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Things that only happen on Windows:

1. Windows updates itself with a security-update
2. On next reboot, upgrade procedure fails and reverts changes
3. Repeat

You cannot prevent the update, you cannot shutdown or reboot without the update and it takes around 30 minutes to install and revert every time during boot.

There is a saying; "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." I therefore officially proclaim insanity of my Windows installation.

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

Time to upgrade

Absolutely seamless upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra. Total time from downloading and installing Sierra, testing all my apps, servers, VMs and VPNs....under 90 minutes 💪

Dear Valentine,

I am writing this to express my love towards you. I know not many express their love towards their own. But I won't forget you and our relationship. Here goes my love for you.

I would first like to thank you for bearing with me & supporting me all along. You have been there with me through all my good and bad times. In fact my day starts with you and ends with you. I was with you in all my moods. There were a few times when I didn't believe in you, but you did what I wanted. There were times when you let me down, but you made it up to you later. I am sorry for heavy workloads these days. I love your performance. I know you love doing it. I know you more than anyone. I guess you also know me better w.r.t my history. Thanks for helping me getting my work done, helping me with job applications, helping me find new people, helping me have fun, helping me organised and for everything.

You do know there might be time where I may have to replace you. I assure you to do my best to upgrade you instead of replacing so that I can hang on to you much longer.

I love you 😍 < >-ThinkpadE570
Wrote in ❤ with my personal machine.

Why I sometimes hate linux:
Found old computer with freya os.. I usually work on Windows, so I thought lets try to work on linux for a change..
First things first: sudo apt-get update / upgrade and while it is doing all the updates lets get something to drink..
Came back, logged inn and mouse is gone.. after some googling and searching on my mobile i found out that alt+ctrl+f1 and then alt+ctrl+f7 fixes problem..
Mouse now is back but upgrade failed half way though because no network.. wifi stopped working.. something wrong with drivers.. so to continue upgrade of OS i need a cable now.. (restart didn't work)
Two hours later I managed to update everything, wifi drivers are working and I managed to post this.. But it's too late to do anything, so I will probably put this away again for couple months and will go through same shit next time I open it.

About a year ago, I started a new position as a Full Stack Java Developer. When I started my employer got me a brand new, shiny, Asus laptop. As I prefer Linux (mint) to perform my magic I had to whipe Windows 10 and reinstall it. It turned out that my new shiny laptop was in fact so shiny that Linux (mint) didn't support/contain all the necessary drivers (yet), especially the network/bluetooth drivers and the gfx's drivers turned out a bit of a pain.. Over the year things slowly got better with every new kernel update that came in. However, due to me trying to fix things before those updates, Linux also had become somewhat unstable.

So ... last week I took some time to re-install that laptop and also take the opportunity to upgrade from Linux mint 18 to Linux mint 19 ... or so I thought ... Linux mint 19 was running (very) hot to the point where the laptop would shutdown due to the MOBO's thermal protection mechanims kicking in. ... Ok ...maybe Linux mint 19 was not such a good choice .... let's see if Ubuntu 18.04 is an option ... Nope ... Linux would lock up within a minute after booting up ... no mouse, no keyboard ... nothing. .... *sigh* ... let's (re)install Linux Mint 18.3 again ... and behold, I can start performing magic again.

Linux, it can be such a pain at times. I still prefer it, but running into all those 'weird' things on my laptop when reinstalling, I have to admit I have seriously considered 'just' installing windows 10 again and be done with it. Luckily I could also remind myself of what a pain Windows is to do serious docker/java development in comparison to Linux which gave me the strength to keep going ... :)

Estimate for writing a custom WordPress plugin:

1 hour - Learn the API the plugin will support
1 hour - Review how plugins are written
60 hours - Set up XAMPP only to find that the version with PHP 7 no longer supports MySQL but something called MariaDB which my host doesn't support and then uninstall XAMPP and install MAMP only to get really frustrated setting it up and beat myself for not just buying that $99 Windows Pro upgrade so I can install Kalabox with HyperV which is much easier than all of this and why doesn't Kalabox have a way of supporting Windows Home because not everyone buys Windows Pro or can afford a Mac or has time to screw around with 100 possible Linux distros to figure out which one will work best and then buy gasoline and matches and set it on fire and watch it all buuuuuuurn such pretty fire.

Last time HP for RAM upgrade, this time Dell for HDD upgrade :)

My sister's laptop ate shit the other day and she ordered a new one. She got me thinking about my five year old rig, and how it was starting to show its age, so started half-heartedly pricing the stats I would want in a new machine on newegg and Amazon for fully assembled machines, and was always getting gouged or having to make some kind of sacrifice for another feature.

So after my wife responded to me trying to sound offhanded about buying a new computer by only rolling her eyes, but not actually raising any actual objection, I committed to the idea and started searching in earnest.

I realized that a fully assembled machine would always cost more, be underpowered for its price, be basically impossible to upgrade, be made of shitty parts, and always require some kind of compromise on my part.

Normally in the past, i would go to the barebones section on Pricewatch, order the basic stats I wanted, and fill it in myself after that. But it appears that Pricewatch might be dead. So, for the first time since probably 2002 or so, I'm building a computer in its entirety.

I'm really excited. Everything should be here by the middle of next week.

Yesterday I had to start the windows 10 partition on my work laptop in order to use a shitty conference call software that works only on Windows. Windows decided that it was time to upgrade the system without asking me, so it deleted grub from the MBR, and destroyed my Linux partition (I had to recover it from a backup sector and it was full of errors).
Result: I wasted my morning fixing the laptop.
Thank you Microsoft.

!rant

MASSIVE UPGRADE ROUND 2:

We took it by steps, the DBA did his portion and I did mine, we had waited for the entire thing to be finalized today on Sunday since our users are probably jerking off to their waifus (as they should) and today was my part. MA BOE the DBA was with me the entire time and the whole process took us about 4 hours of both of us getting multiple heart attacks here and there and praying to the elder gods of Asgard for their devine protection as we venture into the calamity of fire and juten ass mfkers that are our fucking servers for this particular process.

Man I really hope for the pandemic to be over and take my dude out for a nice beer, some wings and some relaxation time.

Best DB/Dev team I have ever been with.

I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".

Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?

Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.

But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.

The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).

Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).

```
cursee@potato-2: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

[sudo] password for cursed: ********
```

Hello asterisk, it's about time we acquittance. 😆

Fuck Apple Two-Factor Authentication.

I am a developer with multiple accounts and this two-factor authentication is a fucking joke! I spoke to this idiot on the line who told me that I had to create an administrator on my computer to login to a developer account of mine. I hung up the phone and told her to "Fuck Off"

It's a fucking waste of time. Apple has not had an innovation since Steve Jobs died; each upgrade does nothing new compared with the last one. What's new things are there between 10.14 and 10.8??? Nothing. Except it's a lot fucking slower.

!rant
I just found out that I can get 1000/1000 mbit fiber for approximately $50 a month where I live........ Time for an upgrade!

New cooler for CPU installed.

Damn it. Was long overdue, old cooler was way undersized after an CPU upgrade.

I knew it would be tricky. But damn... My motherfugging stubbornness.

*sigh*

1mm over RAM heatspreader, took a long time getting blindly the cooler fixed... Screwing blindly isn't fun.

Microsoft engineer walks into my room. we need to join your laptop to the domain, as part of the migration and upgrade company policy. so I give the guy my laptop. The guy has an agonizing look on his face! He goes. This is linux! Mind you all this time am nodding and bouncing on my chair. The guy bolts from my room, as if he was going to report direct to Bill Gates. Apparently the dev team was left out in the whole migration plan!

Finally had a weekend to myself to work on some projects. I got my hands on a Sonoff switch. Did a manual flash of some new firmware and got it setup on my crappy old washer to do a little DIY smart home upgrade.

Always nice to get to do a personal project 😊 Just wish I had time to tinker more.

Fuck me sideways. I work for a small business doing most of their IT work, a lot of which is in-house software development. Today I was working on a feature of our employee schedule system that I wrote and for the last couple of hours, my laptop (which is my dev machine) kept freezing up on me every ten minutes or so... 😬

Well, I finally found the cause, but only after running apt-get update/upgrade to see if updating fixed the issue. I haven't updated in a LONG time... Productivity is not on the agenda for today I suppose.

A manager who asked me to research and produce documentation on findings on a new system upgrade we could apply. Report on the risks, the amount of resource and time that would be needed etc. And the benefits of upgrading. Then after recieving the documentation and taking 1 month to read it, refused to make any form of decision without asking managers 2 levels above them who respond with "It is your decision". Then deciding it's best not to upgrade at this time. Okay, no probs.

6. Months. Later. That thing I said I didn't want you to do? I want you to do it now, could you get that done by the end of the week seeing as you have done the research already? Oh yeah and I will be off for the next two weeks as I am off on a ski holiday, so good luck with that.

TFW you find debian is running a newer kernel version than your Linux PC

Apartment management: Hey folks. Elevator #4 is getting a software upgrade so it will not be in service for a few weeks. While we’re doing the upgrade, the elevator call button next to elevator #1 will only call that elevator. The other call button will call elevators 2 and 3. Please press only one button. If you press both, you’re requesting two elevators to come to you and this slows elevator arrival time for other residents. Thank you.

99% of residents: Ah ha! You told us the secret. We’re going to press both call buttons because we choose chaos 😈

Well since I cannot post my work setup due to post-its with 'important stuff' (NDA, not passwords, mind you!!😋) & a lot of curse words & other stuff.. I decided to shame, I mean share my home laptop.. Most of the time, he is lurking in the shadows, trying to upgrade shamelessly whenever I need to use it, occasionally he embarrasses me in front of clients, or makes my summer days at sea a living hell..
So here he is! Everyone, meet LOKI!! :/

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

I love Nvidia's apathetic attitude to Linux support. It makes it so much more economical for me every time I need to upgrade my GPU - the mid-upper tier previous generation cards are always available for around the same price as a lower tier current generation card. There is no buyers remorse when the only things I'm missing out on by not going bleeding edge are kernel panics and random reboots.

So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.

I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.

First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.

Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.

He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.

Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.

Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.

Finally made good use of my RPi and setup pi-hole on it. After a painful 4hour long dist-upgrade and picking the right filters it is working like a charm. Why didn't I make this work earlier.

I've also wrote a little script which queries the api and displays different info on the AMOLED screen that was lying around unused for some time.

In case you are interested (from left to right and bottom), the traffic in the last 10 minutes with the max value on a graph, the most active clients query and blocked ratio as lines relative to the top one, and an overview of the total queries/ blocked queries and total clients.

At least I've finally spent a weekend useful not just playing games and watching anime.

Food and Programmers life:
Spaghetti —> My Code
Pizza —> We are spending the night working in the office
Power Drinks —> delivery date is tomorrow morning
Candy —> extra task
Coffee —> bug massage
Water —> wash your face, we have meetings in five minutes
Truffle —> fu** BlockChain
KitKat —> upgrade your phone please
Lollipop —> one more time please
Marshmallow —> do you like some Nougat?

I hate the Windows vs Linux posts and the Windows sucks posts but god dammit...
With Windows 7 becoming older and older with less and less things supporting it (latest thing is the new Oculus Dash) I yet again decided to try out Windows 10 to see if I should finally upgrade from a reasonably stable system.

So I make a virtual machine out of my physical one and boot it up in VMWare... I upgrade to Windows 10 to check it out it's kind of janky, but I attribute the jankiness to the messiness of running my physical machine in a VM... I continue with the setup process and suddenly, I only see a black screen and a cursor...
I notice VMware is hinting at not being able to connect to the monitor... I realise that, while everything is black and I can't even open Task Manager, I can still see the Ctrl-alt-delete screen so I'm fairly certain at this point it's the VGA driver, still thinking it's probably VMware...

I boot up into safe mode and I try to open up Device manager to uninstall the driver, it won't open (no error or anything, just doesn't open)...

I try opening up devices in the settings and see that the display device is giving an error, try to uninstall it from there, but it freezes the settings app, every time..

I try to uninstall VMware tools as that's where the driver is, click on remove or uninstall whatever the button says and guess what, it freezes the settings app....

I try to open task manager to kill it and task manager is not responding...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
fuck it, I'm done...

So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.

I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.

If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.

This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.

In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"

Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.

Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.

Finally finished the longest ticket I've ever worked on in my life. The ticket title and description was a pretty simple and straightforward one: "Upgrade from PHP 7.4 to 8".

If it was only so simple in real life. Our application is mostly done with API Platform framework, which is based on top of Symfony framework which is based on top of PHP language.

Once I did PHP 7 => 8 upgrade I needed to upgrade API Platform 2 => 3. But of-course that couldn't have been done as before that I needed to upgrade from Symfony 5 => 6.

This all was literally an equivalent of touching into a wasp nest - it took me a bit over 5 months and 800 hours of work and there was literally not a single source file left untouched.

In the process of all of this I've ran into literally dozen undocumented feature-breaking changes, broken backwards-compatibility promises and inside out architectural changes - from both the frameworks and the language itself.

Upgrading just one major version of anything SHOULD NOT be so hard. And to top it all up just to think I will need to do this again in a year or two..

Experiences like these really set my hate for time-based model of releases and the state of today's development in general.

Yesterday I had another job interview. This time from home via Skype. Today I was blown off. I was not technical enough according to the company.

This company was working with an ancient cms nobody ever heard of and made Sass sound difficult and new.

Good luck in the Stone Age fellow devs. Make sure you upgrade your pc to Windows 7.

Discord...

Okay, I have a lot to rant about discord, but today, exceptionally, to the point.

I have my dedicated server. It has uptime last 3 years better than 99,99% (was down 15ish minutes for maintainance and RAM upgrade and like 10 minutes down becouse hoster's generators failed to trigger when there was outage)

This year it was up 24/7/365.

Why am I saying it?
Well, my TS3 server is up 100% of time this year. Yet still everyone moves to discord and suffers brutal audio quality and audio lags, and outages like right now. Its not first time this year and recently discord was acting up before. Today they scored bigger downtime than my dedi server (thats not redundant, not distributed nor any fancy "uptime helpers") last 3 years.

Why the fuck people prefer discord to ts3 other that it allows to upload images more conviniently? Okay, it looks nicer, and is like 10 times heavier on machine, but other than that? Its beyond me.

E: fix typo
E2: fix typo

Canonical has relased Ubuntu kernal update for Spectre and Meltdown.

It's time to do: fucking apt update && fucking apt upgrade.

(alias fucking='sudo').

ios is such a fucking piece of shit os. it won't let you upgrade it unless you are on wifi, and even if you connect to wifi it will say "iphone will try to install this update later tonight". typing on the ios keyboard is terrible, and feels like i'm in 2011 again. it would have been much more usable if the good parts were not sacrificed to suit appearance and whoever is in charge of ios development didn't think that his way of using the iphone was the only true way of using a phone. i'm so pissed off because of the wifi thing gosh

P.S. i can't imagine someone coming from long time android use and saying "how fucking awesome!"

TLDR: There's some days where the Gods of IT are not with you. Just lost a whole day of work.

So this morning, we (me and my team) big performance issues with our web app. Lot's of requests time out, big latency, etc

Try to ssh to VPS, latency of 10 seconds between user input and output.

Usual checks: RAM ok, Proc ok, hard drive ok, reboot server (20 minutes), update/upgrade

We decide to call OVH. After 15 minutes call, we try to reboot in rescue mode. Reboot fails at 60% + everything freezes.

After an hour, OVH opens an incident ticket on +200 vps instances (including mine) everything is down during +1h

Finally everything is okay ! Even had time to migrate my new database schema.

Still, quick heavy on the mind but feels good to go home with everything working out correctly

!rant
Linux experts, please read if you have time

Seeing all the posts ranting about Ubuntu, I'm starting to wondering : I have a laptop on Ubuntu that I set for my courses at school, I took Ubuntu because I could try at school with VMs, liked it and because between this and Linux Mint, I wasn't aware of all those distributions.

So my reflexion is : Since I've started my internship, which would be the final semester (I'm in last year of studying), I use this computer mostly for personal coding projects, which aren't ambitious and I sometimes use my Windows too, so my computer is a kind of switch-not-so-often.
Should I keep it to Ubuntu or should I try to install something else ?

I've heard of Solus, which got my curiosity, and Arch Linux, but this one is not want I think I need. But seeing all those distributions here made me confuse, I dunno if I should upgrade something that's a kind of placeholder for coding and do stuff when the Windows (which is my main laptop) is busy doing things.

Have any suggestions ?

We are upgrading to nodejs 8 late, because no one is tracking versions. I had to rage a prove war with everyone that we must upgrade because node 6 is ended lts. This week i have to argue with one of the admins that the build server should be updated also (jenkins). And his problem is that our private jenkins server is not used only by our company, but other companies under our group. In my mind the only question is who decides our or other company project is important to build nor6maly. And why we should care ..
Every fucking time its a war against stagnant and/or lazy people.

Fuck Unity.
Today the version that those monsters call stable, decided to not render UI text (canvas) in a project I had to upgrade from an older version.

But it performs this practical joke (that stable software must do) only in the fucking editor.

How am I making sure that the text aligns? Ah, just moving the anchor positions, changing the font size, binary fucking searching for the right position for alignment by moving n pixels at a time, and exporting a webgl build and running it to make sure it's aligned

We're shifting to Unreal next year. I'll make sure of it

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Just had a first meeting with a customer who wants me to upgrade their system that a company spent one year making. He gave me the .exe and was surprised I couldn't just edit it.

He was cool about it when I explained, but it's tough to break it to someone how much more time it will take than they had anticipated.

I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).

I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.

After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )

After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.

Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.

I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )

Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.

Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.

I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.

Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.

Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.

Well we’ll see.

Why for fucks sake can't I motivate myself to finish my thesis?

I mean I guess it is because I already got my third raise in my current (full-time) job because of hard work, which left not much time for side projects (or thesis writing).

On top of that, there is nothing which forces me to finish. My Prof. does not really care. I would probably not earn more because of a higher degree. Only thing is I have to pay the fee for enrolment once a semester.

Also, going back to my thesis project after some time, and having to upgrade all the npm modules in there does not help.

Even though I already have a working backend and proof-of-concept app, something blocks me from finishing all this work.

It is a curse. I would do so many side projects, but I tell myself that I first have to finish my thesis before doing anything else.

It is some kind of loop and I have yet to find the return condition.

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

When the online invoicing software you have used for the last 4 years gets a major upgrade, only to find there's a massive feature cull and the interface is prettier but far less intuitive. Time to look elsewhere :-). Pity, I loved it and got tonnes of people on to it.

Reading IE rants on here and I'm confused.

If a client/boss asks to have something work in ie 8, for example, why can't you just say...

No.

"No, it'll waste a hundred hours in Dev time, costing you at least 5 grand or more. please have your users upgrade to the latest browser, it takes them five minutes."

Or am I just naive

Just... Why can't you say that.

Dear Facebook.

FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING CUNTS.
The next time you upgrade your piece of shit application on iOS and remove stuff from their place which makes me search all the way your crap battery vacuum application until i fuckin find it i will come to your office find that dumb zuckerberk and push the fuckin chair he sits at down to his throat.

Same goes for your retarded website.
Suckers.

Apple, next time you want to get me to upgrade my file system, please FUCKING TELL ME IT WONT LET ME INSTALL WINDOWS USING BOOTCAMP, 9 hours and I’ve only just found the file system that will let me run Adobe Cloud and Windows

MySQL 5.5 end of life’d in 2010. In 2021 my company started an upgrade to 5.6. The outdated dependencies meant we needed 25 engineers for 2 months full-time to make the upgrade as invisible to users as possible. We still took about 90 minutes of downtime on cutover day. Not upgrading MySQL on time meant we paid way more in terms of engineering hours. The reason we call it debt, is because you pay interest when you don’t tKe care of it right away.

Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer

so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit

WTF Is wrong with Kotlin! Every fucking time I upgrade its Android Studio plugin i receive loads of errors about: Type mismatch: inferred type is FragmentActivity? but FragmentActivity was expected

for fucks sake bitch! Why the hell you keep on switching from optional to non optional on every fucking update, my commit history is full of this type of fixes -_-

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

Fucking Android 12 everybody hate it, it's ugly, and what has changed from 11 besides everything you already know. 90% of time pressing volume down + power to take a screen shot will result with volume bar popup first then screenshot, so your screenshot is dirty with volume bar.
They must have adjusted time threshold between how fast/precise press of both buttons is, and now you kind of must be faster and alwas this "I need to press 2 buttons but power must be pressed first"

So fuck you google engineers for ruining Android in every sense. I want revert path, I'm going back to 11!!
It's a first major upgrade that is worse than previous, and those ugly tiles and notifications, cool they are big for what exactly? I still can't operate the phone with hand gloves on the motorcycle with tiny keyboard buttons.

It's like everything is tiny and then grandpa style huge top drawer icons for who knows what with so fucking annoying scrolling text, for fuck sake 11 had is just perfect!

!rant
Hey guys...
It's finally working.
Just needed to upgrade the drivers.
Using RGBL + 3 28BYJ steppers.

Just have one tiny problem and need help...
The resolution isn't right... Instead of moving mms, if I send a move of 64mm (one stepper revolution) it just turns one time instead of moving 64mm... Where are the settings to change this?
Btw this is the best birthday present ever, from me to me :-D also... My parents bought me a 3D printer, waiting for it to arrive... Me happy today

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

story of a release
v2.1.0 major changes went live : new features, bug fixes, optimisations. also included releases for 2 associated libraries
release process tasks:
- do code
- update test cases
- test sample app
- test on another sample app
- get code reviewed and approved by senior ( who takes his own sweet time to review and never approves on first try)
- get code reviewed again
- merge to develop after 20 mins( coz CICD pipeline won't finish and allow merging before that)
- merge to master after 20 mins( coz CICD again)
- realise that you forgot to update dates in markdown files as you thought the release will be on 10th sept and release is happennig on 12th sept coz of sweet senior's code fucking/reviewing time
- again raise a branch to develop
- again get it a review approval by sr (who hopefully gives a merge approval in less time now)
- again get it merged to develop after waiting for 20 mins
- again get it merged to master after waiting for 20 mins
- create a clean build aar file
- publish to sonatype staging
- publish to sonatype release
- wait for 30 mins to show while having your brain fucked with tension
- create a release doc with all the changes
- update the documentation on a wyswig based crappy docs website
- send a message to slack channels
- done

===========

why am i telling you this? coz i just found a bug in a code that i shipped in that release which still got in after all the above shitty processes. its a change of a 3 lines of code, but i will need to do all the steps again. even though i am going through the same shitty steps for another library version upgrade that depends on this library 😭😭

AND I AM THE ONE WHO CAUGHT IT. it went unnoticed because both of those shitty samples did not tested this case. now i can keep mum about it and release another buggy build that depends on it and let the chaos do its work, or i can get the blame and ship a rectification asap. i won't get any reward or good impression for the 2nd, and a time bomb like situation will get created if i go with 1st :/

FML :/

CTO at my previous company think that wordpress based website is took a long time to load.
I suggest to use caching and fix ton of abusive query, He refused. He spun up more VM, upgrade the ec2 instance level to the max. Said that he resolved the problem. But the problem still persist actually.
Blame me for slow response website, blame me for late of deployment because data is not ready ( there's a lot of spam in there, we need to clean it before )
I left the company, Coworker said that he just install a bunch of caching plugin,
He made the website down for entire day and don't understand what is happening. Ask other developer to fix it quickly, to do unpaid overime
The site is back to bussiness, said to all team that he already fixed it.
Everything good happened, he claimed that it was his idea.

And the best part is : he put 'ssh' as skill list in his personal site

I really don't understand why my company is so slow when it comes to change. We have a very small engineering team (<100 people), but it takes MONTHS to get anything done. They have spent the last 4-6 months getting FontAwesome Pro into the platform, been taking 8 months to get engineering levels out the door, and we've been lagging on choosing between React or Angular as our upgrade from AngularJS (yes it is the old one) for a year.

Is this normal? I am on the FE and don't know much about our dependencies, but it should not take this long to make a simple decision. The whole migration process will take time, but be decisive for Jesus' sake.

The feeling of dread as still a semi-junior sysadmin when an app doesn't work after an update.

I got stressed, triple-checked everything that I changed and that I followed all steps of the documentation of the upgrade process, then, as a last step before going over in half-panic mode to my boss, I try to restart the stupid java app and it starts working.

Wtf. Why. Why didn't it work the first time I started it? D:

Sometimes I consider using Linux from scratch but then I remember that every time I wanted to upgrade stuff I'd have to recompile everything myself. I'd likely write some kind of package manager or something but then...I'd essentially have a Gentoo system.

Dual-booted Gaming Computer: A Saga of Frustration, Alcoholism*, and Relief

So a while back my gaming computer was booting Antergos Linux and Windows 10. It took me a few months, but I finally became fed up with Windows 10's bullshit of putting ads in the OS (Suggested Apps, OneDrive, etc.) and reinstating all of their defaults after an upgrade (Edge, privacy settings, the People Button in 1709).

So, I backed up my data and installed Windows 7. Windows 7 has a bright, consistent look, and in my opinion still holds up as a good operating system.

However, I couldn't boot into Antergos after that. For whatever reason, no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn't able to. So, I decided to reinstall. Might as well, anyway.

Now, I have an nVidia card, which does not play well with the OSS drivers, so it's basically normal for me to have to unplug my card and use the on-board graphics. So I do that and boot into the LiveUSB, do the install, boot into the desktop, install the nVidia drivers package, shut down.

I reinstall the card, turn the computer on... and nothing. Just a black screen with a flashing underline. I can't even get into a TTY session.

I ended up trying a few other distributions--Gecko Linux, Arch Labs, Manjaro--but all had the same issue. I was about to give up, but decided to try Antergos one more time, but with the newest install media.

And it worked! I was so freaking happy! I can finally play my Linux games again!

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.

2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.

He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.

After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.

I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.

I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.

Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

Updated to iOS 12.1.2 (sleazy release 2) after previously getting fucked up the ass by iOS 12.1.2 first release. Yes boys and girls, they tried to cover up their latest fuckup by re-releasing the same release with a modification.

The first time I updated, it knocks my Apple ID out on all my Apple devices when I upgrade my iPhone to 12.1.2. Mother fuckers... gotta log back in for every device, iPads, iPhones, Apple TVs, Macs. And for each service iTunes Store, Messages, FaceTime on each device supporting. Oh yea, it knocks out my Wi-Fi calling and I have to reestablish that too. Then to really ice me, it knocks out my HomeKit system as the Apple ID is knocked out on the Apple TV.

Now after updating just my iPhone to the second 12.1.2 "sleaze release", the thing knocks all my devices out again.

Apple has taken away that which I loved; impeccable engineering and design that could be used as the model for an entire industry. The industry guru. (teacher, leader) Apple has become the new Microsoft.

October 5, 2011, the day Apple died.

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

I have a buying dilemma.

Do I buy a new phone, laptop, or desktop?

Phone: I just want a better camera so I don't have to spend time photoshopping the RAWS manually. Everything else is fine, it's rooted and had no bloatware, have external powerpak

laptop/desktop: my current laptop is usable but it someone had boot error. Feels like 1 day it will just die, dunno when.

Desktop n laptop are same price and have 2TB HD, 16GB RAM, i7

Laptop also has 256SSD.

Desktop I think has better GFX and was thinking I could just swap my laptops current SSD (also 256GB) and put it in as the primary, tho not sure how.

I usually go by don't buy this stuff until u need it (Moore's Law) but should I buy for just the sake of convenience/upgrade?

So, even as a long-time Apple user, overall there really wasn't too much exciting in the announcement last week.

That said, seeing the Mini get a spec bump caused the ears to prick up a bit. My 2014 is running fine, so it'd be a bit capricious to upgrade, but it does have one very annoying limitation:

It *will* *not* allow me to run 3 monitors at once.

Found this out for certain when I first got it and plugged one into each Thunderbolt port, and then another into HDMI, producing a courteous notice that I needed to remove one of them due to GPU limitations.

Anyone who knows more about hardware than me able to speculate if the new one might be able to support said extra monitor?

Helped a colleague today with finding the reason why everything was lowercase after a release. Turns out another colleague made a SQL upgrade script two months ago the did REPLACE(lower(value)... Found it in 10 minutes, saved a lot of time on debugging and still got scolded for working to long on another ticket...

I wish i can just stop shitting. I shit so much that im literally a shitbeast. Reminds me of that one NFT project that popped out in mid 2022 with artwork of shit. You could buy shit jpegs and sell them. Golden shit is more expensive than brown shit. You could even upgrade your shit to become a diarrhea and sell that jpg. Alright im done with shitting time to wipe and post this rant as my diary

I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.

Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'?

Got my new 2TB HDD delivered today a few days early (expected on Monday). Time for some data migration and that new OS smell!

I think my upgrade strategy will be a Ship of Theseus story in the end.

Today, my manager received a brand new Macbook pro with all its cool features while I am still stuck using an old Macbook pro (mid 2012 model). I always complained him about performance issues and all he did was to approve an OS upgrade (to Sierra). How does that even enable me to be productive? I am already running applications at the peak of the machine limits. Sometimes, the JVM crashes and other time Node.js runs out of heap space.

The manager is not a programmer. All he really does is attend online meetings, track and report to management, and write emails. Ideally, he would need a Mac Air or perhaps a Windows machine. I still wonder how did the company management allowed this. He is simply misusing his privileges as a manager and I can do nothing about it.

So today my company was removing most workspaces with USB 2 connections, DP cables and magsafe 2 power cables. This means that my MBP mid 2014 can't connect to the keyboard and monitors anymore. It already struggled with 4K, so my 2K options were already limited, but now the last few spots are mostly gone. In short: I'm being forced to upgrade.

But tell you what: I don't want to. It feels like a waste to recycle my laptop (even if it's company paid and owned) while it's perfectly acceptably fine. And mind that I will get the latest and greatest i9 for free. Yes, that overheating, throttling failure of hardware design piece of shit. 2 coworkers already own the beast and confirm that it gets really hot really quickly. One of them even has daily crashes (the laptop just turns off) and random reboots. A total waste of money. And my future time. As if it's not enough work to migrate to a new laptop (even with Time Machine).

So, fellow ranters, what do I do? I hope I can leverage the second best MBP (CPU-wise) from this situation, unless there already is a bunch of i9s in the office ready to be used. I really, really don't want one. And I think my current computer is great for what it is, even if it's old. It's a really pro machine for my needs (I'm very efficient, except for Android Studio).

I even consider asking for a Linux machine, but then a whole new world opens to me that may be a step too big (since I barely have hands-down experience).

Enlighten me with your ideas, muggles!

Why Microsoft update is fucking cancer ? Each time you need something fast ohhh shit ! Update.... Now i love my sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade !

Learning how to hack my brain!

Time for me to have an upgrade too!

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.

I was asked to integrate a piece of industrial software which was pre-alpha in a prod to align with corporate objectives. It would have caused all kinds of production problems and instability. Nobody would even notice that it wasn’t there. I procrastinated for eight months until version 1 was released.

I told my manager it was done. Then he informed me that it had been working the whole time and he got plenty of positive feedback so i should roll back to the old version until we can do a planned upgrade. I nodded in agreement and put off the downgrade.

Is it me or software subscriptions make developers lazy?

There is a great photo editing software: Capture One. Every year they release a new major version, so users need to buy an upgrade. In the past developers packed a bunch of big changes into major update, also they released 3 minor updates yearly, and every minor update brought some cool features. But then they added subscription model which was cheaper then perpetual model. And at the same time major updates became not that cool. Developers started to add enterprise features needed by museums, features involving other camera brands users, changes targeted at newbies and so on. For perpetual model users most of these changes are not worth 80-255 EUR yearly (depends on license type and offs) but is ok for subscription model users because they continue using the software and even small updates and enhancements are fine for them.

Not every major update is that weak but many of them are not worth upgrade. And developers are not motivated to do more cool stuff because subscription model users will continue paying for their subscriptions.

Some user profiles I thought were worth stealing for a post:

PonySlaystation
"Full Stack Software Engineer, Electrical Engineering Student driven by OCD & Club Mate."

'club mate' read: probably white powder and ritalin. I heard he once dismembered a horse and put the bloody head in a rivals bed.

uyouthe
"Russian assassin leader, Apple fanboy. Tabs ftw"

Comrade, apple is bushwazee capitalist filth. Onlytrue comrades use windows, because the upgrade is free.

Root
"Magical processor fairy; part-time misanthropic bane of idiots. 🧚‍♀️🏹 Ergo sum miseriae"

Do you sprinkle magical processor fairy dust in each new generation of chips to increase their
clock rate?

Android Studio upgrade

Over the weekend I upgraded my android studio and the project files of my current project and all went smoothly (as far as I thought).
I did not touch the project till today as was implementing some few features only for some few unexpected bugs to creap in.Been implementing that feature for some time and thought would be done in a flash only to my disappointment.
Turns after upgrading my SDK they were some conflicting dependencies that had no idea of.
To make it worse my fall to branch was way behind the active one and had to create a new project from scratch and copy paste files.
All this after spending hours in Stack
Overflow and scratching my head.

Lesson learnt to commit more frequently.

About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.

My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.

Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.

The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!

We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.

Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!

They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!

This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!

Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!

If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!

So, looking at the news coming out of WWDC... Is it just me, or is this something a collection of "about damn time" and "oh look, yearly specs upgrade" combined with a splattering of "wait, that wasn't already a thing?"

Client wants me to document the updated patch in the system... In detail. I just want to upgrade their server memory but noooooo. They want me to detail it all in step-by-step, including change impact, description task, expected time duration, back-out plan.

The first time I had to do this, it was cute. But now it's FUCKING ANNOYING ON HOW DETAIL THEY WANT ME TO PUT IN!!!

Client: "OK, so you wanna upgrade the server memory. What do you need to bring into the data centre?"
Me: "Just my laptop. I'm just configuring your underutilised server memory and upgrade it."
Client: "Good. Put that in the document, including your laptop serial #, make and model."
Me: *Screaming internally*

When I look at the hefty PC setup on my desk self-assembled ~8 years ago, the only thought crossing my mind is: "what the hell was I thinking..."

time for an upgrade to free up 1 sq meter of space on my desk

So I wonder if anybody on here has ever come across the LG G3 flickering screen issue.

I bought a LG G3 about 2 years ago. Fantastic phone.. Until all the issues started appearing.
First of all, the glass started lifting off on the left side of the phone, exposing the backlight layer, because the phone somehow managed to bend (insert iphone joke) inside my pocket. I was okay with it since it was a minor visual thing and didn't affect anything.
About 6 months ago the phone started lagging like crazy, and it kept getting worse and worse. It's so bad right now that Twitter will rarely fullscreen images, apps crash all the time, and occasionally the phone freezes to the point where it won't even react to the lock button.
About 2 weeks ago I started getting messages that my sim card was removed, and the phone starts rebooting itself. This would sometimes happen 10 times a day.
I was already pissed at all of these issues and in a desperate need of a new phone, but on Sunday a brand new issue appeared!
The phone's display randomly shut off, then wouldn't want to turn on, and occasionally turn on just to fade out or flicker away.
I of course went to google to see if anybody else has this issue... And it turns out that youtube is full of videos about it. Apparently the overheating issue these phones have slowly ruins the solder on the chips, which in turn creates a poor connection and causes these issues. The only way to solve it seems to be to reflow the chip, but others that tested that only got it to work for around 2 weeks before the issues started reappearing. I haven't tested it myself yet, but after disassembling, fucking around with it, and putting it all back together 3 times I sort of got it to work to the point where I can use it for several minuted before the displays fails. While writing this rant the display only quit on me once at the very beginning.

What I'm wondering is, why is it that nobody at LG decided to address the heating issue by perhaps throttling the CPU more? And I heard the G3 isn't the only LG phone with these issues?
This crap made me lose all my trust in the company. I wanted to upgrade to a G6 or V30, but because of this crap I think my next phone might be a Xiaomi.

This rant is now so long that it's barely even a rant or on topic. I think I should end it here since I have nothing more to say other than the LG G3 is a beautiful but crap phone, oh, and the new iPhone 8 is a flop

Tell boss you want to resign in a good manner.
Boss tells you it will take you a very long time to leave.
Tell boss that is way to long.
Boss persists his not so kind requests.
Check your contract and local laws.
Dilemma: Tell him he’s being unrealistic and demand a normal procedure/Do the time and cry about every missed opportunity for a career upgrade. What would you do?

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.

After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.

Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).

Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).

Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.

I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.

Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.

I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.

That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

The OnePlus 3 looks soooooo amazing! OnePlus One.. you did me well. time to upgrade!

what are your thoughts ranters?

That moment when you're away from home and you're performing a fucking system update (upgrade?) on fucking Gentoo and your fucking Chromebook can't fucking connect to your fucking computer at home running fucking Arch to offload fucking compilations over fucking SSH and fucking Polybar tells you that the fucking RAM is almost full and that both of your fucking Broadwell CPUs are fucking 100% on usage and even fucking Vim can't open your fucking work to add the fucking documentation for a fucking assignment from a fucking online course due today and everything's fucking stopped in time but the fucking window manager is still working normally?!!!!

I had my first config with a 286 CPU (dos only) machine when i was like 6.

My father brought the stuff in around midnight... i supposed to be sleeping already then...but it was my first fucking pc! Got so excited that
i was played the shit about a game called JBird like no tomorrow.

Had to upgrade it to a 486 dlc when win 3.1 released and some text editor's response time was over 10sec (for a letter or character to display on the screen from the point you pressed the button). Also it was needed to place a piece of paper between the two ram slots so it can recognize both ones. Seems funny with nowaday's hw and stuff.

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

So Im planning to build a pc, which i will mainly use it for dev and gaming in free time, my main components will be:
CPU: INTEL 8700K
GPU: GTX 1080 msi or gigabyte?
SSD: 860 EVO
RAM: 16GB 3200MHZ
MOTHERBOARD: should i go with msi or gigabyte whixh one is better?
PSU: 650W or 700W deepcooler?

Also for the cpu cooler do i get water colling or a standard cpu fan?

P.S: i plan to overclock the cpu and gpu at some point.
Also whats your opinion on the rgb lightning gpu and motherboard, and is there point in getting a mobo with sli support (is it work buying second gpu at some point or better upgrade the existing)

yesterday, I just swapped my sim card for some time with another. Placed it back....and voila! I can't enable data connection. I lost all my apn settings. To add to this, neither is it auto fetching the apns, nor i can manually change it! It shows some fucking error "apn settings not available for this user". I have another phone with same android version (lollipop) and everything works smoothly on it. These guys just broke everything after giving an upgrade from kitkat. Auto brightness stops working after a few hours, random reboots.... This is it... bye bye stock rom!

When your new upgrade process looks like it will save you a few hours of time. After 18 hours and scrapping the improved process we've finally got the green light.

When you're writing your most beautiful module yet and realize that you need the new Jackson library, go to upgrade the dependency and all your old dependencies break because nobody ever took the time to keep packages up to date! #DependencyHell

RANT
THE fucking pip is not working again. This time throwing sslerror ssl_certificate. Googled and came to know they removed TLS 1.0 and 1.1 support. Solution upgrade the pip. Done. Still same.
Checked their website no information.

Don't have words now.

Honestly, people who complain about Chrome using too many resources, it's fucking time to upgrade your toasters or close some of the 100+ tabs you NEVER use

This is an actual transcript...
Since it's way too long for the normal 5000 characters, hence splitting it up...

Infra Guy: mr Dev, could you please give some rational for update of jjb?
Dev: sparse checkout support is missing
Infra Guy: is this support mandatory to achive whatever you trying to do?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: u trying to get set of specific folder for set of specific components?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: bash script with cp or mv will not work for you?
Dev: no
Infra Guy: ?
Dev: when you have already present functionality why reinvent the wheel
Dev: jenkins has support for it
Dev: the jjb is the bottle neck
Infra Guy: getting this functionality onto our infra would have some implications
Dev: why should I write bash script if jenkins allows me to do that
Dev: what implications ??
Infra Guy: will you commit to solve all the issues caused by new jjb?
Dev: you show me the implications first
Infra Guy: like a year ago i have tried to get new jjb <commit_url>
Infra Guy: no, the implications is a grey area
Infra Guy: i cant show all of them and they may hit like in week or eve month
Dev: then why was it not tackled
Dev: and why was it kept like that
Infra Guy: few jobs got broken on something
Dev: it will crop up some time later
Dev: if jobs get broken because of syntax
Dev: then jobs can be fixed
Dev: is it not ???
Infra Guy: ofc
Infra Guy: its just a question who will fix them
Dev: follow the syntax and follow the guidelines
Dev: put up a test server and try and lets see
Dev: you have a dev server
Dev: why not try on that one and see what all jobs fails
Dev: and why they fail
Dev: rather than saying it will fail and who will fix
Dev: let them fail and then lets find why
Dev: I manually define a job
Dev: I get it done
Infra Guy: i dont think we have test server which have the same workload and same attention as our prod
Dev: unless you test how would you know ??
Dev: and just saying that it broke one with a version hence I wont do it
Infra Guy: and im not sure if thats fair for us to deal with implication of upgrading of the major components just cause bash script is not good enough for u
Dev: its pretty bad
Infra Guy: i do agree
Infra TL Guy: Dev, what Infra Guy is saying is that its not possible to upgrade without downtime
Infra Guy: no
Dev: how long a downtime are we looking at ??
Infra Guy: im saying that after this upgrade we will have deal with consequences for long time
Infra Guy-2: No this is not testing the upgrade is the huge effort as we dont have dev resources to handle each job to run
Dev: if your jjb compiles all the yaml without error
Dev: I am not sure what consequences are we talking of
Infra Guy: so you think there will be no consequences, right?
Dev: unless you take the plunge will you know ??
Dev: you have a dev server running at port 9000
Infra Guy: this servers runs nothing
Dev: that is good
Dev: there you can take the risk
Infra Guy: and the fack we have managed to put something onto api doesnt mean it works
Dev: what API ?
Infra Guy: jenkins api
Infra Guy: hmmm
Dev: what have you put on Jenkins API ??
Infra Guy: (
Dev: jjb is a CLI
Infra Guy: ((
Dev: is what I understand
Dev: not a Jenkins API
Infra Guy: (((
Dev: (((((
Infra Guy: jjb build xmls and push them onto api
Infra Guy: and its doent matter
Dev: so you mean to say upgrading a CLI is goig to upgrade your core jenkisn API
Dev: give me a break
Infra Guy: the matter is that even if have managed to build something and put it onto api
Infra Guy: doesnt mean it will work
Dev: the API consumes the xml file and creates a job
Infra Guy: right
Dev: if it confirms to the options which it understands
Dev: then everything will work
Dev: I am actually not getting your point Infra Guy
Infra Guy: i do agree mr Dev
Dev: we are beating around the bush
Infra Guy: just want to be sure that if this upgrade will break something
Infra Guy: we will have a person who will fix it
Dev: that is what CICD is supposed to let me know with valid reasons
Dev: why can't that upgrade be done
Infra Guy: it can be done
Infra Guy: i even have commit in place