No,you can't be a fucking hacker by just knowing python and installing Kali.

Just finished our BIG update including a big change in the backend (PHP => NODEJS). So I hope our users will enjoy this one because we are not yet public and our competitor get a lot of clients each day but if we compare our product to their product: Ours is responsive as fucked and have much more stability but less fonctionnalities so we have to add more fonctionnalities before releasing our product to the public. I hope we will be able in a few weeks! With only me and my back-end dev (My employee and friend at the same time) to work on it and they have 2 more devs to their team to use Bubble.. (They are now 6 or 8 devs (wannabes and using a drag and drop website) in total vs 2 (us) real programmers).

A well deserved night of sleep :P

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

I met a fake “programmer / hacker” at Starbucks. He was so full of shit & he couldn’t stop talking about things that didn’t make sense

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

Well, I got 2 mega arduino kits and a raspberry pi over xmas (and no experience with either), plus unemployment, so my goals are learning the hardware side of things this year.

Also, hi devRant.

0: Monitors and Graphic's Cards become affordable for us poor graduates

1: Node bloat becomes a thing of the past with WA or has auto-minimize functionality to keep only essential code

2: North American internet companies all go out of business due to free super high speed infrastructure maintained by a trust of communities and elected delegates

not all "dev" related per se, but my current day to day gripes answered

I swear I hate seeing these wannabe programmers sharing their shit content on social media. I mean, I respect people who are getting into programming and giving it their best. But one just doesn't write "Fuck Types" when talking about a Dart. I mean, atleast open the introduction page of that language before you jump and start giving people "pro tips". Stop skimming over technologies/languages and dive a bit deep to understand how it works.

Just got an amazing lecture by text from a university mentor of mine on some of the coolest shit to do with cat in linux, and why you can do things like open a shell with cat /bin/sh (or in my case, use it to stall a program and keep open a shell in a simple buffer overflow task).

God bless all you mentors out there who take the time to explain exactly how all this stuff works. It feels so good to have an idea on the mechanisms on "WHY" something works, not just that it does and that you should use it. As someone new, it makes all the difference.

Today, I made someones day in 5 minutes by using my phone camera, a picture to pdf converter, and a wireless capable printer to take a sheet of music in a small book, supersize it, and print it so they could read it without squinting.

Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have this technology on demand, and it takes someone who doesn't have it to realize just how cool it is.

!important

And fuck whomever decided not to follow programming convention and put that exclamation mark there, may they burn in hell.

Phone interview sprung on me in 2 hours from now. It's in devops. Just got called out of the blue.

Wish me luck

Today the struggle was real.

But damn if it isn't days like this where you learn real shit.

Fighting with a debian VM for half the day to make a local development environment. I'm tired, but everything works, the project looks good, and I'm just sorta angry/tired/proud now.

I learned so much, and now want pie. I am going to go eat some pie.

It is still blowing my mind how a button on my raspberry pi is programmatically functional in the same way as if I was programming a database and web app.

Fucking eh, why haven't I been doing this hardware stuff sooner? You can literally make physical shit happen. That is so cool!

Urgh. One key skill that wannabes seem to forget is patience. Patience, patience, patience. Don't panic, don't be lazy, be methodical. This is the way of the analytical computer scientist. Don't panic all over the place or make assumptions..

Some techs..

There should be a developer licence so we could stop these stupid wannabes from getting into and ruining the industry with their shit work. We're so fed up maintaining these stupid codes the company previously outsourced somewhere on earth.

Fuck, the 10 pounds I put on over the holidays is now 11 pounds.

So, I got an iFixIt toolkit with a gift card from xmas. Was excited to tear into my iPhone6 given that it had lasted me a long time, and not that long ago, I had the screen repaired given I didn't know how to at the time and was working stupid long hours. I haven't used the phone in about 6 months now.

Wtf.

I open the device, and immediately 2 screws and a bracket fall out of the device. The inside is filthy, and appears to have corrosion (despite the fact I've never gotten water on it, I was kinda anal with that phone).

Whoever the guy was who "fixed" my screen apparently did so in a way that involved spilling something on my phone, over torquing a screw, breaking a bracket, and the entire thing looks sketch.

All while charging over $100. I can see why he insisted on having an otterbox on the phone now, he fucked up and was worried the one screw pin wouldn't hold the screen on. Motherfucking asshole.

Wargames are addicting. RIP today.

This year has been rough. No programming. 3 great job applications snuffed. Currently unemployed, and all my recent job experience in a field I don't want to continue working in due to not making my 3 career options. (Military and policing sort of thing)

So since I'm off for the holidays, and looking to really get back into computer work, I've come back to devRant. Missed you guys. <3

Now I've got to actually get good at something, and preferably employed in doing it. Any advice or stories are appreciated :D (but my mom said not to listen to strangers on the internet, so...)

its day 4 of updating documentation and consolidating data.

The webclient has broken on average 4 times a day.

The database took 20+ seconds on updating a password entry.

I explained to my boss the real cost of interrupting my attention with these pauses. I figure it's caused my productivity to go from record high last week to being literally losing about 4 hours a day lost, plus extra time in having to go back through and verify things worked.

The technicians and developers who are working on fixing the database system are apparently quitting left right and center; their company acquired it awhile back, so they don't actually have native developers on it. Yet they still are pushing out new integration features rather than fixing anything.

Yesterday, one of the other people on the documentation project lost half a days work due to the angular updating the local cache, but it never reaching the backend. He came back from lunch, reopened his browser, and all his work was gone. (at least thats what we think happened). So we are hard resetting the program every 10 minutes or so just to make sure it is updating the backend.

The good news is that when it is done, we theoretically will be able to use this to cut back onboarding time and update times by about half, and it'll mean our new nano-server deployment project should be able to spin out with standards that can be referenced properly by everyone, not just the guy with the powershell script that he tinkered with for a particular project and never told anyone else what he did.

Theoretically.

Today, a few thousand dollars of potential equipment being replaced was prevented by deciding to follow the network cords and finding out that the switchboard had the power cord knocked loose.

Payment was in candy.

Cracked my first weak RSA implementation challenge today. Feels pretty awesome.

Involved primes that were very close, which means you can factorize the modulus quickly to get the private key. Normally, you would never use close primes as prime factorization's difficulty relies a certain amount on some distance between the two values.

The reason you can brute force close primes has to do with them being close in value to the square root of the function, meaning that you can search far quicker than if you were to try every combination of primes.

Today: FUCK RADARE

5 minutes later: FUCK GHIDRA

2 minutes later: God bless both of these wonderful programs, and I finally think I understand what is going on.

2 minutes later: Fuck this, I hate everything, I'm going back to studying hardware shit.

Today during lunch in office, me with my colleagues were discussing a funny start up idea. Made lot of gags and finally dispersed, remarking "it was fun".
Update: Buisness Plan is partially ready and new Android Studio project started. 😂😂
#wannabeentrepreneurs

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

I had the opportunity to ask some basic security questions of a government system that is rolling out (got invited to a meeting).

So now I am absolutely terrified about any technology that is being rolled out by this particular government agency. Their security model literally ends at "we use HTTPS".

Seriously, how the fuck are these systems not audited before they reach public use? Is this normal??

Spent over an hour on a shell script that wasn't working properly. I use it, works perfectly. Every time cron executes, does nothing, not even log an error.

It took me that long to realize that the user I was getting the cron to run on didn't have permission to write to my log file... You would think I'd realize this when my error scripts didn't log...

(on that note, the Bandit games at OverTheWire have been awesome refresher on getting back into the swing of linux - highly recommend)

Both my actual and previous boss. Egocentric, narcisitic, unfit for their roles, detached from reality, intransigents, etc.

Can't really understand how guys like these become CTO or CTO wannabes when others are more qualified... Whatever... They are smart on taking care of "their" life. <insert shrug here>

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.

Remember kids, passwd is a readable file! You can have a very bad day trying to figure out a user's shell from side-channel attacks and getting nowhere, or you could remember that it LITERALLY SAYS WHAT IT IS PUBLICLY IF YOU DON'T FORGET THAT IT'S THERE.

On the plus side, I learned a ton about what you can do with ssh arguments and debugging logs. Shit's pretty cool.

One of the ways I met a girl was helping her program her clubs website. Surprisingly a great way to talk about interests, likes, and dating (making an about page OP)

in job application mode; getting really tired of entry level positions wanting 3+ years of experience.

Given that a) no one I have seen with this much experience wants these positions, b) HR says they are getting applicants with this much experience, I can only assume two things:

1: People lie on their resumes.
or
2: The job market is far more saturated with good applicants than I thought.

Either way, frustrating.

I bought a computer awhile back off Kijiji (Canada's craigslist) for a really good price. Today, decided I was going to upgrade the ram since I got a sick deal on some corsair vengence 8gb sticks online...

And just before installing it, I realize the fucker decided to use low profile RAM in his build for a reason: he (for some fucking reason) decided to route the airflow for the system by placing the cooling fan directly over the first 2 memory slots.

Guess who's 5 minute memory upgrade just turned into an hour of re-routing all the airflow in the PC and having to redo all the fan wiring.

I shouldn't complain, I mean I got this computer a couple years back for like $400, but still, wtf man...

The world would be much more perfect if Jenkins released images for ARM architectures (Raspberry Pi), so that noobs DevOps wannabes like me could play around with that 😭

Today, I found out that the webmaster for the organization I volunteer at is using a security-by-obscurity PHP implemented design for the private data of our members. I've talked with him about it, but for a variety of reasons to do with organization and workload, it won't be changing.

Fml.

Learning about sessions is simultaneously liberating and terrifying.

!rant

God bless Gynvael and content creators like him.

I may have inadvertently gotten my old university's Comp Sci System Services addicted to CTF wargames. oops.

I also just found out that you can prevent a more command from automatically exiting on completion only by limiting the size of the window of your terminal. I lost a good 4 hours of trying literally every ssh command combination I could, when all I had to do was use a small terminal screen. Whoever designed this last challenge should be given an award and then shot.

It's a good day when nothing has gone horribly wrong... yet. :P

Anyone else use ConnectWise? I'm 8hours into my 16hour introduction to it.

I'm honestly unsure if I'm in awe or just terrified, and thats just with Manage. Tomorrow is Automate. Wish me luck.