Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

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

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

This dude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mofocka plz.

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

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

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

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

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

Lost it more.

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

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

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.

I did it alone and with almost no help.

I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.

-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding

I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-

GO FUCK YOURSELF BY A CRAZY PONY SAFARI !
Fucking useless browser that hide by default the fucking dev tools.
And also it fucking supports flexbox but can't fucking calculate height 100%.
Fucking fuckitty fuck.
Have your website with a shitty ui then. Might as well do a popup saying "switch browser" cause even IE manage to understand height:100%.

Safari is like IE to me. Quirks, missing features, useless debugging tools, vendor specific.
At least Microsoft started fixing is turd.

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

The Linux sound system scene looks like it was deliberately designed to be useless.

ALSA sees all my inputs and outputs, but it can't be used to learn (or control) anything about software and where their sound goes. Plus it's near impossible to identify inputs and outputs.

PulseAudio does all sorts of things automatically, but it's hard to configure and has high latency.

JACK is very convenient to configure, has great command line tools (like you'd expect from Linux), is scriptable, but it doesn't see things.

Generally, all of these see the others as a single output and a single input, which none of them are.

As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.

But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...

So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.

"Hello,

I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :

1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION

Advantages and benefits of change

Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers

HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools

The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors

Blocks of text, boxes of text

The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties

Relative and absolute measures units

2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES

Full CSS, XHTML websites demo

Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property

Columns creation

Layout for forms

Layout for data tables

Layout for menus

3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)

Role and importance of SVG

Using SVG on client side : basic shapes

SVG structure of document, tags examples

Using CSS styles with SVG

Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document

4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE

Introduction to DOM and Javascript

Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically

Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements

Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus

Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation

Can you please give me your availability ?"

Seriously...

CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?

...And if only my rant was just about the program...

It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.

The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".

And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.

So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.

Wish me luck...

It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.

It's over.

I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.

Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:

I had a lot of expectations from you.

But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.

The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?

But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.

But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).

And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.

So now the time has come.

Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.

I'm so fucking fed up with the npm ecosystem. Every single god damn time I've had to do anything it always takes DAYS to figure out how to get anything working and I always have to try multiple tools or libraries to final get it half way sorta.
I'm so fucking annoyed right now. They always turn out not that great, have lacking features or trivial oversights in functionality and ALWAYS have garbage documentation.

I just want to build a fucking npm library with TypeScript to be used with node. That's probably the NUMBER 1 use case so how fucking hard can that be?

So obviously I start out with tsc. That's quite simple, compiles all my stuff and shits out .js and .d.ts files. Okay so how do I use them via es6 import? I don't fucking know, because it doesn't work no matter what I do. The 'module' option in tsconfig is absolutely useless btw. It does *literally* fuck all. Nada. Absolutely nothing.
Okay I'm far from defeated, maybe I'll just have to bundle it. So I waste two days finding something that half works (I'm using fusebox right now) and at last I get a stupid es6 module as a single bundle... But what about type the declarations? They are nowhere to be seen and of course there's no option for that. Because Fusebox the pile of shit that's oh so well Typescript integrated apparently doesn't think TYPE DECLARATION FILES are needed. What the actual fuck.

And that's where I'm now. I need the fucking .d.ts files so I can use it as a module with import. Do I really need another fucking piece of shit tool that bundles these files? Honestly fuck all of this. "Oh the Javascript ecosystem is so great" YEAH fucking great, alright. Where 90% of the ESTABLISHED tools and libraries (we don't talk about the landfill of all the other shit) flat out don't do what you need. Again, how fucking hard can it be to make a npm lib with typescript? That should be NATIVELY SUPPORTED. If not by npm atleast by typescripts tsc.

FUCK NPM. FUCK JAVASCRIPT. AND FUCK THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM

Why are project/tool webpages so useless...?

I mean, whenever I hear of a new tool/project I google its name. Of course, its dedicated webpage pops up as result #1. And EVERY TIME I find them looking nice, but quite confusing, riddled with all the buzzwords, nice phrases, promises of a better tomorrow,... but I'm yet to find a tool's webpage that explains what's that tool for and how to use it at least half as concisely and clearly as that tool's README.md in its GH/GL repo.

I mean, I can read every single word in the webpage, look at every picture/diagram, every fancy gif and still in absolute majority of cases I have no clue what that tool does.
Then I go to its GH/GL repo, read the first 2 sections of its README.md (takes me what, 2-4 minutes?) and I know all I need to now about the tool.

What's the point of those fancy webpages apart from containing docs and an SEO-tuned link to a README.md...?

Useless waste of storage and computing power if you asked me.

Is just me or being a developer has become a complete nightmare?
I mean, I never expected when I got into it to have a simple life in the first place, it's a fucking problems solving job.
But heck, I'm in the field from more than 12 years and something has definitely changed for the worse. Believe me I am just seeking for a general consensus not approval or anything, but it doesn't feel anything like 10 years ago.

I have worked with .NET mostly in all his sauces from aspx, wpf, up to today .NET 10 and C#13 and in the meanwhile it happened that I needed to do tech assistance, code in exoteric shit, use arduinos and raspberries, use perl, java, turn into full stack with databases, devops and shit.

Each year it's worse, the "developer" word gets more and more blurred word to say "the one who must know everything".
I'm asked to know docker, kubernetes, kafka, CI/CD and devop shit, web dev, to get ertifications, to learn how AI works to the level of learning again matht to do matrix interpolations, to get on data science, python, numpy, pandas, pytorch and shit, to know every OS, to know about networking because APIs now have to use rest, a single verb for every action, because if routers and new communication protocols break you have to know and figure out why.

Not to mention that marketing and sales guy shove up the big customers ass every new tecnology to make our work look like bling-a-ling top notch 1% developer stuff that always use latest bleeding edge technology and you're forced to learn new immature frameworks every 2 months or so (latest being various javascript/typescript diagramming libraries).

Every idiot feels entitled to puke out a new framework or supersets of existing languages. I lost count how many supersets css has that I had to peek and learn lol.

Every fucking simple software I did from scratch and designed by myself, web portals for big pharma were much simple than whatever PM i get assigned to are and guess what, I published it and fixed ofc some bugs, but most bugs are related to customer unstable datasets and well, I never had bugs after the first few weeks, except once every few months and nothing serious.

The fucking things they let me do now are hypercomplicated and I spend days fixing other people bugs and we get some hair pulling structural problems becuase they shove in all they can (mediator patterns are a must): kafka, docker, messagebus, whatever javascript clusterfuck they can, patchworks of html and css blurred out in layers of hierarchical scss or sass, slapped into angular (the most immature and crappy shit in js) that has all of his hidden ways to bury and hide DOM (ng-deep: anyone? :host anyone?).

And it's all like this. Whenever I put hands everyone wants to do his little frankeinstein experiment cooking togheter in a cauldron a shit ton of different stuff, overcomplicated patterns.

it's a challenge at shooting flies with bazookas.

I'm really tired of technology at all, not only for my jobs. This fucking trend is a plague spread everywhere and now, since everyone has to deal with it, everything is unstable.

In my daily usage of a smartphone app crashes a lot or have weird troubles, slowness, websites are pretending to be full blown app with this shitty SPA trend and are filled with bugs and incompatibilites.

Basically every tech tool we use is 100% more prone to bugs than 10 years ago.I'm really thinking to find a simple job like baker or shit and get an old phone that just can call and send SMS.
I need to get out of tech for a few years to get back my sanity.

This is not a problem-solving job anymore.
10 years ago I needed to study too but once I got the tools in my hands the job was fun, you got a magic wrench and sky was the limit.

Now you got to fucking learn a ton of bullshit everyday and it's not like you see a end on it, everyday people push out new unstable and bugged shit waiting for devs to be guinea pigs for them. You gotta learn a ton of stuff of which 3/4 will be useless/obsolete/broken and considered inefficient the next month.

jeeeeeez

Why the fuck is Seagate's official bootable HDD/SSD toolkit 32-bit??? It's bad enough that it's TinyCore, but it's 32-bit, so even while booting it tells you to fuck off if a drive has >2TB worth of LBAs, but it's meant for ALL their drives! Their Twitter support was predictably useless, too, and was just "we don't support running the bootable disc off of anything larger than 32GB" and "we don't officially support Linux formatted disks in our tools" (neither of which were even remotely close. The first one I can understand, it was an untrained knee-jerk reaction to a number they recognize, but the other one...)

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

Confluence is called so because it is confusing. It's a prime example of a tool getting in the way for work instead of helping. In Swedish, we have the expression: "Rätt verktyg gör halva jobbet", meaning the right tool does half of the job. Tools from Atlassian do the opposite, they only double the workload.

My little brother started college this year. He hasn't decided what he wants to do, so he took classes in finance and computer science. During finals week, he comes to me ranting about GitHub. "It has to be the most useless tool ever made", he said.

His teachers made him use it without any explanation on HOW to use it. His whole team was working out of a single branch, downloading the zip every time, and struggling to fix merge conflicts. At no point was this ever corrected. This has been going on for an entire year!!!

Safe to say, I spent the afternoon walking him through more productive ways to use GitHub and showing him why it's not "the most useless tool ever made". I don't get why teachers for students to use tools but fail to ever explain how. All that is going to do is deter kids from using tools that could save them when they get a real job.

TL;DR - an entire emulation of a closed source CMS to develop a theme

The longer version:

We are using a cms that is closed source, and we only have access to frontend files alongside twig files. The CMS is custom built but many aspects are in a very rudimentary state, for example it is nearly impossible to develop locally, we have to use an integrated text editor to code stuff.

So out of frustration, and for my development needs, I decided I would make an emulation based on Symfony 4. Also because my PM was pressing me to optimise our site. I wrote some custom JS to handle everything smoothly, a semi-sass framework and well-structured twig files.

I was also supposed to work with our graphic designer, but she didn't get any alloted time from our pm to work on it...

Now PM asks me to write a specifications document in order to make another company build the new version

I mean wtf, I'm so bored, I can actually enjoy my day by coding, and no, I'm just there to write the specs.

When I told PM I am currently building the new version, she's like "but we didn't validate anything", when she explicitly said I had a green Go to code it a few months back

Instead I have to make prezies and convert them back to PowerPoint because we have computer-illiterate people in the company who aren't flexible to understand simple tools.

Let's hope it won't get useless by Friday (I have a presentation to give, alongside my estimates and project management presentation)

Hello ranters, I'm looking for advice in regards to a freelancing job which I haven't been paid.
In summary, I got a freelancing job in like March 2018, I had to do a simple platform with an administrator section, simple but "long", it had to be fully customizable, so I did it. I then got another project, which I also finished, both by December. I added some functionality not on the requirements and also some other asked by them, I also deployed both of them, tasks not included on the "contract". The problem is that I didn't sign a contract (my fault), it was all verbal. Since I was "friends" with them, I asked them to pay me with a motorbike (of around 2300 USD) and they agreed. Then they gave me another project which started wrong, they asked me to finish it within two weeks with a language I didn't know and other tools I also didn't know, I told them about this and agreed that could be a delay, besides, the requirements weren't totally clear and they were clarified three days after the project "started". After this, we had a discussion about how I later realized I was totally underpriced, that I hadn't been paid yet and how the dude that was like my main contact for the project told me that "my code was all nice and cool but was useless" because he clearly thought that an excel could be used as a database and din't know that I had to parse it and upload it to Firebase, which in total were about 4 million documents and this obviously took time. To not make it longer, I delivered the project 1 week later and they told me that they had to "assign" a full team of 7 members to do it from zero because I didn't deliver it on time and because when he asked me to "help them" I laughed. I first delivered like the 90%~95% of the project and he was been condescendent, he also blocked me from everywhere (hangouts, slack) and told me to "deliver what I had" to at least have something to prove that I did work. His team of "7 members" was stupid enough to not be able to at least run an npm install and npm run, they were also stupid enought to not understand what a GET request was an all and when he realized this, he asked me for the database dump and for the 100% of the project, so I also delivered it. We agreed that we were not going to work together anymore, so I asked him to pay me at least what had to be paid of the other two projects and he agreed, he also purchased a computer for me which I was paying him and was going to be discounted from the total payment. In the end, I was going to be paid 1430 USD. He asked me for my bank account and like my tax ID, for whatever he needed it. Since then, almost two weeks, he hasn't paid me, replied or even seen my messages. He also had a "partner" which was also "my friend", the huge motherfucker isn't even replying my mails or anything, so, since it was all verbal and they are being such motherfuckers, I don't know what to do. They are being such motherfuckers and I think I can't proceed legally, since there is no written contract. So what should I do? I was planning on going tomorrow but I pretty sure they won't even open the door or will tell me to wait or whatever. I seriously wanna cry, I don't get how people can be such dicks and unfair fuckers. I believe in karma but I don't think karma will give me that money and time back. :(

2005 called. It wants its numbered file names back.

While I am mostly satisfied with "celluloid" as a worthy successor to xplayer, the first major disappointment I stumbled upon is `celluloid-shot0001.jpg`. Are we in 2005?

Just like xplayer, Celluloid, the new default media player of Linux Mint, should use proper, i.e. time-stamped names such as `celluloid-2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` or `celluloid-video_file_name-2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` for screenshots taken from videos, to eliminate the possibility of file name conflicts if files are moved into other directories, to make screenshots searchable by video file name, and to retain the date and time information if the files are moved to a device that does not support date and time stamp retention such as MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), and to allow for date range selection using wildcards in the terminal (e.g. `celluloid-2023-04*` for all screenshots from April 2023). Besides, PNG screenshots should be supported too, but that's out of scope here.

As a reference, the gnome and mate screenshot tools also pre-fill time stamps into the file name field.

Numbered file names were useful in an era when there was no VFAT and file names needed to have 8.3 file names that could impossibly fit a date and a time, and compact cameras used such names, but those times are long over. Just like the useless and annoying pull-to-refresh gesture on mobile apps and the Media Transfer Protocol, numbered file names belong to the technological graveyard.

If numbers are really desirable, at least `celluloid-shot0001.2023-04-10T00-47-42.jpg` should be used, to include both a number and a date. The command to get this date format is `date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S"`. For compatibility across operating systems, dashes instead of colons have to be used to separate hours and minutes and seconds.

Numbered file names are a thing of the past. Use time stamps.

So basically a friend was tasked with doing some syadmin on a propietary system running on top of GNU/Linux (they distribute the software as a distro).

Called me about an hour ago because there was some odd stuff happening so I log into the system and start figuring out what the actual fuck is up.

Just now we discovered that for a certain critical feature you just need to trust that there will be no eavesdroppers, meaning you send system credentials in cleartext over the network, and it won't work if it's not so.

Of course, some tunnels and routing later (which by the way, is "manual" configuration which is highly discouraged by the creators of this piece of crap) we kind of managed to overcome this obvious fail.

Now then, can you please explain me again how is it that these companies grab open source, make useless layers that limit it in every way possible and still profit? I mean, for fucks sake, you should at least let people manage shit with standard, well understood tools instead of "improving system administration", "easing it for...", for whom?

I'm so happy to log into our production server and be welcomed by beastie.

linux rant number 23094823094

Linux is a marvel of modern engineering. Well, at least in a sense that it somehow manages to work despite its design.

Basic commands like ls, grep, rm, cp (think busybox) do work predictably. Given that some of them are older than you and me combined (grep is 51 years old), it would've been weird if they didn't.

Yet, when comes the time to configure linux itself, there is no right way to do it — there are 5 or 6 wrong ones.
The wrong way number 1 to configure linux is to use predictable commands and their combinations. You know, cat + grep some config files, then awk to change them… If you do it, you will instantly break your system to the point that you'll have to back up your data, reinstall everything and put your data back.

All the other wrong ways are wrong because each of them will break your system in their own unique way. All of them kinda-sorta do what you want, at the expense of messing up some other things that have nothing to do with what you were trying to fix. The worst way to use them is combining one wrong way with some other one, like configuring xorg directly and then using ubuntu-specific userland config tools. This will instantly break your system too.

You'll have to google/chatgpt your way through historic quirks that are somehow still there in 2025. Remember: the worse the shell command looks, the more likely it is that it's the right way (or at least the least wrong way) to do things in linux.

Some minimal distros like alpine is a notable exception, in a way that they're more predictable, but they will become useless the moment you try to get some actual work done. I've used alpine as my desktop os for quite a while. I know what I'm talking about.

If you want so much as to install a browser, you'll have to use flatpak. But flatpak will only bail you out so many times. Your colleagues, and people that write tools that your colleagues use, are using macos, windows or ubuntu. You'll have to use whatever they're using, and if it uses glibc/is not in flatpak, well, tough cookies.

sudo apt install fuse breaks ubuntu instantly — it won't boot into graphical desktop anymore until you reinstall everything, including systemd, and do initramfs. Why does it do that in 2025? who knows.

I hate programmatic auto layout. It's such a mess! Simple shit like cells that can easily be defined in a .nib become spaghetti coded messes that violate every good programming practice ever. Want to recreate the same style of cell again? Good luck reverse engineering the hieroglyphics your teammate wrote when creating the layout by hand. Never mind a whole bunch of useless shit is done in code that could easily be defined via runtime attributes through the storyboard. But why learn a new approach? Cause job security. Or because for some reason Interface Builder tools are seen as "too hard" or "not scalable" to use.. fuck me.

PC-Lint is such a useless piece of shit! Tons of warnings with no actual benefit. The obvious motivation behind this crap was to throw as many warnings as this cheap sucker can even generate with no effort to minimise false positives. Typical snakeoil shit, reminds me of ZoneAlarm back then which reported every ping as "attack" just to fool the clueless into buying. Meanwhile, the actual bugs that sophisticated tools can find pass unnoticed through PC-Lint.

Why would the developers of a library with +800 Github starts suddenly decide to change the interface and render my whole app useless? Some might say because this is software and it is always changing. Well, I think it is because they are a bunch of tools and I'm even a bigger tool for updating to their new version.

I get frustrated about the shitty work I'm forced to do to meet useless deadlines or follow meaningless ever changing consultant ideas.

I write a rant.

People in devrant suggest me best practices, solutions, tools, even technical steps.

I write this meta-devrant.

Devrant refuse to add more than 1 rant every 2 hours.
Fuck.

What's the best way to turn a phone into a dedicated http server? I have a useless android lying about. Wanna turn it into a server.

Linux tools on android? Or forget about android and install Linux on it from scratch? Which flavour?

Any tips?

Doing some stupid shit-ass presentation on powerpoint. I hate this kind of work, so brainless.

PM doesn't know anything on how to create presentations, each slide has 150k words at size 10, bazillion images with a width of 1x1, and badly taken/prepared. Fonts sizes are all different (still surprised she managed to keep the same font family) between blocks.

And when I tell her that: "well I expect from you to make to make that kind of suggestions and fixing it".

How to waste a brain. Going to spend my whole day on fixing this mess.

Plus at some point she had some keywords and she had the idea of "oh, let's make a word cloud thingy". All of these tools are useless, the only decent one is "PLEASE PAY TO DOWNLOAD YOUR SHITTY CLOUD". Won't pay a shitty dime for your shitty app that I'll use once in my entire life, plus your shitty shit is overpriced.

Today's going to be a bad day.

I'm trying to find a linux distro that suck less to study the basics of bash, and some c/c++ dev tools. I play around with linux since 2013. But I just can't believe that, still, until today, in gnome, you can't fucking chose a audio output and get to the system to remember on the next reboot.

I mean, it doesn’t fit in my mind this nonsense, if I can only solve this shit on the command line or in a configuration file, why don’t you take that shit off the option and put a plain text explaining how to configure this shit in the right way . Who expects a system to behave like this?

I don't know why someone lost their time implementing something useless, and worst, deceiving.

Wanted for once use FireFox for dev / tooling.

Welp, it only took 1 page load to see why devs don't use it :

There is NO information on how long an ajax request took.

A lot of useless stuf like "Destination IP" (Who the fuck cares?) or "Initiator" (I already know where it started, I want to iknow how long it took).

That concludes my try to work with a non chromium browser and i'm sad. because chromium is a new IE6.

Don't belive me ? Look how websites manages checkboxes. Yes that's right with ::before and ::after.

These pseudo elements SHOULD NOT work in <input>. But they do in chromium. Which basicly a deal break to use firefox for our users.

Fuck you chromium. IE6 bis i'm gonna call you now

And FireFox : Please, just COPY dev tools of chromium, yours are unusable.

Ok, I feel better, going back to my bug.