It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

I overheard this on my way back to home.

Girl 1: I bought a new phone yesterday.
Girl 2: Let me see it.
*hands over the phone*
Girl 2: There is no Instagram?
Girl 1: No, Instagram wasn't installed when I bought the phone.
Girl 2: That's weird.

*me almost dead*

Bruteforce IRL

So I recently bought my first house (yay!).

Whilst doing the initial viewings I saw the below on the backyard and thought "hey that's neat, I can leave a key in there for when I come in late and my fiancée is asleep.

Fast forward to moving in day and the previous owners hand me the keys so I ask "oh yeah, what's the code for the keysafe" and he just looks at me completely blank, so I'm just like "the box on the wall out back" and he's just like "oh! So that's what that is. No we've never had the code for that, bye."

Being a pen tester I'm just stood there dumbfounded thinking "How the hell can you have a locked box attached to your house and not want to know what is inside!"

Anyway, that brings us to now where I'm stood outside in December on a Sunday morning brute forcing my way into my own keysafe.

I wish this didn't run so many parallels with my work life 😂

A group of programmers and marketers were traveling to a trade show on a train. Each of the marketers had bought a ticket, but the programmers had only bought one ticket for the lot of them.

One of the programmers was keeping a lookout, and when the conductor neared their car he called out "The conductor's coming!" and all of the programmers piled into the train's lavatory and closed the door. The conductor took the tickets of all of the marketers, and then knocked on the lavatory door and called "Ticket please." The programmers slid their ticket under the door, and the conductor took it and left.

The programmers were laughing at the marketers for the rest of the trip, and the marketers felt like idiots.

On the way back, the marketers decided they would use the same trick and only bought one ticket for them. But this time, the programmers didn't buy a single ticket! Again, one of the programmers kept a lookout for the conductor. When he called "Conductor coming!" all of the programmers piled into one lavatory, and all of the marketers shut themselves into another lavatory.

One programmer came back out of his lavatory, knocked on the other door, and said "Ticket please!"

This one made me giggle....lol 😂

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

When the inventor of the USB stick dies, they'll gently lower the coffin, then pull it back up, turn it the other way, then lower it again.

Years ago we had a visit from a startup company developing a firewall and I got the chance to talk with one of their devs.

He explained the subtleties of security holes in websites and after I said something about our site being secure thanks to being behind a firewall he gently asked what would happen if he entered a specially crafted test into one of the text fields ... and he gave an example ...

I got a chill, went back to my seat and traced what it would do ...

That was when I learned about sql injection and his example would have killed the DB :/

Before going home I designed a way to secure the input which I then refined over a few days.

We still use that today after 17 years.

That one single sentence really showed to never be to proud of our security and I realized how vulnerable our site was.

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

This facts are killing me

"During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said, "P = 0 or N = 1." Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google’s public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard."

"Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers."

"gcc -O4 emails your code to Jeff Dean for a rewrite."

"When Jeff Dean sends an ethernet frame there are no collisions because the competing frames retreat back up into the buffer memory on their source nic."

"When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his keyboard."

"When Jeff Dean designs software, he first codes the binary and then writes the source as documentation."

"When Jeff has trouble sleeping, he Mapreduces sheep."

"When Jeff Dean listens to mp3s, he just cats them to /dev/dsp and does the decoding in his head."

"Google search went down for a few hours in 2002, and Jeff Dean started handling queries by hand. Search Quality doubled."

"One day Jeff Dean grabbed his Etch-a-Sketch instead of his laptop on his way out the door. On his way back home to get his real laptop, he programmed the Etch-a-Sketch to play Tetris."

"Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard, it ended up on another computer. "

I met this girl on the way back from lunch, I stopped, requested her digits, when I asked "what's your address" and she replied "123.2.2.8". I fell in love instantly. I knew she was the one.

In our office, everyone is placed so that we have a wall behind us. Initially, there was enough room behind us so that we can walk just fine.

Everything was fine till our manager didn't start making us some random visits and standing behind us just looking at our screens and making us feel unpleasant.

So one day we moved the tables so there is almost no room behind us. And we are aligned in a row with no space between the tables. Now if the manager decided to do it again he would have to struggle his way behind us.

Few days passed by and our manager finally showed he saw what we did, didn't say anything. It was clear that he wasn't happy about it. He tried to lean himself over the monitors to take a look but that was just not so as "good" as standing behind us...

A time passed and one day when we came to work we saw the tables moved forward some 15-20cm just enough to be able to move behind. Almost immediately we pulled them back as they were before.

We moved back and forward already few times and are currently playing cat and mouse with our manager.

Noone is saying anything just the tables are moving every 2-3 days or so. Let's see who is going to give up first hahaha

Gahaa!!! Finally back home, after 7 fucking hours of sitting in busses and trains!

BUT I GOT MY NEXUS 6P!! Yoo-hoo!!! :D

And I've got a nice story about it.

So when I bought it, the guy selling it to me was a nontechnical type (I think?) whose wife was the previous owner. So I thought to myself, cool a nontechnical user used it.. probably no hardware mods or anything to worry about. Apparently they even factory reset it for me :)

Now, when I left to go back home, I of course immediately booted up the thing and did the whole doodad of logging into it, setting up the device etc.

Then it struck me. When I booted up the device and wanted to log in, there was a lock from Google that required me to first authenticate as either a previous account of the device, or their unlock pattern. So I figured, eh fuck it, I'll just flash some AOSP without GApps or send the owner an email asking what the previous pattern is.

But I still had to wait 30 minutes at the bus stop so I thought to myself.. previous owner was a nontechnical woman.. maybe I could crack it. No way to know if I don't try. So I started putting in random unlock patterns.

3 attempts later - I shit you not! - pattern accepted.
Do you want to add this account?

Oh boy Google, of course I do! Thanks for letting me in pal!

3 fucking attempts. That's all it took to crack the unlock pattern of an unknown person. 😎

I am a long time lurker on stackoverflow. There was a time I was stuck on an obscure error for so long but finally light shone when I found an answer to that problem on stackoverflow.

Overjoyed, all I wanted is to leave an upvote for the answer; before I realised that you need a +15 reputation before you can do (I know I am late in this game)

So I worked my way to that 15 and it was a tedious one. Stackoverlords deleting my answer, voting no to my edit and reverting another over petty reasons

I fought back by flagging my deleted answer with my reasons and alas the community backed me up by upvoting my answer (which was revived),the original answer poster approved my edit and @me a thank you comment. I was elated

And it is today, I got my +15. That I could finally pay back and upvote the answer from my benefactor

Aaaah...I just got back from a meeting because of a production data problem caused by an analyst who keeps making mistakes that screw up client data. I wrote a program to automate most of it and everybody initially accused me of having a buggy program, only to find out she wasn't using it, never did.

"Why aren't you using the program then?" was asked. "Oh, well, I just understand my way better," she replies, "When I make a mistake at least I understand why."

Pause....

"Then, um, if you know you're making a mistake, why don't you fix it?"
"Because my process is so manual and labor intensive sometimes it's not worth it to go back and fix it, because I'd have to do everything over again, and you guys are much better at fixing this stuff than I am."

I indicated that everyone is too busy to stop and fix her mistakes, to which she then asks:

"So if you can't fix my mistakes, what am I supposed to do?"

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

I generally like to separate changes into as many commits as is reasonable. That way I can go back and see how, why, when and what was changed, along with meaningful commit messages.

But sometimes...
Git add *
Git commit -m "changed lots of stuff"

God I hate myself.

My wife. She's also my best friend.

Back then, when we were just flirting, I helped her and her friends(they were all medicine students) with their programming courses which included sql and html. I guess that help led us the way we're here now.

Merry Christmas everyone 🙂

This year I didn't prepare anything for it, and family won't be visited this year. I think it's better this way. My mother didn't piss on me when I was on fire - back when I was homeless and begged her to be allowed back in her home, she told me to deal with it on my own. She's been homeless herself and knows how terrible it is. I dealt with it. I hate my mother because of that, and visiting her was always an act, a formality.

Not anymore. Half a year ago I cut ties with her.. and honestly, it's for the best. I don't want to get hurt anymore by visiting the house that should've been a refuge but wasn't when I needed it most. And I got rid of it, in favor of my own stuff. And a family of my own, a community of fellow developers with whom I feel a far stronger bond than a family could ever be. You are my new family, my dearest friends. And unlike those blood bonds that make up a family unconditionally, you can bet your ass that you've very much deserved my respect.

Merry Christmas.. unlike with my biological family, I've found refuge in devRant and its community every time I needed it most. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. I love you all.. thank you for being my precious family! ♥️

HO. LY. SHIT.

So this gig I got myself into, they have a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to access their web server. It's work-at-home. We just got a new internet provider, and it looks like I get a different public IP address everytime I disconnect and connect to the WIFI. And since it looks like the way they work on their codebase is that you either edit the files right on the server or you download the files that you need to work on, make the changes, and then re-upload the file back to the server and refresh the website to see the changes, now I can't access the server because I get different IP addresses. And it's highly inconvenient to keep emailing them to add IP addresses to the whitelist.

No source control, just straight-up download/upload from/to the server. Like, srsly. So that also means debugging is extremely hard for me because one, they use ColdFusion and I've never used that shit before and two, how the hell do you debug with this style of work?

I just started this last Tuesday, and I already want to call it quits. This is just a pain in the ass and not worth my time. I'll be glad to just go back to driving Lyft/Uber to make money while I look for a full-time, PROPER job.

By the way, can I do that to a contracting job? Just call it quits when you haven't even finished your first task? How does this work?

Just the other day I got back from getting an extra monitor.. and just when I came back home, some older lady that also lives in this residence came to me, all panicked because her left car lights wouldn't turn off. So she asked me whether I could fix it, because I'm a man and therefore technical... Yeah.

Told her I don't know anything about cars (I don't even have a driver's license), and she should ask someone else.. but she kept clinging on to me and eventually I figured.. screw it, how hard can it be?

Got to her car, yada yada yada.. lady opens the door, and it's full of fucking buttons everywhere! No fucking way that I'm gonna dabble with those. So, do the easiest thing first.

"Ma'm, could you please turn on the car?"
*Turns car on, all lights light up*
🤔 Fair enough...
"Hmm.. and what happens if you turn it off now?"
*Turns car off, all lights go off*

Lady: "I've got no idea how you've done it but thank you so much, you're an angel!! 😊"
Me: "Well.. 😅 let's just say that turning it on, off and back on again works at least 90% of the time..."

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

When your primary Android app (with over 1/2 million total downloads) gets banned...

And all the email says is read these [links to] policies!

Back story: this happened to me back in 2011, no matter what I did there was no way to get in touch with a human at Google, I sure hope this process has gotten better! Having my app suspended with no way to fix and get it back is ridiculous!! This could ruin a business.

Over two years later, on a Google+ hangout with Google Android devs out of the Google London office, I said to them how silly it is that this happened....one of them asked me for the app ID, I provided, he looked it up in a system which then had a reference code which then related to SEO violation....wow I finally found the answer, how silly that an SEO violation (too many keywords in the app description) can get your app permanently suspended. What a shame. I wouldn't wish this on any solo developer trying to self learn and make something...

Sometimes I really just have to say "Fuck you, Google" out loud a few times.

This is probably gona make me sound arrogant, but fuck it, you don’t know who I am, and I need to RANT!

I hate it when B.A.’s who have never studied UI or UX rail-road over my design decisions, and I just gota go along with it cos they in charge.
Then, when I make the interface the way they want it, all sorts of problems arise… Mother fucker, I saw this shit coming, and that’s why I designed it the way that I did.
Now I gota tell them how to solve the problems by doing what I originally said, and when they finally see the light, I gota waste more time re-doing the interface.
I once went through 5 fucking iterations of “Let’s try it this way”, Just to end up back with my original design spec cos these fuckers can’t even imagine what shit would look like, and how it will interact.

Now you would think after this happens a few times they would learn to trust my design skills, but noooo, Mr B.A. has to piss all over my ideas every time.
And every FUCKING time, we end up going back to what I originally proposed…
Learn your fucking lesson dumb ass!!!

*drops mic & goes straight to the bar*

when your first try to learn a new programming language, for example c++ and you are still new to coding:
"Wtf does it behave this way. How dafuq do pointers work...argh"

and then years later, you come back to c++, do a little revision and it all starts to fall into place and make sense. Man. That feeling.

I always find it more productive to have at least two ongoing projects at once.

That way, if I get stuck on a bug/frustrated with the first project, I focus on the second and more often than not, when I go back to the first project I realize that I had made a dumb mistake and keep going.

>> this === rant
<< true

At beginning of this year, I only knew HTML, JS, and CSS so I just applied for offers like "Jr Apprentice Dev in Front-End"
In a interview call, the woman told me that they will send me a test asking about my JS and HTML5 knowledge.
When I look in my inbox, the mail subject says "Back-end Test".

Then I call the woman:

Me: "Hello, I have received the test mail, but maybe it's wrong. I applied for a Front-End position and the test is about backend! "

She: "Do you have skills in JS and HTML5?"

Me: "Yes!, and CSS3"

She: "Well, the test is about that. JS, jQuery, and HTML5"

Me: "..."

Me: "Sorry, that languages are Front-End. In the subject say 'Back-End' and Back-End is PHP, SQL, MySQL, Java, .Net... I don't know nothing about that. I only know HTML, JS, CSS."

She: "It's the same"

Me: "I sorry but it's not the same. Fron-End is client-side, what users sees. Animation, colors, FXs, buttons, forms... And Back-End is server-side, what users doesn't see."

She: "Well, JS, HTML, and CSS is backend for us. We call it that way too"

Me: "Sorry but that is wrong. I invite you to read some basic info. Now I am confused"

Of course that I am not confused. That idi0t was wrong.
Perhaps recruiters should take some info about areas where they are recruiting... (:T)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

Every year, my company organizes an internal seminar week for its engineers and developers. I helped plan it this year and, since I also ran a few sessions, was absolutely exhausted by the end of the week.

On Friday of that conference week (after I'd spent four hours in our engineering building), I come back to my desk to discover that a coworker managed to, single handedly, get our boss to agree to shortening our release cycle to one that, without dramatic infrastructure changes, would require about 8x the developer overhead than today's. ...The test cycle I am supposed to pick up in a month.

When asked about it, he said he was so full of energy, why wait for automaton? What better way to inspire us to improve than to switch right now? The worst that can happen is just a few bugs.

I love my job, but I can't stand this guy. 😒

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

My current boss' boss. Dude has my back, no questions asked. If I mess up, he backs me up to the customer and then teaches me the right way behind the scenes. Even stands up for me when i'm not around.

He's helped me change my lifestyle, too, connecting me with trainers and coaches who can help develop a workout plan around my one hand. He understands the value of work/life balance, but has no power to change our schedule, so he helps out however he can around that.

He is honestly #bossgoals. I want to be like him when i'm a boss

PM was on vacation the whole sprint.
this sprint was so much more... convenient. i really liked what i was working on.
Also, team lost some of its bureaucratic discipline along the way.

colleague replacing him, in today's daily: since the sprint is basically almost over, i can really recommend to the whole team to wrap up your work of this sprint, so you have something *done* that you can deliver or show in next week's sprint review.
team: ...

oooohhh boy, let me get a shitload of popcorn for the sprint review when PM is back 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

So customers can place orders at our website, but some of the products are actually handled by a third party. We use a web service to communicate about these orders. Obviously, we need a way to uniquely identify each order, and decided with this other company that we would use a simple incrementing integer.

Last week, something strange happened: we could no longer cancel orders by their ID, because according to the web service, the orders were placed too long ago and were no longer eligible for cancellation. But I knew that could not be true: the orders were from last week. So I checked out database, turns out the ID's are not so unique: some refer to two or three orders. Somewhat worried, I contact the guy responsible at the other company and ask him how that could ever happen?

He: "Yeah, when we restart our server, the counter goes back to 1, you see. I didn't think that would be a problem...".

REALLY?! YOU DIDN'T THINK?

I was in my way back from work when this guy speeds off the on-ramp onto the highway and almost hits me.

I suppose you could say that it was a pretty serious merge conflict...

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

Whatever you do, just keep going.

If you don't have mental capacity to do all tasks today, do one or two. If you want to do that side project you wanted, but lost motivation in the moment, do at least something, like a sign up form. Just keep going. Put some work in, make this day's net impact positive. And it's not all about work! Wanted to play that game you bought on a steam sale but never opened? Play the first level today. Wanted to learn how to make music? Download Ableton or Fruity Loops, watch a tutorial video on YouTube, replicate the steps. Just keep going.

Wandering directionless and letting yourself go is the sure path to misery. Remember — every figment of human behavior has a reason. It is important to identify reasons behind seemingly random behavior patterns and comprehend them in a non-judgmental way. Then, starve what holds you back, and feet what keeps you going.

I have bipolar type I + autism. Using this approach and remembering that everything has a reason helped me debug my low productivity. And no, I don't mean my job, I mean my real goals I want to pursue even if I had a billion in the bank today and never had to work a single day in my life.

Aaand, the reason was?… fear. I discovered I had PTSD all along that manifested when I was misdiagnosed and prescribed strong neuroleptics. In a way, it's a chemical lobotomy, just less invasive and more reversible. My intelligence came back, but it came back together with PTSD.
Now, instead of chasing mythical productivity, I know the reason behind the lack of it — PTSD. It is hard to fight what isn't defined, but it is real to win a fight with a thing with a name and a face.

Just keep going. That's my message to you.

On an afternoon the day before delivery, we discovered a crashing bug. At around 2 AM, we had found the cause and fixed it. A short sleep at home, then back to office at 8 AM because the delivery was 200 devices containing that software, and they had to be updated manually because production had put in the old image.

We seized all available computers, even those from marketing who were... surprised. Half-way in the update, we calculated that we wouldn't have enough time until the freight service would show up.

So we asked the secretary that she should be a bit flirty to the parcel guy, invite him to a coffee and chat around to buy us more time. We closed the last parcel just when he figured that he had to continue with his tour.

A few years back I worked at a company as their front-end web developer with one other guy who was their "back-end" developer. PHP and MySQL specifically. He was eventually fired and I took over both development roles. When I got around to seeing his source code and the way he had created the databases, I immediately saw why he was fired. This guy did not understand the concept of loops. Instead of separating out tags and categories with a split / loop, he set up database tables for EVERY. SINGLE. TAG.
i.e. tag_1, tag_2, tag_3, etc. And then to top ot off, instead of looping through the tables, he set up huge conditioks for EVER.LY. SINGLE. TAG.
i.e. if(tag_1) else(tag_2) else(tag_3) etc.

That fucking guy...

A group of programmers and marketers were traveling to a trade show on a train. Each of the marketers had bought a ticket, but the programmers had only bought one ticket for the lot of them.

One of the programmers was keeping a lookout, and when the conductor neared their car he called out "The conductor's coming!" and all of the programmers piled into the train's lavatory and closed the door. The conductor took the tickets of all of the marketers, and then knocked on the lavatory door and called "Ticket please." The programmers slid their ticket under the door, and the conductor took it and left.

The programmers were laughing at the marketers for the rest of the trip, and the marketers felt like idiots.

On the way back, the marketers decided they would use the same trick and only bought one ticket for them. But this time, the programmers didn't buy a single ticket! Again, one of the programmers kept a lookout for the conductor. When he called "Conductor coming!" all of the programmers piled into one lavatory, and all of the marketers shut themselves into another lavatory.

One programmer came back out of his lavatory, knocked on the other door, and said "Ticket please!"

First day of a week long vacation and this series of emails comes in (no I didn’t reply to any of these)

Random new QA: “Why does this 5 year old functionality behave this way?”

(10 minutes later)

QA: Okay I saw your out of office message but I really need to know why this behaves this way or else I’m opening a defect because I don’t believe it should behave this way.

Internal me: Heh that’s great kid but you didn’t make the requirements.

(Another 10 minutes pass)

QA: Defect opened, please resolve this before Wednesday.

Oh the joys of enterprise development, I guess if it’s a big enough deal they’ll actually forward it on to the people I put in my away message. I’d love to see that defect holding up the release when I get back on Monday.

To be able to code blind folded - literally. A few years back when the web speech synthesis apis came out and chat bots were raging I thought it would be cool to dictate pseudo code on the fly whole whiteboard the problem. When I investigated the easiest way to implement a mvp I was shocked to learn that there are BLIND programmers.

That alone is impressive and I went on to find that many have years of experience and add valuable contributions on a regular basis. Unfortunately I havnt had an opportunity to meet one yet but I am in utter awe of their accomplishment.

Should I get the chance I want to try and walk in their shoes, live a day without my eyes and learn to solve problems without spotting a pattern

At a previous job, I worked with a graphic designer who knew it all.

The first design he gave me, all font sizes were in points, and way too big.

I asked for them in pixels.

He said points and pixels are exactly the same.

I explained that they were not, when you're using a browser. He got visibly angry, and stormed out of the office to cool down.

When he came back, I sent him a link explaining the difference between points and pixels for digital media.

He sent me pixel sizes.

Next project, same exact thing happens, complete with him angrily storming out of the room.

By the third project, I just started picking my own font sizes, and ignored his point specs.

Why do people insist on moving stuff on my desk!

I've very particular about my desk, have my monitors, laptop stand, stands for devices etc. setup the way I like them, and every so often someone sits at my desk when i'm not in and just shoves everything around.

Last company I worked for, I came back from holidays to a thunderbolt cable, the connector of which, had been crushed under the wheel of a chair, because someone left it on the floor.

... Is it wrong or not "proper", to send around an email saying the next person to touch my stuff gets stabbed?

When I was getting my CS degree, in the first year (2003-2004) all projects had to be delivered in an envelop containing the printed document and a floppy disk with the code/program inside. Yes, a floppy disk.

So whenever I couldn't finish the project on time, I just dropped a corrupted floppy disk on the envelop, this way I got at least one more week to work on the project and when professor came to me like "Hey, your floppy didn't work" I was like "no way! oh man, I think I have a copy here, try this one instead".

Oh those good old times that will never come back.

Back in the early 2000's when phones were barely getting smart and phone companies were charging for text messages like they were solid gold, I made a j2me app that could send SMS-es over GPRS trough a website that was offering free SMS-es. That way you could send 10 SMS-es for the price of one.

The app got some traction in my country. At the time ICQ website also had an option for sending free SMS-es. So I made an international version witch got featured on some blogs. But then within a week I got a cease and desist email from AOL lawyers. So that was the end of that.

Fuck (some of) you backend developers who think regurgitating JSON makes for a good API.

"It's all in JSON. iOS can read JSON, right?"
A well-trained simian can read JSON, still doesn't mean it can do something with it. Your shitty API could be spitting out fucking ancient Egyptian for all I care, just make it be the same ancient Egyptian everywhere!

Don't create one endpoint that spits out the URL for the next endpoint (completely different domain, completely different path structure). Are you fucking kidding me?

As if that wasn't enough, endpoints receive data structured in one way, but return results in another!! "It's all JSON", but it's still dong.

How do I abstract that, you piece of shit? Now I have to write ever so slightly different code in multiple places instead of writing it only once.

How the fuck do I even model that in a database?

Have a crash course on implementing APIs on the client side and only come back when you're done.

Morons.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

I really love taking HR mandatory training concerning covid-19 that apparently speaks for me.

Did you guys know that I was dying to go back to work instead of remotely doing everything from the comfort of my fucking home?? and that my biggest fear was that i would be at home too much and missed the workplace?
No? well, me fucking either. I was way the fuck more productive working from home that being in my office dealing with stupid shit all day because i was constantly being interrupted.

Pretty sure my employees felt the same way when I yelled from my office :"y'all this training is some bullshit and apparently you guys were fucking dying to come back"

and one of them yelled "ahhh hr speaking for me again!!"

Fuck brainwashed trainings.

"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve Jobs

When you haven't touched a project in a month and you decide you need to get back into it.

I have pages of dated notes, pseudo-code and function in the still need written. I have about 75% of the actual code up and functional, but I have no idea what I was working on when other things got in the way. I've been staring at this mess that I swear was once organized and made total sense and I'm completely lost.

Why do our brains do this!!

People on dating apps say they are very pissed off and frustrated when they’re ghosted.
As a developer you get eager calls from recruiters talking for hours. They say I’ll catch up with you first thing in the morning. An HR manager says I’ll get back to you in 14 hours (in 14 hours?? very precise). Even you get a contract offer from a manager who is rapidly contacts and convinces you.
Than you hear nothing, you are left on read.
“Professionals” communicate in that way. They are also getting paid whilst taking your time. What can you say to random people behind nicknames?
I don’t know what I would feel if they get back and I’m zombied. I really feel like unmatching meh.

After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!

I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.

I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!

Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!

Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.

I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.

So...much... rage!!!

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

I feel lonely on my way back to home. I am a bit depressed while listening to the song "Alone" by Alan Walker. Because I code alone all day and I am single. There is a shop in my neighbourhood. It has its light turned on this night, perhaps just to increase its exposure. But, there is something so shiny that caught my attention. It is a smiling duck. I don't know what the duck is doing right there. I havent seen it before. But the shop is closed now.
At this moment, I realize it could be my friend when I don't have a friend.

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Four engineers and a broke down car

One day, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer, and computer engineer were driving down the street in the same car when it broke down.

The mechanical engineer said, “I think a rod broke”.

The chemical engineer said, “The way it sputtered at the end, I think it's not getting enough gas”.

The electrical engineer said, “I think there was a spark and something's wrong with the electrical system”.

All three turned to the computer engineer and said, “What do you think?”

To which, the computer engineer replied, “I think we should all get out and then get back in”.

Who's got time to be an imposter. 🤷‍♂️

I am out of my depth 90% of the time, always diving into areas that are foreign to me, you just need to enjoy the buzz of knowing you are coming out the other side more knowledgeable then you did going in.

But if you do get overwhelmed with this condition, step back, take a breather, and use that moment to think things through at the big picture level before moving forward again, sometimes the right solution is hard to think off when you're to focused and drowning your way through a bad one.

Okay, seriously, are there some secret question-asking ninja skills i am lacking, or does some people just insist on confusing people and wasting time?

I was working on this small bug. Super tiny. Basically a counter that was way off since it counted some duplicate values. Simple, right?
I decided to ask a clarifying question to the lead dev, since i am still new to the company. Really simple. Do we remove duplicate values, do we ignore them in the count when they occur, or is it actually working as expected?

He decides to answer with a long message on what the issue is. That is not what I asked, so I ask again in a slightly different way, thinking he didn't understand the question.. and he answers the same, in a slightly different way.

We go back and forth like this for 30-40 minutes, until I got tired of it and directly asked "I am asking what solution we want, not what the issue is"..
He finally picks option A. Fine. I made the adjustment and pushed my code. He checks it out, and apparently it's wrong.

After a long series of questions (again), it turns out the solution he now describes is exactly what I listed as option C...
A bug that should take 10 minutes to fix ended up taking over 2 hours. Awesome waste of time.

!dev && rant
Temperature causing temper!!!

Summer 2009...
Me: Dad, can me and sis go swim in the pool?
Dad: No son, you can only swim if it's 25°C or higher.
Which in practice meant that we could only swim a few days each summer. Average in Belgium used to be about 21°C.

Spring 2019, my younger siblings...
Little sis: Mom, can we go swim in the pool?
Mom: Lol sure, it's only April but it's already way hot enough.. and during summer it'll be too hot to do the work on setting up the pool anyway.

Winter 2029, in Antarctica...
Me, to my children: During my old days my children, we had this thing called snow!! And we lived in the wasteland that used to be the glorious Europe, back when it was still habitable.. you should've seen it, now it's a desert, but back then it was awesome!
My children: Mum!! He's acting senile again, and talking about things that don't exist!!!

Coming to the crux of the problem right now, fuck me.. I'm tired as fuck but can't sleep because already in the fucking spring, my house is too fucking hot to be able to sleep without sweating like a pig!!!
AaaaaAAAAA 😣

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.

(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.

**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**

Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.

After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...

Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?

Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.

Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.

That moment when you take a look back at your old portfolio websites...

I have to cringe and laugh at the same time rn. The way I styled it. OMG...

Self note: You will still cringe in the future, when you are going to look back at your current portfolio website.

I'm at a pretty cool company today, learning new stack now. Everyone is helpfull and teaches me a lot.

I remember at my first job, when I just started, my boss sent me a MINIFIED .js file (just one file and nothing else) and said "it doesnt work, please fix this". After OBVIOUSLY not being able to fix it, at that moment, I started to doubt my choice to become a web dev.

I turned out to be pretty okay. But, fucking hell, thinking back, that "ex-boss" of mine could potentially influence my later career decisions and not in a good way.

I just want to share my very first companion. Haha... This is btw my laptop way back 2011, used it to store highschool memories and silly stuff, if you know what I mean. This is the laptop that I first used the labrynth of directories such as A folder contains A to z Folder and again inside one of those contains A to z again lowered and upper. This is also my partner in coding C++ back in the days, I usually write code in paper and when back to school I used our lab's computer. Ohh and I also have my anime addiction started on this too! One time I discovered the side VGA and connected it to our big LCD screen but by the time I plugged it in, it produce explosive sounds, and my grandpa said that that lcd tv is only for 110v not for 220v. I learned the importance of voltages that day. I just went back and open it to backup my highschool memories and stuff to my external hdd. Ahhhhh memories.

Lesson I learnt the hard way today: ticket every fucking task (including admin) to:

A. Cover your arse (if the tickets are not ready because they haven't given us enough information, push back on it before committing too much effort to doing it)
B. Better deliverable (what you output will probably be better quality because you worked out the requirements upfront + you know the audience)
C. You have something to show management when they want to try and overwork you some more

I gave up on learning math as a young person because no one was ever interested in teaching it in a way that made sense to me.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started working on a pet projects that require understanding of (what I would consider) fairly advanced geometry, which as it turns out is called computational geometry. And it’s fun.

I just look back at the time I was afraid of this stuff with regret. All because my teachers weren’t terribly interested in teaching, but more interested in fulfilling useless metrics that only make it look like students are learning when they’re actually not.

36 hours here.

It wasn't really work, but I went to FOSDEM 2 years ago with a friend of mine that's also a hacker (hardware stuff mostly). So on Saturday we went to all the talks fully energised, when that was done we got back to his home to "sleep", but there's so many other projects to do!! At the time we felt like we really needed a weather fetching thingy in our IRC client (I think it was Hexchat) but that didn't exist yet. So we built it, kinda in a pair programming way, all night long. Oh, it's morning already?! Time to go to the Sunday talks! We were both complete zombies by then, but somehow I still remember a little bit of it.. some ass who was showing oh-my-vagrant (boring as shit) and some other stuff. All in all, 36 hours on the counter when I got in bed completely wasted, but it was so worth it ♥️

Rant on adaptive brightness....
So basically on my laptop there is this "function" that if the screen is mostly black it lowers the brightness, while if it's white makes it higher....
This means, if you are on devrant or discord or visual studio or any dark UI and then switch to something like google you will get freaking blinded by the max brightness, and when you'll switch back to the first program due to the lower brightness it won't look good and also it will be annoying to the eyes, and you CAN'T make it brighter because that's already the max brightness
...
WHO THE F*CK THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE A GOOD IDEA
If you really want to do something like this at least make it opposite: white screen low brightness, black screen higher brightness.
Well, i don't like it, maybe someone likes it, so can i disable it ?
NO
I have it disabled both in power saving settings and in the intel control panel but it's still active, the only way to fix it is set a registry key i found online and then reboot, but guess what, after one or two weeks it reverts back to enabled :/

So it would seem that Chrome no longer goes back a page when I press the backspace button.

In some ways it nice, as when i'm typing anything important I won't accidentally backspace myself out of the text.

On the other hand, now I have to reteach myself that Alt + Left Arrow is the only way now

New episode on my clients being morons.

Got a call this morning:
Client: hello, we've got a problem here...
Me: tell me about it
C: well... Do you remember the 1200 account we loaded last week ?
Me: yes? What's wrong, we tested them, everything was alright.
C: yeah... But we just noticed we loaded them in the wrong status... Fix that!
Me: easy, we clear the database and load the correct data back.
C: NO WAY! We already worked on 3 accounts. Don't want to lose any of that. Just change the status, it's easy
Me: well not really, there's a lot more going on when you go from one status to another.
C: Don't care, just do it

So... now I need to delete the bad data, checking nothing else gets impacted in the application. And then reload that same data with the proper status this time.

As weird as this sounds like, this is the reason why I love my job. You get challenges like that every single day.

QA: When I start the onboarding process, kill the app and reopen it, I return to where I left off with no way to go back to the previous screen.

Me: Please click the back button in the top left corner

Remember the post about bruce's constant?(4.5099806905005)

Well apparently theres a convergent series for it found all the way back in 2015.

Apparently its an actual thing. Which connects e to the square root of this series.

And it converges on (bruce-1)**0.5.
I confirmed it myself.

The two people who found the series that converges are N. J. A. Sloane and Hiroaki Yamanouchi

Thank you Sloane and Hiroaki!

The actual formula is a series of embedded square roots with the repeating numbers 1,4,2,8,5,7
like so...
sqrt(1+sqrt(4+sqrt(2+sqrt(8+sqrt...

What this means is you can find e using this series.

All you do is run the series, raise by a power of 2, add 1, calculate J and K like so

J = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 2)
K = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 3)

then calculate (J+K)-(bruce-1)
and out pops our buddy e:
2.7182818284591317

I guess I bullshitted myself for so long, that I didn't believe people like scor when they said they legit witnessed by math skills grow.

Or maybe a blind squirrel occasionally DOES find a nut.

Pretty cool find either way.

My boss and one of my coworkers “touch me”...

I’m usually one of the first ones in the office. When my coworker comes in and walks by, he touches my shoulder from the back in a “hello friend” kinda way.

Especially when I’m trying to ignore him he pokes my shoulder. He could you’d waved his hand in front of my head.

My boss is trying to be the “buddy” I guess. When having lunch and someone says something funny, he literally rests his hand on my shoulder or kinda rams my shoulder with his shoulder..

They think that’s nice and “bonding” but I hate it and it makes me very very uncomfortable. The ONLY ones who are allowed to touch me are my GF (I don’t have one) and other girls i know in a night out after a few drinks.

Not even my best friends touch me cause they know I don’t like that.

Im giving obvious signs that they should stop but they don’t get it..

On the other hand I probably have some serious problems that It makes me that uncomfortable in the first place, but not sure how to fix that.. i don’t even go to the barber shop because they have to touch me to cut my hair. So I cut them myself or my dad does it once in a year.

As an interviewer, the toughest part is actually before the interviews, trying to convince recruiting teams that you are not looking for "anyone who works with computers".

Seriously, I've once heard a recruiter ask me "you want someone who knows the program language, right?", to what I answered "a couple, yes". The mouth breather looked at me astonished, askng "is there another?!?"
I'm not surprised that they shower me in piss-poor curriculums from anyone who had a Nintendo DS growing up.
Someone needs to come up with a way to hire more selective recruiters. But I guess we're back to square one when approaching this problem.

About being interviewed, the toughest part is when people do not know the salary that will be offered (usually those recruiter types) and evade the question as billionaires evade taxes.
I don't fucking care if your compensation "is so competitive it could have been an Olympian", I want to compare numbers. And if you do not have a number, I will assume the money is crap, period.

I got my promotion by forcing it. I work at a fairly large gov organization and have done so for 2.5 years. I had been asking for a pay rise for years but was always told there’s no budget. I was doing work way beyond my pay grade as many senior devs had left. Eventually I got really sick of it so applied to another company, took 5 interview rounds but I had an offer that was a 30% raise on my salary at that time.

I submitted my resignation fully thinking that i’m going to leave, but what do you know, my division not only found the budget but did so in 2 days to come back with a counter offer. It’s funny how when push comes to shove, money that previously didn’t exist just appears out of no where

!rant I pity anyone who may have overheard my interaction with a gecko that managed to sneak inside my house when I went to get a package on my doorstep last night around midnight

“Hey little guy, let’s try to get you to go back outside, okay? Nonononooo not that way, fella. Down the wall. DOWN. DO NOT CLIMB BACK UP. Okay. Yeah, see, there you go. Good job. OH MY GOD DO NOT DO THAT. Listen, I think you’re fucking cute, okay? BUT IF YOU CHARGE AT ME LIKE THAT, YOU TRIGGER MY FEAR RESPONSE AND YOU MAKE IT REALLY HARD FOR ME NOT TO KILL YOU. Hooooooly shit, little dude. You were so almost dead. Okay. Okay, yeah, go out the door. Door. Yesssss.”

closes door, only to realize little dude’s tail is still on this side

“OMG LITTLE DUDE, are you okay?!!” opens door, little dude sneaks back inside

“Noooooo you need to go outside. Come on, you know you want to go outside”

Finally managed coax him out the door and confirmed he’d cleared the doorway before closing and locking it.

Not here to disturb y'all , but am a little sad because our cute little boy honey has wandered somewhere and hasn't come back for last 2 days. :'(

I don't know what to do, we searched the whole area nearby and there are no signs of him. We have also alerted a few neighbors who aren't bad to animals.

But i guess it's his time to go out. We always had many cats , and we live on the topmost floor, so cats usually wander over to different terraces and come back after a few hours. But there is always a day, when they go away, nd never comes back.usually the female cats return, with stomach full of babies, but the boys are full Roadies, king of some random place

Its just my heart says he hasn't gone forever. He is a super dumb, and not very much of a bold boy. I think he fell somewhere in an empty home,and couldn't find his way back. ;_;

Not sure if this is necessarily a prank, but I was working on a team that was split in 2. We had a group of senior devs in one country, and junior devs in another (god only knows why, and yes I complained about this a lot).

The "lead" of the juniors was very stubborn and refused to adhere to the official standards, as his way was better.

I was working on an app with him, I was fed up with how badly the app was working, how hard it was to find files etc. So I waited for him to be off on holidays and pulled some extra hours to completely re-do the folder structure, rip out his persistence layer and a few other things.

When he came back he lost his shit and complained to the architect. The architect (also fed up with his shit) told him that we don't have the time to invest in reverting back everything, and loosing all the new features I added on top, especially since the app is now adhering to standards.

Never felt such satisfaction in my life.

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

The solution to a long running bug hit me while I was ironing my shirt today. I took to my heels running upstairs to make the update on my PC and with my haste provoked a shock in the living room causing everyone to run after me.

Finally I got to my PC ignoring the puzzled crowd behind me. Turned it on, launched my VS and was about to make the update when my dad from behind patted my shoulder:

Dad: Hey, what made you ran that way? You got us all scared.
Me: * short gibberish explanation *
Dad: Next time be cautious of the people around you.
Me: * apologized to everyone *

Now back to my PC:
VS Code: (⊙_⊙)
Me: (⊙_⊙)
VS Code: (⊙_⊙)
Me: (⊙_⊙)

ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ Fuck I forgot the code. I forgot the fucking code!
Everyone back in the room... Me still screaming *fuck*

Can someone explain me AI/ML/DL in traditional algorithmic way without AI jargons?

What I currently understand is that they convert the training data to numbers based on a complex black boxed mathematical algorithm and then when a new data comes in, the same conversion is done and a decision is taken based on where the the new number fits in within the geometry/graph plot of the old numbers from training. The numbers are then updated. Is this what they call AI? Nearest number/decision search?

Kindly try to avoid critic, I am having a difficult time understanding the already trending AI stuff. People say that the algo exists from long back but only now we have the compute power.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

When I thought I had bricked my HTC Hero while trying to load a custom ROM and it just didn't boot. I had a real eureka-moment late that night when I understood the whole process and successfully flashed it in a non standard way to get it back working.

I haven't thought about this for a while and it wasn't really dev-related either more than problem solving. That moment was also realisation that I both love and hate technology.

Is there a way to disable the social media buttons and if not could that be built in?

I keep pressing the buttons by accident when I move my finger to the back button. And I cannot even use them because I dont have an account at those platforms.

Craziest prep for an interview?

Way back when I interviewed devs, I prepped a bank of Simpsons and Star Trek trivia questions if the candidate answered one of the softball questions ("What are your hobbies?", etc ) that related to either subject. On rare occasion a candidate claimed to be a big trekkie so I asked..

<Deep Space Nine was in it's 5th season>
Me: "What was the name of Captain Sisko's ship?"
C: "Sisko? Was he from the original series?"
Me: "No, Deep Space Nine"
<awkward silence>
C: "Is that the new series?"
Me: "Not really, but lets do an original series question. What does the middle initial 'T' stand for in James T Kirk?"
<awkward silence>
C: "I have no idea. I don't think it stands for anything."

He didn't make the cut.

My boss at the time said I should not document any of those questions/answers just in case we are sued for discrimination.

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

I'm from New Zealand, and was working in the business side of things but really wanted to learn more tech. Saw a course in the states I really wanted to do, spoke to the admissions person and they said I can initially do a 4 week course then a 8 week bootcamp. Decided I would go but turns out I needed more "experience" when I spoke to one of the instructors.

Was super disappointed I had travelled all the way to America only to be denied a place, but the same instructor said if I did all the tasks she gave me I could get in. 2 years later I'm a full time dev and will never go back.

Really appreciate my instructors belief in me to go the next step, my life would be so different (and empty) if it weren't for her!

Never lose your sense of wonder when it comes to working with clients. Client berated us saying her data were outdated. Ok. Check the file the third party that generated the data is sending us.

Outline all stated discrepancies in the data back to the client, showing that everything lines up with what we are receiving.

Client is frustrated. Contact the third party in their behalf.

Third party support: “oh yea, client had us start sending data to your competitor like a month ago”

Bruh. Bruh. Bruh.

Fortunately the client wants to stay with us and is getting their data pointed back but how in the hell do you forget that. The reason the client when looking at competition (at least guessing looking at previous call records) is to get faster processing of the data coming from the third party. How are you gonna forget you turned off the sending when you are so worried about speed?! Most of our clients are running 7-8 figure businesses by the way.

balancing school work between life and sport and programming is so hard. i mean, school is complete bs. what’s the point?

ffs it’s not *just* that im never gonna use the shit im taught, but that if it dont learn it, im punished. even in some classes (code.org), information that we’re taught is blatantly incorrect. either way, being able to find the foci or an ellipse and the latus rectum (hehe) of a hyperbola isnt going to make it easier when i get my job and just adjust css to my bosses’s specifications. i maintain a 4.0, and i fucking hate it. my friends are working hard, and getting into mit for racial diversity, while im doing just as much work, for what?

i want out. i really do. but this redundant thing called a degree is holding me back. i really want to have some way of proving my skills without a degree. i’m currently building a social media application i believe will take off, but frankly, i dont care.

take off or not, hopefully it will be enough to prove my skills. i’ve been working on this for two weeks now, and, well, that’s my story.

I worked really hard to make this girl my friend at work. We go for morning breaks around from 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM.

And then this new guy joined the company sitting close to me and we become friends. This new guy finds my girl friend really awesome and they are getting closer everyday and they are leaving me behind now and separates me with almost all the conversations during morning break meet.

Today, during the morning break. My girl friend said that I have changed and don't talk to her much like I used to. Way back when we met I really clearly told her that I have anxiety and social disorder so please bare with me and she told me that she will be there for me as a good friend.

I'm not sure what to do. I'm going to lose a good friend really soon.

Im seriously thinking about Watercooling my Raspberry Pi 3...
Why?
BRCAUSE THIS LIL SHIT RUNS SO FUCKING HOT THAT I CAN MAKE AN EGG ON IT! THATS WHY!

Its 80°C when under little load BUT GOES OVER FUCKING 90°C ON LOAD! AND THIS IS FUCKING DANGEROUS! FUCK!

so back to watercooling...
Its a Stupid idea, I know, but its literally THE ONLY FUCKING WAY TO COOL THIS BASTARD! And trust me I tried Novec (Yes the liquid that evaporates at 60°C...) and SHITS EXPENSIVE!

Things I’m learning from my accounting job that will help me in my future dev career:

Today I have really, truly understood the need to sometimes just walk away.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix something, I kept fucking up, and at 16:40 I realized I can just stop, do something else that’s easy and doable, and come back to the fucked up mess I made in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a lesson I’ve been continuously learning over the last few years, not to stubbornly brute-force my way into doing something when I’m not in the right mindset and able to do it, and instead just calm myself down and come back to it later.

Idiot mode: on

It's bad when you realize you are the most idotic person you know. I just bought a wifi card replacement for my laptop only to find out that one of the screws on its back was completely unscrewable. I foolishly decided to force my way through by forcing the plastic. I tought I got away with it as I only damaged a plastic support tighten to the laptop base but now, my laptop screen isn't showing anything.

When I first booted it up after this, it was working, but it started showing troubling signs shortly after. Now, all I can get out of it is a completely black screen, no backlight at all.

What should I do? 😥

It's fascinating to see C# mentioned as a "lower level language" now days. Times change.

C# was my first language when I started out learning about programming as a kid (I still think it's a great language) and I remember searching the forums for information about any commercial games written with it hoping it was possible to build something "cool" and "3D". Back then that was pretty much just a dream, or so it seemed. C# was, I understood, way too high level for anything like that.

Today it wouldn't be totally baseless to call C# the game dev industry standard.

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

*cracks knuckles*

Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.

So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.

Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.

Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.

I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈

I was still a 2nd year college student back then. Someone approached me about a personal branding site, with quite a generous fee for a poor student like me.

I took the job. Surprisingly she paid me in advance. About a week later, when I wanted to clear up some requirements with her, she disappeared. Didn't read any of my messages. Didn't respond to my calls, let alone emails.

Some time later, I got busy with exams and college stuffs. Welp, I let go of the project, even erasing the github repo to make some room for new private repos on the way.

A year later (yes you read it right), she came back.

Messaged me on WhatsApp.

"Hey dude, how you doin? Sorry about last time, I needed some time to take care of stuffs.

So how's the website going?".

By that time, even the domain name I bought for her site had expired.

I didn't know what to say, so I just shut up.

"Remember that I paid you in advance. Either finish the site or give me my money back."

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

In 11th grade I had a shitty teacher who would make students go away from this one computer he always used in the computer lab. It was pretty annoying because he only ever used it to watch YouTube videos of fuckall Bollywood news and other garbage like it.
It was extremely annoying and inconvenient to everyone.
One day, I went to his PC, when he was not there, and reallocated the default way to open all .exe files to nothing, using the Windows Registry.
He came back and saw that none of his applications work and his PC is basically unusable now.
It was extremely funny for a few days to watch the IT guys try to fix but they weren't able to.
Now I don't know what they told the school but a month later they bought a completely new CPU and placed it instead of that one.
So fucking stupid.

Now my client does not want to rely on Amazon S3 because of the One Outage that it ever had a couple what weeks ago I forgot already. So my dumbass blurts out well we could always just back up to some other image or file storing website. But now I'm expected to implement this right away when I really haven't thought about it at all I mean I would have to write some sort of failover and some sort of daily or syncing mechanism. I guess I should forget about any direct upload to S3 code that I have written. Really I guess I have to wrap all of the image and file handling stuff with my own solution. Which actually that will be very nice when it is done and I could use this on other projects but it's quite a lot of work for something that I don't feel we really need at this stage in development. Just because you're using stuff on production that has am enormous red TEST label in the way of the ui doesn't mean i can code bullet proof software any faster

I struggled to find the interview location as the company as they were using another companies offices. As I sit down, sweating, feeling rushed for barely making it on time the interviewer says: "Tell us a joke"

I should have got up and walked out, but since I was there already I pulled this one out:

One day, a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer, and computer engineer were driving down the street in the same car when it broke down.

The mechanical engineer said, I think a rod broke.

The chemical engineer said, The way it sputtered at the end, I think it's not getting enough gas.

The electrical engineer said, I think there was a spark and something's wrong with the electrical system.

All three turned to the computer engineer and asked, What do you think?

The computer engineer said, I think we should all get out and then get back in.

When a client wants something changed, and you spend all day changing it for them to come back with "never mind we liked it the other way"

Listen to your developer when they have an idea that will save you time or money. If she's wrong she will fix her mistake because she wants to be good at what she does. If you're wrong you'll be crawling back to her and end up paying twice as much to get it done your way and then the right way.

Alright, I’ve got a question for some of you who may have felt this way or currently are feeling this way.

I’m burnt out. I hate my job(s), I hate computers, technology, programming, etc. Honestly, at my primary job because shit is so bad, I haven’t even set an alarm clock to wake up in the mornings for the simple fact that I just don’t give a fuck anymore. My direct supervisor is the same way. This place is falling apart and honestly I’m welcoming it.

I’ve grown up with computers my whole life. When I was younger my brother would hack and tamper with shit just to test the limits. To see what he and his machine were capable of. My dad, he was always taking computers apart, anything that had a board, it was at one point taken apart to see how it worked, and when put together; always worked. They liked modifying and testing the limits of things... the shit I use to enjoy...

I guess what I’m trying to ask is, how do you gain a passion back for something that has faded away over a period of time... I truly hope I haven’t forever lost a passion for computers and every subclass under it, but I fear as though I have... How do you guys get it back?

Do you find it difficult to make new friends in your late 20s? Im talking about situation when you left your hometown, left your university city and started living in a fresh new city while working as a remote dev? Only way to make some would be to get into some hobbies, but for now I just try to kick my anxiety causing addictions (nicotine in particular). Once Im back to my calm state I will get out there, but for now Im just an anxious uninteresting wreck haha. At least Im living with my sister and managed to find a great girlfriend, but in terms of social life I dont have it as much as I wanted. Im in a strange situation where I hate people but at the same time want to connect more with them.

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

In my previous work, when I was under pressure (very often, because we were to few people for all the work) I used to manage the situation in the following way:

PM: It's super-important and prioritary to develop < 2 days feature >. Sales really need that feature because they cannot work without it.

Me: Ok. I'll need from them < 2-hours-to-get data > and then I can leave what I'm doing and start with the feature.

PM: *... goes to tell sales ... comes back*

PM: Well, they say they can work by doing < some not as confortable way as feature, but pretty acceptable >.

Me: Ok, then I'll continue trying to prevent the systems break down inminently.

On this work I learned a lot, but clearly, we were too few people to mantain the site, and too much lazy sales people.

When thinking back to my first pc im like how da fuck did i survive using dat crap I must've been a very patient guy 10gb hdd, 64mb ram, 700mhz cpu (if dats da correct way to write megahertz) and to top it off 56kb/s dialup internet

Way back, 20 or so years ago, when I went to the university, every student got an account so that we could work with the Unix machines. Every user got the same default password, -apollo-, still remember it until today, and one day I felt a little bit evil and I tried to login to the administrator account, of course the first password I tried was the default password and it worked!!! I got super scared and told an older student about it, who was brave enough to scare the administrators a little bit by leaving a message like "you have been hacked!!!" or something similar. I was just too scared to do anything about it. All I wanted to do was see IF I could login ☺️ my few minutes of being Mr. Robot... Guess hacking was not for me 😃

Windows 10 Rant:
Windows 10 has so many frustrating issues. Most recent being when my computer, if the PC goes into sleep mode, or sits unused for 40 ish minute period of time (screen still on), when I return; awake the computer from sleep or sit back after being away, the WiFi stops working. Turning WiFi on and off again doesn't fix it, only way is to restart the device, which is damn annoying if you have multiple windows, chrome tabs, or programs running. Having to open and set everything back up is a complete pain.
I must point out, this issue only started happening when my device (auto) updated itself to the Anniversary build of W10.
Thanks Microsoft.

Back when I lived in my university dorm I shared my room with internet admin. Usually I helped people with internet problems when he wasn't there and I've placed FAQ on the door how to fix common stuff with a little note, that I can help only with internet problems and only with those that aren't listed. It worked for most people, but one guy knocked and messaged me around 5 times a day to fix his system. So I've decided to finally do what he wants.
He: come on, I heard from XYZ that you are an admin in job and you fixed her computer.

Me: but I work only with servers
He: what's the difference? Just copy my photos to my external drive and install new system on my laptop, just like you do it in job.
Me: so this is that simple job?
He: yup, but I need a laptop tomorrow, because I have something to do at the evening.
Me: okay

I've used find to copy all the photos from his HDD and installed minimal Debian without xorg on the laptop. He hasn't come back after picking up his computer. And that's the way to get rid of leechers that whine for fixing everything because you are IT guy :D

<warning>bad words</warning>

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!!! LibreOffice Impress is a complete shit!! I am all about open source and such but this shit just sucks, moving elements around a frame snaps them to some grid, however when you paste an element from other frame it will have a different grid!!! This motherfucker has got an ALT function that will allow you to move the element more precisely but it only works seldom and it hates it when I try to use the fucking arrow keys - it even crashed once when I tried it. AND WHEN YOU FUCKING COPY A TABLE FROM ONE FUCKING FRAME TO ANOTHER MOTHERFUCKING FRAME, DELETE A FEW ROWS AND THEN COPY THE FREAKING TABLE BACK IT WILL HAVE MAGICALLY DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS BUT JUST EVER SO SLIGHTLY, BECAUSE FUCK THE USER, RIGHT??!!! (Doing this because there is no way to split tables into two different objects) I constantly have to save my presentation, kill the process and open it again because something just stops working or gets stuck, like seriously, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK???!!! Are there no tests?!!! Do the people who work on this piece of motherfucking shit even use it???!!

Do you all remember the dark ages of DVDs when honest customers made a worse deal than pirates because legitimate media was packed with unskippable advertising and PSAs about piracy?

Well, looks like video game publishers are on their best way to recreate that mistake. Why do games nowadays need to be forcefed with storage-consuming, unappealing and technically nonessential launchers that all look and do the same? And why for God's sake do very old and offline-only games need to go through this sodomizing procedure?

prime example: GTA 3 was released back in 2001 and capable of running on Windows 98SE/2000/XP. There's a Steam-only release out there that requires you to install community-made patches if you want the game to run smoothly on modern hardware. Steam itself as a requirement for this atrocity to even launch the executable dropped support for XP more than two years ago. If you'd wanted to play this game on original hardware, you would rely on a real DVD that was made back then, but there are even better options if you know what I mean.

When a multimillion-dollar industry relies on communities of volunteering enthusiasts to make its products work, it won't receive a trace of my empathy when customers and non-customers alike try to download their games from more reliable and honest sources.

!dev

I'm one of those self improvement assholes. I want to always strive to be better and to see what works and what doesn't.

One way to keep track of how satisfied I am with my life, I have a prompt at 20:00 to self report a score, 1-5 how happy I am.

It's like a minimal journaling system. Sometimes I motivate why I feel like shit.

Does anyone here do something similar? Not counting your GitHub commits.

Do you track progress when doing things in some visual way? Projects, working out, whatever.

Here's a post of my life a few months going back. I kind of like this system.

- Played with and learned Scratch
- Learned some Python, made some weird little programs
- Learned C, using two good books: K&R C and Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way" (back when it was still in development and was free to read on the internet)
- Made LOTS of programs in C
- Came back to Python when I wanted to learn network programming
- Learned some Racket/Lisp, Bash scripting along the way
- Now I use all of the above, minus Scratch

What was supposed to be a simple HDD to SSD upgrade for my brother ended up taking 3 fucking days.

His computer's idle temp was fucking 90c because of fucking YEARS worth of dust preventing fans from breathing, one of them was even dead so I had to go to best buy to get a new one.

Had a power outage happen in the middle of cleaning the damn dust out before replacing the bad fan. It took close to 24 hours for it to come back, and I just didn't bother until the day after cause fuck that.

When I go back to it, I finish cleaning the dust, clone the old HDD to the new SSD, do the swap out, replace the thermal paste on CPU cause why the fuck not at this point. Then turn it on to test, yeah from 90c down to 20c : |

Yeah... so I charged him for the new fan, and the hour-ish it took me to clean the damn dust and replace the fan... (drive was agreed to be done for free as a favor) Yeah not really worth charging for but I was pissed and that was the 'nicest' way I could show how annoyed I was with him not properly caring for the PC. Like honestly 90 degrees celsius. I refuse to believe he didn't notice impacted performance in his games

This is actually a question about the devRant app.

I’ve noticed this a few times. When I click a rant repeatedly (say x times), from the front page or from the notifications pane, multiple layers of that rant open up. And I have to hit the back button x amount of times to go back to where I initially was (again, front page or notification pane).

Now, I understand an app capturing multiple user inputs on the same object but shouldn’t it also account for this by only considering those taps as one input, especially if the object is lagging and hadn’t been loaded? Why is devRant implemented this way?

I would consider it undesirable to have Gmail open the same email in multiple layers when you click the same email repeatedly. So, is devRant’s a feature or a bug?

I’m not a web (app) developer. I’d just like some knowledge on how user input might be captured and why repeated inputs aren’t screened out?

If anyone could page the two awesome doods who work on devRant, that would be awesome! I hope I didn’t just wrongly assume their genders.

Why can’t IE just die?!

I was sent home for almost 3 months due to the pandemic, when I came back on monday there was a major issue with page load speed on IE and some potential customer, had a test account and told us that the platform is taking forever too load and then came the hunt to fix what is asap, it was a very important customer that still uses IE

This happens last week, the only developer on the job last week, was 3 days trying to figure this out, no dice! then I come back on monday, then Im being reboarded and keep up to date what has been going on while away, then I am given that damn task on Wednesday and I’ve been tearing out my hair trying to fix this all week.

But today!

I fixed it!

The solution: npm update <package-name>

Great way to start up at work again *clap*

So I get to work this morning and find one of my monitors has been moved and my HDMI cable and Display Port adapter are missing...

I've since found the cable, it had made its way onto another desk. When I asked if anyone had seen anything one of the guys said he found an HDMI that's not his on his desk. Still no sign of my adapter though...

So for now I'm back to one monitor like some kind of peasant

Someone around here once said that they believe that Rust compiler errors are generated by first sending the compiler noise to some dude in India and then they parse the errors and send them back to the compiler.

This was not a nod against our friends from the land of India, but instead, I think, a praise.

Thus I would like to add a request to the rust devs to see if they could include more "trademark Indian" sassy remarks in the messages that the compiler generates. But I am afraid that they think I am being racist or something.

For reference: My Indian friends are all beyond sassy in the way they clap back at mfkers when having friendly arguments, I have been left with a "well, damn" in multiple occasions because I am incapable of reaching that level of sass myself.

We're using Angular in the shittiest possible way.

It's wrapped in .NET, the code follows no standards and we lack any sort of component hotload functionality with _fat_ data.

When I change a SCSS style, the whole page reloads and it takes me 15 minutes to get back to the state I was in to say "Hmm, more to the left."

I hope this place burns to the ground.

I love to develop for the web, i find JavaScript a nice language and I love the unmatched flexibility of the web platform but i hate when I have to work with the unstable or badly documented APIs which seems to be the norm in the enterprise world: wasting hours in forced breaks because suddenly the API returns nothing but 503 or the VPN suddenly dies, wasting lot of time to find the documentation you need in the slow and cumbersome enterprise API manager, making lots of tests with cURL/Paw/Postman/wethever trying to find out why a request which should work just doesn't... in these moments I envy desktop and mobile devs. The worst part of it is which microservices made everything worse since nowadays there are way more "moving parts" which can break making the API you need unavailable and unlike with monoliths often it's hard to just clone a back-end, populate a database and then work fully locals since now everything depends on a lots of things which are hard/almost impossible to replicate on your laptop.

With work from home being way more productive why the fuck would any software development company go back to the office? Rent, workstations, and electricity are expensive! Why spend that money when it’s not essential to your business.

!dev

I just had one guy coming back to the house at 4am, again, and he made his usual grand entrance, slamming the doors, stomping on the wooden floor making all the creaking sound as he walk all the way to his room, which is right beside mine. And when he went into the bathroom, which is on the other side of my room, he slammed he motherfucking lid on the toilet bowl which was so fucking loud I literally jumped out of bed. I ended up not being able to sleep (I have a lot of trouble falling asleep), and when I tried to sleep in the afternoon to catch up on the missed winks, another motherfucking bastard started blasting fucking hardcore electronics in the living room which is right below my room. The same bastard also plays loud movies or music at 2-3am. I’ve told that bastard that comes home late to watch his noise but man he only minds the noises I told him and nothing else. As for the other fucker, he’ll say he’d keep it down but continues doing what he’s doing anyway.

I moved here cause I know that it’s usually a quiet place and away from the party kids, but I somehow ended up with a party kid and an insensitive fucker (This motherfucker had the loudest sigh of frustration when I knocked politely on his door last night. Yes I calmed down before I talked to him, but ended up deciding to not utter a word at all when I hear that sigh).

I should move out, but I can’t find a place before next term cause it’s way too late at this point. I am on a lease, but my landlord understands my situation, and he seems okay with breaking the contract.

Having been here as an international student for almost 2 years now, and having moved 5 times, this has been the worst nightmare of a bunch of people to stay with.

For those that has read of me ranting about this elsewhere, yes it’s that same fucking bunch that doesn’t clean the house.

So i informed my intent to leave the job in few months in pursuit of learning something new in tech. Boss is trying to convince me to not leave and said i should consider learning it after work hours. In fact, in his opinion, the best way to learn is just going ahead and learning it while doing it in the project ( which usually has impossible deadline and fugly code by colleagues who never thinks of good coding practices when typing their shit ).

Well guess what boss, I don't want to just live a life staring at monitor all day. I don't want to kill my eyes either.

Following his advise and not quitting would mean living a slave life.

I have other plans actually. Like being self employed and traveling the world which would be impossible if i follow the routine life.

Fun fact: he claimed he made an AI car back in 90s!

He also thinks I can't sense BS!😏

You know a server is having a jolly'ol time when, while logging through the serial console, it lags... Then, a few seconds later, you get a message

[time.seconds] Out of memory: Kill process PID (login) score 0 or sacrifice child
[time.seconds] Killed process PID (login) total-vm:65400kB, anon-rss:488kB, file-rss:0kB

10/10, only way to bring the server back to life was by a hard-reset :|

man, fuck php.
fuck fucking php fuckitily fucking hard.
basically every fuckin stdlib function it has is fucked in some way.
can't even remember it anymore properly, but...

for example:
explode(" ", "some string like this ");

function to "split a string into array of strings using the first param as the boundary marker.

the above one would return
["some", "string", "like", "this", ""]

BECAUSE I'M FUCKING FUCKITTY SURE THAT WHEN THE LAST CHARACTERS OF THE STRING ARE EQUAL TO THE SEPARATOR STRING, EVERYONE WANTS TO GET BACK ONE EXTRA FUCKING USELESS EMPTY ITEM IN THE ARRAY.

because beyond the last wall of my house, there's another room of my house, you stupid Lerdorf fuck.

Show a comment field below a discussion, with rich text and link functionality, to inspire people to craft a detailed answer.

Maybe they will forget to type Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before hitting send.

So when they do, show a message that "you must be logged in to comment". Use a JS SPA to make sure that there is no way for users to restore their drafted comment. Don't show it after they logged in. When they use their browser's back button, they surely want to exit the application, so make sure to discard any transient data in that case.

Seen on WordPress.org using their infamous Gutenberg block editor.

Them: You have 6 days to build this frontend page for our wordpress site.
Me: Ok...
*proceeds to spend 4 days trying to arse my way towards a semi reasonable bootstrapped website based on the existing website's styling.*
Me: *Presents website*, so... uh... yeah, I don't usually do frontend stuff, I'm more of a backend dev, but here's what I could do.
Them: This looks like absolute horseshit.
Me: So what do you not like about it?
Them: All of it. It doesn't look anything like the wireframe that I gave you.
Me: Ok... So let me get this straight, you want it to look exactly like how you designed it in your wireframe? *wireframe looks like a child drew it*
Them: Yes! Is that so hard?
Me: I mean, it's a little hard. I'm not exactly a front end developer. Aside from that, I think this design is not very user-friendly.
Them: we don't care about your opinions, OP. Get back in there and make it look exactly like the wireframe.
Me: Ok.
*proceeds to go to fiverr, and contract someone else to do it for me while I get to do fun stuff in the back end.* 😂

----

We'll see what they think of the project when it gets back to me. Wish me luck guys.

So been working with Linux for almost 10 years now, so am not new with this. But yesterday, a friend had difficulties accessing Wikipedia and their sister sites so I tried to help him out, you know, the usual way. Ping, Direct IP, DNS, and proxies/VPN, checking his /etc/hosts, but to no avail. Decided to download TeamViewer and install it so that I can help him out remotely. Went afk for 30min for dinner and when I came back, TeamViewer installation .Deb installer literally uninstalled every single software from my Kubuntu machine, from Spotify and slowly even my file manager and terminal was uninstalled. When it was over, even my grub was uninstalled.

Had anyone faced the same issue before?

!rant
Health.

This is a big thing I think. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm overweight and this job keeps me at a desk for long periods of time.

I ended up with health issues from a combination of a bad diet, a staph infection years ago, and not being active. So I've made a commitment to start walking - at least a mile a day.

I'm using Pacer + Apple Health on iOS to track my progress. So far, combined with a $50 bluetooth scale I picked up on Amazon, I'm losing weight. I also noticed that when I switched my mile walk to my lunch break, I'm coming back to my work way more refreshed.

I hope to keep this up and I've found the gamification of having apps track my progress is a definite plus.

Anyone else have any healthy habits of "health hacks" they've found?

So, when I was like 18 I made an app for a guy who stole a phone book database in paper and was paying people to pass it to access.
He asked me a program to make it easier to add data, he was paying people to do it one by one to an access db.
So I made that and a module to join all the dbs and check for existing ones (there was no way to join access db back then).
When he told me he didn't want it anymore...
So I deleted the sorce code and gave the binary to an uncle to use as a phone book for work.
Two weeks latter the guy called because he didn't know how to join the dbs. Well the source wasn't lost... I just deleted it and told him that if he had paid my software would take care of it...

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

No matter how many times, or whichever way I explain, he still doesn't get it. Are people so fucking blinkered they do not want to listen, or even read what you write. Back story, produced some web design visuals for a client, and fortunately he had the good sense to listen and employ a copywriter. She had the first draft done when i was putting together the styling, so i placed actual copy on the visuals. 2 weeks pass, still no answer. I send the same email to him, every 4 days and cc his PA for good measure. Finally, he says he wants to make some tweaks to the copy. I explain that any copy changes can be done via the CMS once the site is built, and can I proceed and build the site? He replies I need to make changes to the copy first. I explained again about the difference between the visual and the actual website, same response. You Fucking Infuriate me! Cunt!

I learned coding the best way: While getting paid. I was an Excel junkie (still consider myself as one) and a colleague taught me PHP. This gave me the skills to apply for real programming jobs. Eventually I was hired at a company as a PHP developer who would need to be flexible enough to transition into a C# developer within the next 6 months. It wasn't easy, but after about 8 months and a 1-week course later I was programming in C# .NET with grace. Not looking back at PHP now at all. Naturally, today I can apply for a whole bunch of different jobs that I definitely could not three years ago.

I have the dearth of good programmers to thank for this of course and I am grateful every moment when I understand how lucky I've been.

So arround a month back , I was watching videos and photos I clicked in the vacation I went.
All the photos and videos were in a 1TB harddisk and I connected to my TV for better viewing experience.

In the mid way, I had a power cut and suddenly TV switched off.

This was not supposed to happen because my inverter has to kick in !
Fuck it , something happened to my inverter and delay was just enough to switch the TV off.

Now TV is on , harddisk is recognised and
Hell yeah! There are no files in the harddisk!
I lost my shit !, Before I do any thing, I tried to recover the files, luckily some vacation images and videos were recovered but all of my project source code(the ones I Did not push it to github, those were done when I was learning), most of my documents etc.. were gone!

May not be the worst one , but I lost all my coding memories.I mean those projects were done in my school times.

Me: Ok I've updated the docs, I'll open a PR with the changes

Maintainer: Looks great! Can you remove the changes to the package-lock.json? (I assume it got updated when you ran npm install to start the webserver)

Me: Ok sure, I'll update it soon

And this is where the troubles begin. The file was commited 2 commits ago, so I have to roll back to then. However, the remote repository has been updated since then, so I git fetch to keep up to date.

This makes the rollback a hell of a lot harder, so I run git log to see the history. I try a reset, but I went back to the wrong commit, and now a shit ton of files are out of sync.

I frantically google 'reset a git reset', and come across the reflog command. Running that fucks things up even worse, and now so much shit is out of sync that even git seems confused.

I try to fix the mess I've created, and so I git pull from my forked repo to get myself back to where I was. Git starts screaming at me about out of sync files, so I try to find a way to overwrite local changes from the origin.

And by this point, the only way to describe what the local repo looks like is a dumpster fire clusterfuck that was involved in a train wreck

I resolved the mess by just deleting the local copy and git cloning again from my fork.

I gotta learn how to use Git better

This story is related to Docker containers.

Three years back when I heard about docker my first impression of docker was mini Virtual Machine. Then when you start your first container it’s no way to get out apart from pressing ctrl+d or leaving it like a screen. One of the most embarrassing thing with it was I tried really really hard to setup SSH on one of the container to log in there somehow. Then I understood how to use Dockerfiles and the command called `docker exec`

I thought Dockerfiles are the most amazing thing I have ever used for docker. But then I got introduced to docker-compose, and now it’s same with kubernetes

Now a days I read most of the document before doing hands-on on any new technology.

When I was younger I went to computer camps. We would basically play LAN games the majority of the time.

One year we played Jedi Knight Dark Forces II.

This game was super easy to hack since you would just save a local version of the file and it would override the game.

There was a god mode that you can download which would give your character 1 million in health and never die.

I then modified it so I had a health of 500. This way if I wanted to prove that I could be killed I would just call the kill command 4 times to bring my life back down to 100.

@dfox

Just a suggestion, when scrolling down on a user's profile, their user information should scroll up too along with the 'rants/+1's/comments' tabs and then those tabs stay fixed while the user information hides. Sort of like what Twitter does

There's not much room to view the actual content with all the user information in the way. Of course once we scroll back up, it will then reveal the user info again

:-)

Worst experience with a manager was with this project manager at my first job.

One day the other developers and I were staying back a little late to try to make some progress. The manager offered to go out to get food for us. It must have been two hours later when we realized he was not back. We were ready to go home and starting to get hungry. We called him and he said he got caught up but was on his way back and would be there soon. It was more than an hour later when he arrived with the food. I quit that job shortly after.

Ugh am so done with linux.

I dualbooted ubuntu 16.4 LTS alongside win10 on my new laptop 3 years ago. Back then , the whole os and kernel stuff were new for me, but once i understood how things work in it, i always found linux to be a superior alternative for doing any development related task than windows.
The way terminal gives us sheer raw power to handle services and applications ourselves makes everything easy in linux.

Wanna run a lamp server? Install all parts by yourselves. Problems with the lamp server? You are just 1 command away to know which service/package is causing issue. Some python module fucked up? You can go on checking every package present anywhere on your disk. No permissions? Sudo.

But recently i got so much fed up of its gui. I have gone from 16.4 to 18.4 to 20.4 , but no version seems to handle multiple gui s/w running parallely .
I usually have the requirement to open 2-3 windows of chrome with 30-40 tabs, 1-2 projects of Android studio and studio emulator. But this shit blows even with just 1 project open on studio and nothing else! The even the keyboard and mouse gets stuck when i studio is making a built.
And don't get me started on how slow my system becomes when switching b/w AS and chrome :''( . Maybe there's issue with the dual boot or because i gave very large swap/root partitions when i first dualbooted or something else , but i am in so much pain :/

Finally i went back to win10 a month ago and was a little surprised to find that it sucks a little less now. Aside from the ugly forceful updates, it has been a breeze for working . The builds take longer time (fuck windows defender), but My Android studio (and everything else) does not lag when switching between multiple processes. I even once ran an emulator instance and it was still working fine . The process management of windows is very good.

I have heard that mac is kind of in middle of the 2 and better than both providing rich process management and powerful terminal commands . Waiting for the day when i have enough money(or no longer require my kidney) to buy and maintain a MacBook :/

You win this round SQL.... but I'll be back... and when I do I'll get this stupid join and concat to work the way I want. YOU'LL SEE SQL!!!!

...If I ever buy an SQL book like I keep talking about...

-deploy not entirely janky but also not ideal solution-

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

My manager keeps pretending to punch me in the groin when I walk past. This happens at least once on every shift. I have asked him to stop doing it more than once, as it makes me jump back and I suffer from a back injury, so it can be quite painful. He laughs about it when he does it, and I am sure he does it in jest, but he refuses to stop doing it. He simply laughs and says he would never actually hit me there, but it’s automatic to jump back out the way.

My friend who is a store manager in another store informs me that because of where he aims, it can be deemed as sexual harassment. Is this the case and what is the way forward?

Honestly, nothing.
I’ve had some bad experiences in my career so far, but I wouldn’t go back and change any of it.
I believe I am the engineer I am now because of all the experiences I have had.
Embrace your bad experiences and awful projects, because you gain a greater appreciation for the right way to build things when you’ve witnessed the wrong way first hand.

Webhost (that I basically only use for email) decided to get rid of all plans they had in favour of 1 big "unlimited" (with FUP ofc) plan...
I used to pay about 3,65 a year (incl. VAT) for my plan (which had about 1250MB of storage) which was totally fine...
Good enough storage for mails.

The new plan costs me 55 euro a year (incl. VAT) and has that "unlimited" storage...
Which I don't need for a fucking mail server...
And they don't allow me to go back to my old plan >.>

Literally the only reason why I went with them 7 years ago was because they were so cheap (back when they also still hosted my website) and perfectly fit my needs >.>
Way to shoot your longest time customers in the back.

Well, time to look for an alternative T_T

So I'm not sure on how much Youtube can fuck up so much in a short time, but I'm actually suprised.
And I'm not just tslking of all the shady/bullshit bahavior and reasoning on content creators, but also on how this shitty new app is just one clusterfuck of not working shit.

One if the easiest features there is - the damn shuffle feature for a damn playlist - doesn't properly work since the first day it went live. Are you shitting me? Even after a felt decade they are still not able to fix it. Yet alone showing more than 200 in the playlist items (when a video is already playing)

But a simple feature which is useful to nearly everyone and which worked before is surely no problem when the damn service itself would work.
Aside that the app sometimes randomly crashes when leaving fullscreen mode (desktop) and making it for some magical way impossible to interact with the browser (WTF?!) until you resize it or wait for an eternity to relase you from that suffer.

On top of that pile of garbage, the videos don't load properly anymore. Whats the fucking point of showing how much of a video is supposidly loaded when you skip forward for 5sec and it has to buffer for 10 to continue?

Well, if that were to at least only happen when the video is skipped forwards/backwards. On some strange occasion (Probably when the stars arrange properly) than your connection to the servers is back in the stoneage. Because otherwise I can't explain how the fuck it has to lower the resolution down to 360p and STILL buffer. I have a fucking 10MByte/s+ DL rate, ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!

Now after over 1.5k chars I notice I maybe a bit over the top ... BUT FUCK IT. I mean, it's fucking youtube ffs. If the biggest videoplatform can't even create a properly working webapp, then what the fuck are you doing google?

When Icriticize a paid service for taking away or not providing functionality for all users equally but then a user comes back defending them with some BS reason...

Ok... I'll just continue helping myself only...

@nnee

Me:

1. Can you put the New books tab with back in the bottom, scrolling down into the New section in the front page is annoying. At least make it a setting?

2. Where's the # of books read stat in Android?

Blinkist: Hi thanks for your message! The best way to view the newest titles on Android is to do just as you mention – scroll down to reveal the New section. As for BiB stats on Android, we're working on releasing this feature (it's only live on iOS at the moment).

Me: Hm... I liked the older way better. Faster and can tell when it was added. The problem is sometimes still new books don't refresh and I need to login out to get it to update. Also I notice sometimes the list changes randomly I think. One day a new book is there. The next day it's gone.

BiB stats have been in iOS for a year now? How hard is it to put it in Android. Personally it only took me a day to find out what my total is as I can write a program to do it so to me I don't understand how this could be taking so

Some user: Priorities and often it’s strategy for future features...

Me: you take away useful functionality and and can't release a feature that's been on the iOS version for a year already... fine,,, I'll just take it as a challenge... that I've mostly solved... for myself...

So my worst experience with a project manager was this:

New changes to the system came in, and i was the developer of android frontend back then
So he's shouting at me like 'why is dis so slow, why deez delayed, why those render misaligned on the orbitrary tablet, etc.'
So we finish in like an hour, he walk away back to his office, I went to smoke, came back, oh hey, I wanna go to the toilet
And back then at that place we had a small one person WC, so when someone was there, anyone else would have to stand outside the cabin
So I come next to it, oh, fuck, occupied, and I hear ridiculously loud and echo-y splashes of pure solid shit hitting the water surface)
A min later the thunderstorm was over, the door opens, and my PM rushes out, sees me, stops (I was in his way) and gives me a deathstare for a quick second. Awkward moment's over, he walks around me, but I just could not keep my mouth shut, so I said aloud

"Well, no wonder"

My family literally knows nothing about development, programming, computer science. It's bad. The closest anyone in my family has come to understanding is a distant cousin, who is an IT lead in Healthcare. His mother told him to call me because some fucking piece of shit at his job purposefully mucked up an internal ASP.net app on his way out. Sure, I had nothing better to do than to phone debug your shitty app with zero context. Great.

My wife is the one who comes closest to understanding in my immediate family* but even she admits when I come home ranting that she has absolutely zero idea what I'm saying.

It great though because I get to use her as a living rubber duck that just stares at me with a blank expression. Then at the end of describing a complex problem I'm trying to sort out she just replies with some encouraging thing like, "I'm certain you'll figure it out."

Fuck this is a long rant. Sorry. I better get back to work.

I know streams are useful to enable faster per-chunk reading of large files (eg audio/ video), and in Node they can be piped, which also balances memory usage (when done correctly). But suppose I have a large JSON file of 500MB (say from a scraper) that I want to run some string content replacements on. Are streams fit for this kind of purpose? How do you go about altering the JSON file 'chunks' separately when the Buffer.toString of a chunk would probably be invalid partial JSON? I guess I could rephrase as: what is the best way to read large, structured text files (json, html etc), manipulate their contents and write them back (without reading them in memory at once)?

When you have an important presentation and you are so ready for it, and then you find out you forgot to pack your charger and that you didn't back up the presentation somewhere online and nobody in your entire tech savvy college has a charger compatible with your fancy ass gaming laptop and now you have to commute all the way back and come back in time to do the presentation.

Way, way back when IBM discovered, gasp, that the largest gain in programmer productivity was giving each one an office. Have also read it takes 15 min to regain train of thought after an interruption. What is pair programming doing to us and worse open offices? And phones?

I love when games don't change their mechanics much between installments. That way, when I play later installments and feel like going back to the previous ones, I don't feel so out of touch due to being used to newer features.

So the project I work on basically has to talk to a 3rd party plugin, through a 3rd party framework. The 3rd party plugin is a black box. This conversation happened:

Software guy: so we aren't sure what is breaking the thing. It's either us or the plugin, but it's probably both.

Systems guy: well then if we aren't sure then why are we writing an issue for it.

SWG: because we aren't sure but we know we are doing at least something that contributes. We read int X from a table and put it into a float. X doesn't perfectly represent in a float. It comes out X.0001. Then they take it and when it comes back it comes back as Y.0001. We cram it into an int so it becomes Y, we compare it to X which is really X.0001 and it comes back invalid.

SG: well as long as we are sending them the right number . . .

SWG: but we aren't sending them the right number. They are expecting X not X.0001. Then they send us back Y.0001 but it should be X so it's wrong.

SG: so they're giving us the wrong return value.

SWG: yes, but because we're giving them the wrong number.

SG: well not exactly . . .

SWG: yes exactly. It is off by .0001 because of floating point math.

SG: well . . .

Me: look it doesn't matter how it's breaking. But it IS broken. Which is why we're filling out the damn problem report. THEY ARE EDITABLE. We talked to the customer and gave them the risk assessment. They don't care. It happens rarely any way.

SG: then can we lower the severity?

Me: no. Severity doesn't relate to risk. That is a whole different process. Severity assumes it has already happened. It's a a high severity.

SG: but the metrics.

Me: WE GIVE THE METRICS TO THE CUSTOMER. WE TALKED TO THE CUSTOMER. THEY DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

And that was how I spent Wednesday wondering how a level 4 lead systems engineer got his job. How many push ups did he do? What kind of juice did he drink?

Dear @dfox and @trogus

I'm writing this here because reporting such issue to GitHub doesn't seem to do it's justice.

It's been happening for like HALF A YEAR.

AND IT'S YET TO BE PATCHED.

WHY. WHEN I CLICK THE BACK BUTTON ON MY PIXEL 2 XL (ANDROID 9). ALWAYS CLOSES THE APP?!?!?

Yes, this is a rant about DevRant, I have no complaints other than this exact one.

It's been happening for way way WAY too long, and never been patched.

Please don't reply to me "why don't you report it on GitHub?" ITS BEEN REPORTED OK?!

I've always loved DevRant since I first joined, but this issue is preventing me from browsing it every time. It's jus irritating.

Please, @dfox and @trogus, try and for once take the time to try and fix it.

Thank you.

To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.

Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.

Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.

As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.

Ranted earlier about how my debugger was fucking up. Jokes on me, it's now the only thing that works well.
The fucking C++ code behaves normally in debug build, but when in release build throws a SEGFAULT out of nowhere. Bet it's tellg() or my unsigned to signed conversion that fuck things up (while they work perfectly in debug, I repeat). But I can't tell, since the only way I have to trace back the issue is the disassembly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯