Client : Can you make some adblock?
Me : Why? There is a lot of good things already...
C : I mean... Listen carefully.
M : ok
C: i have some google ads and user blocks with adblock
M : yeah, that is normal
C : so i implemented adblock blocker which blocks adblock so that i can show the webpage plus ads when the user disables adblock.
M : i bet users hate that.
C : yeah, so users found out a way to disable adblock blocker which disables adblock blocker which i implemented to show the ads! So i cant earn revenue..
M : so what?
C : Can you make ad block block block block?
M : Sure. How much will you give me ?
C : 20 to 30 dollars
M : great ( the most generous client ever seen)

*couple of years later*

Client : can you make ad block block block block block block block block block block?
Me : i cant understand
C : count the number of block
If there is odd number of block i means to block ads.
If there is even number of block ads, it means to show ads making user to disable ads.
M : so just tldr your request this time
C : even number
M : ok how much will you pay
C : 20 to 30 dollars

*next day*
C : can you..
M : offline

Who in the fucking world made ads, made adblock and made adblock block?

The GET /users endpoint will return a page of the first 13 users by default.

To request other pages, add |-separated querystring with the limit and offset, as roman numerals enclosed in double quotation marks. Response status is always equal to 200, plus the total count of the resource, or zero when there's an error.

You can include an array of friends of the user in the result by setting the request header "friends" to the base64-encoded value of the single white pixel png.

Other metadata is not included by default in responses, but can be requested by appending ?meta.json to any endpoint, which will return an xml response.

If you want to update the user's profile picture, you can request an OAuth token per fax machine, followed by a pigeon POST capsule containing a filename and a rolled up Polaroid picture. The status code attached to the return postal dove will be the decimal ASCII code for a happy smiley on success, and a sad smiley if any field fails form validation.

-- Every single external REST API I've ever worked with.

One step through the door my wife whips around, a look so disgusted she barely seems human. "What's that smell?" she cries. "It's you! You smell like...like bad code!"

Indeed, I am covered with the scent of the forbidden love child of a man who read half a chapter on if-then statements and then pushed out into the world, earthworm-like, a mangled misshapened gelatinous mass that my employer gave the title of line-of-business application purely out of pity.

For more days than I'd like to count I have been porting a ColdFusion 5 application to .NET. Initially written in 2000 and last touched in 2006, it has a data architecture comparable to Dresden after the second world war. It features a table solely comprised of seven columns of IDs so that joins can be made between other tables lacking a common key. Columns that should be contained within a single table spread out among multiple tables. Single columns containing data that should be multiple columns (with handy flags to separate the subsets). A view with 14 joins that playfully displays unintended results. And so much more spread out over almost 200 stored procedures, views, triggers, and tables on the SQL server, and dozens of additional ADO-like SQL statements within the ColdFusion itself. Fortunately, the application overcomes these issues by having absolutely no data validation while allowing nulls pretty much everywhere.

When I am done this will be a very nice ASP.NET MVC app with at least 150 less stored procs, views, and tables. Auto-generated duplicate entries will be a thing of the past. Pop-up windows that inexplicably refresh the underlying screen to display a different part of the program than the one the user wants will be eliminated. And a UI based on the colors of a Rubik's Cube with usability that Mr. Rubik would find challenging will disappear with only the trauma of using it left behind.

Sadly, this is not my worse legacy code experience. Just the most recent. Just the most recent stench added to a lifetime of bathing in code rot.

An adult cam website I worked on as freelancer had/has this code everywhere:
$user = $_POST['usr'];
$pass = $_POST['pwd'];
$row = $db->query ("SELECT * FROM users where username='".$user."' AND password='".$pass."' COUNT 1);

I was hired to add new features and was touch any other parts of the code. When my job was done, I tried to fix those as a good samaritan but the client thought I was messing with the system or should be thing of new features to add. So I got fired.

5 years later, I check out of curiosity and they are still there. I ask him again if I can work on them for a little less pay(I'm broke) and he doesn't reply. What a douche. I hope his site receives a shot of SQLi from a customer.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

I was helping my girlfriend's sister on her programming homework yesterday. But the thing is that she missed a lot of classes to be with her boyfriend. So now she has a reasonably advanced task, without knowing the basics.

Her assignment was to open a file, extract it's text, and count how many times an user-given word appeared on it. So here's how it went:

- so you use the input function to ask the user to type the word.
- ok, but where do I type the word?
- in that black screen, on the bottom of visual code
~ changes name of the variable that receives the input()~
-like that?
- no, that is just the variable name. You should type in that black screen AT THE BOTTOM OF VISUAL CODE
- oh, ok.
~ changes name of .py file ~

Did a code test at an interview, had to aggregate data from a db. They stored cities with population count and users referenced cities.. 6 cities had a higher user count than population 🤔

They were a little taken back and suggested the population data must be outdated 😉.. it got a bit awkward

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Do arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berserk) count? I got my allowance in quarters.

Atari 2600? Ti/99 with a tape drive to play a game at my friend's house?

Having to buy a 5.25" floppy in the HS bookstore for typing class on the TRaSh-80s and finding a way to put a break in the program and save it to disk so I got top score on assignments?

Tron. That's what really did it for me. To this day, I like to imagine there is a vast world inside the computer.

After a BASIC programming class in HS, I got an Apple IIGS and started writing my own load menus for these little games I'd find around FIDO and newsgroups. Instead of "PR#6, brun gumball" a nice styled menu would show where you could press the number of the game you wanted to play.

I bought a book on Apple assembler and promptly got disillusioned with full blown programming (in 1988), instead sticking to BASIC and, later, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python.

Who remembers sharing hacked PCP accounts to dial out of state BBSes?

Applied Engineering customers and 300 baud chatroom lurkers represent.

User #243, God's Country chat

Oh boy I got a few. I could tell you stories about very stupid xss vectors like tracking IDs that get properly sanitized when they come through the url but as soon as you go to the next page and the backend returns them they are trusted and put into the Dom unsanitized or an error page for a wrong token / transaction id combo that accidentally set the same auth cookie as the valid combination but I guess the title "dumbest" would go to another one, if only for the management response to it.

Without being to precise let's just say our website contained a service to send a formally correct email or fax to your provider to cancel your mobile contract, nice thing really. You put in all your personal information and then you could hit a button to send your cancelation and get redirected to a page that also allows you to download a pdf with the sent cancelation (including all your personal data). That page was secured by a cancelation id and a (totally save) 16 characters long security token.

Now, a few months ago I tested a small change on the cancelation service and noticed a rather interesting detail : The same email always results in the same (totally save) security token...
So I tried again and sure, the token seemed to be generated from the email, well so much about "totally save". Of course this was a minor problem since our cancelation ids were strong uuids that would be incredibly hard to brute force, right? Well of course they weren't, they counted up. So at that point you could take an email, send a cancelation, get the token and just count down from your id until you hit a 200 and download the pdf with all that juicy user data, nice.

Well, of course now I raised a critical ticket and the issue was fixed as soon as possible, right?
Of course not. Well I raised the ticket, I made it critical and personally went to the ceo to make sure its prioritized. The next day I get an email from jira that the issue now was minor because "its in the code since 2017 and wasn't exploited".

Well, long story short, I argued a lot and in the end it came to the point where I, as QA, wrote a fix to create a proper token because management just "didn't see the need" to secure such a "hard to find problem". Well, before that I sent them a zip file containing 84 pdfs I scrapped in a night and the message that they can be happy I signed an NDA.

I'm the most ignored user of devrant regarding last week. Can you believe it? These stats summarize the amount of times that a message is not upvoted. It doesn't count mention's tho. A lot of people do not upvote if they mention. For more heartbreaking stats, see comments.

Also, poor GPT, always directly asked but one of the least appreciated by upvotes

I was working yesterday, writing a calculus with sql.
My very great user explained to me the math in Excel. I first though to myself, piece of cake, i got it.
Then I started typing and at the end of the day i had 6 temp tables which at some point need to join with themselves. It was just hilarious. each table had at least 4 millions rows.

Then I started a new query just for validating the output of me very ugly previous queries.
And I fucking found a easier way to get the same output with 3 joins of 3 different tables and a count at the end.

When you love yourself. but hate yourself at the same time.

xD it was a very productive Friday night

I wrote some simple pen test scripts that automatically get executed on every ip in my fail2ban log.

Ip count: 2500+ in a few days. Probably victims of botnet. Some have mysql, postgres, smb open and many of them support user/pass auth on their ssh.

The scripts were a lot of fun to write but I don't expect much results.

The dangers of PHP eval()

Yup. "Scary, you better make use of include instead" — I read all the time everywhere. I want to hear good case scenarios and feel safe with it.

I use the eval() method as a good resource to build custom website modules written in PHP which are stored and retrieved back from a database. I ENSURED IS SAFE AND CAN ONLY BE ALTERED THROUGH PRIVILEGED USERS. THERE. I SAID IT. You could as well develop a malicious module and share it to be used on the same application, but this application is just for my use at the moment so I don't wanna worry more or I'll become bald.

I had to take out my fear and confront it in front of you guys. If i had to count every single time somebody mentions on Stack Overflow or the comments over PHP documentation about the dangers of using eval I'd quit already.

Tell me if I'm wrong: in a safe environment and trustworthy piece of code is it OK to execute eval('?>'.$pieceOfCode); ... Right?

The reason I store code on the database is because I create/edit modules on the web editor itself.

I use my own coded layers to authenticate a privileged user: A single way to grant access to admin functions through a unique authentication tunnel granting so privileged user to access the editor or send API requests, custom htaccess rules to protect all filesystem behind the domain root path, a custom URI controller + SSL. All this should do the trick to safely use the damn eval(), is that right?!

Unless malicious code is found on the code stored prior to its evaluation.

But FFS, in such scenario, why not better fuck up the framework filesystem instead? Is one password closer than the database.

I will need therapy after this. I swear.

If 'eval is evil' (as it appears in the suggested tags for this post) how can we ensure that third party code is ever trustworthy without even looking at it? This happens already with chrome extensions, or even phone apps a long time after reaching to millions of devices.

The main reason I moved from Linux to macOS was that I grew up. If we count not just Linux experiments but prolonged usage, I was an avid Crunchbang fan. After it died, I moved to elementaryos.

What I want to say is, Linux can be very fun and educational when you're still in the uni. You have all the energy in the world, and you can afford to diverge from your daily routine for an hour to debug GPU drivers.
Now, the backbone of my life is keeping a very tight sleep schedule, taking meds on time, avoid infohazards, avoid scrolling on the web, all to remain in a very fragile state of balance that keeps the bipolar disorder away. I'm in the middle of all this, earning derealization (yes, I'm also autistic) every time I design a data model. All I want from my computer is to be treated like a careless, regular user, not like someone with a CS degree.

I use Sublime Merge instead of command line Git. I use Postico to explore PostgreSQL databases, not psql from my terminal. By the way, my terminal is not iTerm, Alacritty or some other such thing, my terminal is whatever came with my Mac, with whatever default settings.

Linux is crawling into a non-street-legal racecar's cockpit and strapping yourself in, ready to blast off. MacOS is your chauffeur, holding your old shaking hand as he helps you into your Maybach's backseat. They're different, and that's okay.
Can Maybach race? Well, it has a 621 HP V12, so if _you_ can race, it probably can too, but we all know it's not a racecar.

Windows? Windows is an SS officer, wearing the all too familiar Windows logo for swastika, throwing you into a gaswagen.

!rant

Do we have a number, for how many users have joined devRant?
...I mean, yeah, social media and the Play Store page for devRant display a number, but I'd like to hear it from the source :D

Chrome likes to count teleporting goats, Android tests if the user is a monkey. I like to put "void fish(object look)" in my code and throw the fish where ever I wanna test something.

What are some interesting functions you've added to your code? Has another dev caught your function yet? (mine hasn't been caught yet, yay!)

I don't have any experience with cloud providers and I need to get a server for a project.
The website will be up for 3 weeks, access will probably be very uneven, the total user count is somewhat below 2000.
The site will probably be quite interactive and real-time, content may be changing every few seconds for an hour and then remain unchanged for days. I will also need either SSE or websockets for this reason.
What should I consider when selecting a cloud providers? Do you have a good one? My ideal provider would scale resources according to traffic like I've heard AWS does, but I want to hear your opinion first especially considering I know very little about how server load works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

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

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

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

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

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

Newbie Linux User - Story about not working GUI

I am a proud Opensuse user for about a year, still struggling with some basic stuff, terminal, etc.
The story begins when a few days ago I try to login to the system. To my trusty Gnome. I get stuck on login loop;
successful login - > black screen for a second - > back to login screen.

Zero feedback, not a single error message

Stress level increases taking in count that I am at a climax at my university with tons of projects on my computer.

I assemble the Team A:
Me, Google, Stackoverflow, and for desperate times Russian Stackoverflow

Over 4 hours, found out that my user is affected by this, tried restoring default Gnome configuration, went through bunch of logs only to find out that every user gets the same errors, still only my not working. Even KDE denied to cooperate with the same result.

So what went wrong you may be thinking.
One line in file replaced by miniconda, that changed the PATH.

Linux is the best detective game that I've ever played.
Is it something that I should get used to?

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

Dev1: Something is not adding up
Dev2: Yea I saw it too,
Dev1: We can come up with an algo to show more controversial content vs really bad content
Dev2: They already LOATHE the algorithm, and make videos about it,
Dev1: If we remove the dislike count,
Dev2: ... sync count will not be centralized
Dev1: ... because only the creator will see the dislikes
Dev2: ... view count v dislikes will be totally blurred now
Dev1: ... coz the dislike code depends on the "has the user viewed it" algo
Dev2: meaning people will have to watch is more than the threshhold!!!
Dev1: but people are not gonna be happy
Dev2: we didnt get negative feedback on the small experiment
Dev1: Fck it, PR will handle it

How I think it really happend, because I cant wrap my head around this shit

Greets. I need advice. And before reading just skip me with classic things you can't - you shouldn't. As i am Windows user last 20 years, I never actually used any other os (running ubuntu on vm occasionally doesnt count). So for some period of time I'm thinking about throwing myself fully into some Linux distro but I can't choose which one. I was thinking between Fedora, Arch and Debian (i dont want Ubuntu), but also what it should be a main key of my decision is good documentation backed up distro. Thanks in advice if you are willing to help my decision

!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one

Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).

Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.

I've been working on a project that involves realtime messaging and i intend to also allow the comments count to update in real-time with websocket.

What i currently do is, when a user post's a comment the socket is notified to refresh the posts list page. (But if many users are commenting simultaneously that would be so many updates per few seconds. )

What's the best way around realtime comment-count updates in webapps.