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EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2017)
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@trogus and I have had an absolute blast working on devRant over the last year. However, we're strong believers in only working on a project if you're passionate about it, and over the last few months, we've sadly lost some of that passion so we've to announce, with heavy hearts, that we will both be moving on. We've decided to focus 100% of our energies on our next product, one which we are confident has billion dollar potential: Semicolon JS (http://semicolonjs.com).
We identified this sizable market opportunity as we were building out the new devRant website. Every JavaScript framework we tried left us wanting more. More efficiency. More elegance. More extensibility. That's what Semicolon JS is: more. More than a framework, it's a guiding philosophy. We believe that Semicolon JS will do for front end development what Material Design has done for user interface design. We're calling it Semicolon JS because even though you can still develop JavaScript without it, like a semicolon, we think it will soon become a standard and synonymous with quality JS development.
So comes the obvious question. What will happen to devRant? We wanted to make the announcement today because we will be officially shutting down the product in 30 days. So that gives everyone a full month to take in the last memories, look at those rants they really loved, and hopefully take some time to chat with @trogus and I about Semicolon JS and what we have planned.
With so many thanks and looking towards the future,
- @dfox and @trogus
160 -
//long rant but worth it ;)
In our class, we had some writing in Word.
I was the smart PC guy in the class which everybody asked for info. Even the teacher sometimes asked me.
There was a girl in class which I didn't really like, because she had a snoopy attitude and thought she is a queen.
In MC Word you can hide the toolbar with the little arrow on the top right below the close button.
Somehow the girl hid the toolbar and didn't know to let it reappear again. After half a hour the teacher got to the next lesson.
She held her hand up and reported to the teacher that here PC has problems. After 10 minutes try & error from the teacher he even didn't get it.
Now the teacher started the rant and shout at her: "How did you even manage to do this? Did you upload a virus? I bet it is a virus! Do you know how much it costs to repair this pc? It's sure over 1000 $."
The rant continued for 15 minutes. After that I felt a bit guilty and even I didn't like that girl, but nobody deserves such a harsh treatment.
Without saying anything I went to the computer, clicked the little arrow and the problem was solved. The teacher didn't say anything to this topic. Just said we can go early.
Sometimes dump people make a elephant out of a fly, just because they don’t know it better…
Well the girl still stayed a cunt till the end of my scholarship.17 -
Management : "How long you think it would take?"
Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"
Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"
me : "its a big proj..."
Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"
me : "but we are not ready"
Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued
* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."
me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"
Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"
me : "well alright then"
Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-
* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"
scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...
turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.
----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time13 -
Me: *Applies for entry level full-stack job*
Recruiter: "Sorry, I can't hire you because you don't have the years of experience we're looking for. We can take you on as an intern! Unpaid of course, while we train you."🙂
Clueless Me: "Sure, why not."
*second day into the internship*
Boss: "I have this really big project, and I want you to be the lead. I'm going to be very vague about what I want, so you'll constantly have to make changes to user stories, wireframes, & database designs until I'm satisfied. Don't ask me any questions for clarity, because I'm busy 🙂"
Silly Me: "okay"
Boss: "Also, can you train all the other interns? You're so lucky! You'll get to pick the best to join your team" 🙂
Stupid Me: "okay"
Boss: *emails me a spreadsheet of 80 Front-End interns (freshmen and sophomores)*
"Did you start building the app yet?" 🙂
Me (Dummy): "You haven't approved the final wireframes ye-"
Boss: "And for the other interns' training, what did you have in mind?" 🙂
Me (Dumbass): "I made a training guide, they're already followi-"
Boss: "My project manager for this other project left, guess he couldn't handle the pressure of a real job... HAHAHAHA! You're gonna take the lead of that project, too!"
*Adds me to the slack group* 😁
Me (Imbecile): "Wha-"
Boss: "And we've been having trouble with keeping track of everyone's code. Is there something we can do instead of slacking code snippets back and forth?" 🤔😮
Me (Fucking Imbecile): "Wait, you guys are working on a project and you don't have any form of version control? Maybe we should take a few steps back and plan thi-"
Boss: "Are you gonna take initiative or not!?" 😡
Me (Enlightened): "I quit." 😑
Former Boss: "Too bad... I was going to offer you a paid role tomorrow morning. Oh well!" 😔38 -
[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.
[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.
[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?
[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.
[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.
(a few months later...)
[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.
Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.
[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.
(angry client calls immediately...)
(dev transfers to manager...)
(client transfers to client's boss...)
[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.
[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.
(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)
[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...
13 -
"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"
They're being marked as spam...
"oh damn, how can we fix that?"
You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.
"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"
Have you tried not spamming people?
"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"
No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.
"But we aren't spamming people!"
IT VS Marketing 100% of the time13 -
I made a Trello board and listed some tasks for me and my team.
My boss comes in, I show him the trello board to show how I organized our tasks.
He liked it, so I asked him if we can use it more frequently.
He replied: this is your code, do whatever you want.
I asked: my code?
He replied: yah didn't just build this webpage? This interactive task manager.
Me in shock: hold on you think I built trello?
Boss: oh ... You didn't ? It looks like something you'd do for your "front end masterbaution".
Me: oh wow, well... If that was the case I would've made $425 million on top of my salary.
Boss: looked at me like meh ~ and walked away...7 -
[Thursday afternoon on a call...]
Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?
Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.
[Two hours later...]
Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?
Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.
Client: So when are you going to get it done?
Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.
Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.
Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.
By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.
If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.
I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.
Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.
I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.
[Next morning...]
Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.
-----
Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.7 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
//Long rant
[Boss man]: Hey, we need you to build us a web app.
[Me]: Okay, what do you need it to do?
[Boss man]: We need staff to be able to login from anywhere, create new appointments, check room availability, display live times for the rooms, schedule future appointments, record all the data as stats and export the stats to (email address).
[Me]: Okay, sounds useful, anything else?
[Boss man]: we also need it to send all relevant data to a calendar where certain staff will be notified by email of events.
[Me]: Okay... I'll get right on starting this.
[Boss man]: So you can have it done by the end of the day? (4 hours from this time)
[Me]: *Internal screaming* *WHAT THE FUCK* Uhm, no, I don't think that is possible to complete in a four hour period by myself.
[Boss man]: Okay, well by tomorrow then, I'm leaving for the day though, have a good one.
[Me]....
//End long rant12 -
Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.
Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.
We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.
Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?
Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.
All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.
Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.
Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.
---
I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.6 -
Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"
Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"
Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"
Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"
Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."
Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."
Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"
Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"
Clerk: "€3500"
Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"30 -
Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.
Me: Desirability is not do-ability.
Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？
Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.11 -
Manager: Oh my god have you heard of libraries? I don’t even need to hire developers anymore, everything can just be done with code other people have already built for free
Dev: Well you actually cause a bit of technical debt when you use an abstrac—
Manager: EVERY TICKET SHOULD BE DONE USING LIBRARIES GOING FORWARD.
Dev: …This is going to implode…Can we at least fund some of the libraries we end up using?
Manager: WHAT? NO! Open source developers are suckers, what idiot puts code on the internet for free?? I shouldn’t be required to fund their stupidity. Let’s just take their stuff and make money with it.
Dev: *Phone rings 100th time today from recruiter*. One sec I have to take this call……It’s urgent.13 -
Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix
User: It’s still not working
Dev: Did you log out and in again?
User: No why would I want to do that?
Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue
User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?
Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version
User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.
Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though
Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!
Dev: …
Dev: What other bugs did you notice?
*no response for 2 weeks and then:
User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.
Dev: ….muppet.16 -
Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):
1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.
2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:
3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.
Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.12 -
Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)
Long story:
*I add first unit tests to project.
*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.
*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.
Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"
Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".
Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."
Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"
Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"
Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"
Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"
Me: "then why add any tests?"
Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"
*Boss storms out
I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.
That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.
My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.
We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.
I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.
Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.21 -
boss: please look into tools that do X.
fullstackchris: Ah, here's a solution we can use!
boss: I don't want to use it because it is too complicated.
fullstackchris: ok, that's fine with me...
[one week later] boss: oh I found this nice site that does X, can we do X?
fullstackchris: YES, THAT'S EXACTLY THE SOLUTION I ALREADY FOUND, *AFTER* YOU ASKED ME TO LOOK FOR A SOLUTION, AND IN THE END YOU DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT. OH HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND?!?!
F*@#! *%*#8 -
Before anyone starts going batshit crazy, this is NOT a windows hate post. Just a funny experience imo.
So I was tasked with installing ProxMox on a dedicated server at my last internship. The windows admin was my guider (he could also do debian). (he was a really nice/chill guy)
So we were discussing what VM's we wanted and the boss (really cool dude by the way) said he wanted a VPS for storing some company stuff as well. Fair enough, what would we use? I suggested debian and centos. Then we started discussing what we'd do if the systems would fuck up etc (at installation or whatever).
So I didn't wanna look like a Linux Nazi so I suggested windows. Then the happy/positive guider/windows admin suddenly became dead serious (I was actually like 'woah' for a second) and said this:
No. We're not going to fucking use windows for this. For general servers etc sometimes, fair enough but we're talking about sensitive company data here. I don't want that data to be stored on a proprietary/closed source system, hell what if there's some kinda fucking backdoor build in, who can fucking verify that? We're using Linux, end of discussion.
😓
I was pretty flabbergasted as he's a nice guy and actually really likes windows!
Linux it became.5 -
tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.
We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.
Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.
Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.
Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.
After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.
Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.
He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.
Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.
To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.5 -
Act I
Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO
> enter stage left CEO
CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"
Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"
> exit stage right CEO
Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit
Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"
Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"5 -
At the end of our first podcast (https://devrant.io/podcasts/...) we gave a hint about the featured guest on our second episode. Now, it's time to announce this guest!
For the next episode of The devRant Podcast, we're fortunate enough to welcome David Heinemeier Hansson, also commonly known as DHH!! (http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/) David is the creator of Ruby on Rails and founder/CTO of Basecamp/37signals (project management tool), and a best-selling author know for titles like "Rework." He also drives race cars. We're extremely excited that we'll have the change to interview him as our second featured guest.
Like last time, it's time to take questions from the devRant community! If you have a question you'd like us to ask David, please add it as a comment on this rant or you can email me (david@devrant.io). Thanks everyone!
6 -
So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"
First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.
Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.
PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer
PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"
FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"
Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"
End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok
Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"
15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"
And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project
WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!
I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...
Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...13 -
Tldr : In my country, there is always a middleman .It is so rare to work for end client directly and it is very common to be fuck over by them, because they want milk you out as much as possible
Job description : Salary range from X to Y
Me : I expect 90% of Y $
HR : if you pass technical examination we can agree on this amount.
*Technical interview*
All correct answers, perfect match with stack etc.
HR calling next day:
HR: Great job on interview, but you need to lower your financial expectation to X (around 50% of Y)
Me: Why? We have spoken the other day and you said there would be no problem with the money. I nailed the interview, I don't understand why I should agree to lower wage.
HR: I know I know, but right now we cannot give more. Maybe later
Me: I am sorry, but I feel kinda cheated. For me this is red flag since I don't know what I can expect later if you are not sincere from the beginning. I won't take your offer, goodbye.9 -
We had the most fucking retarded client today. No, seriously, if you ever beat their level you have a serious mental issue.
They had a mail problem for which they'd need to check at the side of another company since we don't have those fucking logs.
Their statements:
- they entered an email address In the text field of mail-tester.com and were furious that they didn't get the results sent.
Note: it says right on that page that YOU JUST NEED TO SEND THE EMAIL ADDRESS WHICH IS PRE-ENTRRED IN THAT TEXT FIELD AN EMAIL.
- their company has been a reputable 'conservative' company which hasn't done anything wrong since 19xx so the fact that they'd end up on a blacklist was FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS and bullshit.
- our support wasn't willing to help and only willing to tell them outrageous lies.
- the other it company was only reachable at a premium number and thus expensive to call.
Emails back and forth and finally they CC'd the other company. They're reply was fucking priceless:
"we never had a premium number. Feel free to call us on *number* any time during the week between *time* and *time*.
Then he told us that we should just go back to sleep.
It was way worse than that but due to privacy and my own memory this is all I can tell.
Just wow.3 -
Client: We need to add a field to the model that serves as a unique identifier
Dev: You already have one, it’s the _id property
Client: We want another! This one is for a task number so we can make a connection between the database record and our ERP.
Dev: Ah I see. I can add that for you. Is this truly a unique identifier or will you be using the same ERP identifier for multiple database records?
Client: I already said it’s a unique identifier. One ERP record to one database record, end of story! To do otherwise would be absolutely ridiculous! You should think for yourself before you ask silly questions.
Dev: My apologies I just want to make sure to clarify exactly what the requirements are.
**6 months later**
Client: HOW COME I CAN’T ASSIGN THE SAME UNIQUE IDENTIFIER TO MULTIPLE DATABASE RECORDS??? CAN’T PROGRAMMERS GET ANYTHING RIGHT EVER??
Dev: …14 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.4 -
1. Do you know why my computer is so slow?
2. What cellphone do you recommend me to buy? (They always end up buying the cheapest)
3. What do you do at work? (Answer: "I create applications". Anything more complex than that is not going to be understood or they will loose interest)
4. Something is wrong with the: [TV, Cellphone, microwave, etc.]. Could you please take a look? (Believe or not, if something works with electricoty, my family thinks I can fix it).
5. Is it true that if I send this WhatsApp message to all my contacts I will have more options?
6. I need to build an application that (pretty much The Matrix), how much time do you need and how much would cost? Don't you dare to give me wrong numbers. (We have to see the future)
7. (Continuing the previous point, a non-technical client) I don't think that would take so much time/money. (Every time)
8. I want to use the latest Front-End frameworks. I want to see all those beautiful animations in my page and that it runs smoothly... I also need that it runs in IE 5.
9. So, you have been working in the back end? If you don't have a screen to show to the client is like you didn't do anything in this sprint.
10. Why haven't you built and million dollar application? Everybody is doing that right now....
Yep, those are only a few downsides of our profession if we count family, friends and even co-workers. But I can't imagine myself doing anything else.6 -
It's funny to see how a coworker of mine and me are very similar minded on some privacy stuff. He's a very cool/open guy and just a regular consumer (used the default services etc) but he shares quite some of my views. This is a convo we had today:
*got to the WhatsApp subject somehow*
Him: oh right, you didn't use that haha
Me: yeah 😅
Him: why was that again, privacy reasons or something, right? xD
Me: uhm yes *help*
Him: Well fair enough.
Me: so you'd think I'm right? I mean it uses end to end crypto... (I'm entirely with him in the next few lines but I always approach it carefully)
Him: they veeeery probably have some kinda fucking masterkey.
Me: why'd you think that?
Him: it has over a billion users, the owner is facebook, fb is directly integrated with several mass surveillance programs, they are known to work closely with one particular one, the intelligence interests are way too high for letting such an opportunity pass and after all, THE FUCKER IS CLOSED SOURCE AKA NO ONE CAN FUCKING VERIFY THE CRYPTO NOR THE APP ITSELF.
Me: I agree haha 😅
Him: it's not rocket science, it's modern day mass tracking/surveillance logic :)
I like that guy.5 -
Backend internship interview
They: Can you reverse the given string without using pointers? (C++)
Me: Yeah, sure
*Then I start explaining how I am gonna approach the problem and such*
They: Ok, we understand that you can do it, now can you write a front-end that has a couple of routes. Also, these routes should have some sort of list views because we want you to print information **attention** that you are going to parse from Amazon inside those list views.
Me: *dumbfounded and trying to explain that am not a front-end developer*
They: But we still want you to do this.3 -
Well today I got a fantastic surprise (truthfully). We hired a dev some months ago, who was on 6 months probation and, to put it politely, he was not going to pass it.
*side note: for details of some of the above, read my last 10 or so rants. They are pretty much all him.
Anyway, management put him on an improvement plan to make sure everything was fair, it wasn't working out, but they said we had to finish it to be fair.
So we had another 2 weeks left when he announced last night he's leaving for a new junior role, technical but not a dev.
Months of stress, heartache, bewilderment, late nights and weekends all just came to an end.
The English language fails me to express my overwhelming joy at this moment. The only way I can come close to it is to say that when he made his announcement, a colleague told me I should stop smiling as it could be taken as being rude.
I'd like to take this moment to thank the community for supporting me over the past few difficult months. Without you I probably would have tried to kill him with my dev rant stressball.
Thanks,
practiseSafeHex8 -
The amount of people who don't know the difference between kilobyte and kibibyte is too damn high. So much confusion.
TL;DR : Most people use Kilobyte ( KB ) and Kibibyte ( KiB ) wrong and i am angry about it.
When i first got involved with software as a teenager, i always wondered why we convert kilo to mega with multiplying by 1024, when we do it with multiplying by 1000 basically everywhere else. Our physics teacher called this SI unit system and told us that this is an internationally accepted statement. So why is there a different rule ? Did i miss out something ? Regrettably I didn't ask her about this.
I just didn't get fully as a teenager. Now, as I am a developer now, i understand that dealing with power or ten is troublesome. Due to ease of work, we lazily mess with SI system and use it wrongly. Isn't it the time we end this abomination ?
2 years ago i talked to a friend about this, he said that i shouldn't bother.
I talked to a teacher, he said "you are right but using different brand of unit system can be overkill, since there is not much difference anyways." I said okay and left.
1 mega = 1000 kilo
1 giga = 1000 mega etc
also,
MB = Megabyte ( 1000 Kilobyte )
KB = Kilobyte ( 1000 Byte )
MiB = Mebibyte ( 1024 Kibibyte )
KiB = Kibibyte ( 1024 Byte )
I am writing this because today i saw someone do it wrong on the internet, all of these came into mind. I wonder your approach about this, for research purposes.
Call me dick all you want, but i am the guy who always corrects uncertainty, no matter what. Things should be in place, correctly. No i don't have OCD. If you say something like "I have 1 MB of executable file, which means i have 1024 KB of it", i will find you, and i will correct you.37 -
I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.
Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"
2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.15 -
Another episode in the search of a job and it involves recruiters again
Last week tuesday:
> d69: 'Hi this is derpina69 from someFancyShmancyCompany, we got a position for you that might be interesting for you, here is the job description, would you be willing to meet us?'
> Me: 'Well it seems interesting enough, how about we set up a videocall meeting since this is a informative meeting, once ypur end customer is interested in my profile, i am willing to come over'
> d69: 'sure, i'll get back to you to alert attendees for this meeting, i'll get right on it'
Days go by without any word nor even an ical...
Two days ago:
> me: ' hello, pinging you again for a sitrep on the meeting, would like to hear from you and your attendees, wkr: neatnerdprime'
Nothing, until today.
> d69: 'hi sorry for the late reply, we really would like you to come ovzr because we don't like videocalls, are you available on these dates?'
MOTHERFUCKING SHITFACED CALF, YOU REALLY NEEDED TO HAVE MORE THEN A WEEK TO FIGURE THAT OUT, GODDAMN EVEN A TODDLER CAN BE QUICKER IN A RESPONSE ON WHAT HE OR SHE WOULD LIKE!
> me: ' sure, lets pick this date, hope you hace coffee ready'
> d69: 'we don't serve coffee for first meetings'
Mfw.webm
What the actual fuck!?!?
You're going to be classified down to my shit tier opportunities, and you better buy some goddamn coffee. All-dieties-be-damned!15 -
this.rant == "long";
This is something I feel strongly about, I hope you do too...
I fucking hate it when I hear that people don't care about net neutrality (and I've heard people say it). There is little in this world untouched by shitty corporations encroaching on the little good that is left in this world.
Yes the internet is full of edgy teenagers, incompetent Seniors (both old people and Devs) and god knows what else. But you know what? I pay my money to copy and paste code from SO (we ALL do let's not lie to ourselves) and I'm not paying a special fee to look at this content or that or send this type of text to that kind of person.
Now then to the point... On 14th December 2017 the FCC will vote on whether or not to allow companies like Verizon and - dare I say it - Comcast to charge more to access certain sites or block you access altogether and otherwise control what you say and do.
I for one, say FUCK OFF and I hope you do to. If you can, call or otherwise contact your Congressperson - you can do that here: https://house.gov/representatives/... . If you're not from the US, you can still help! https://www.battleforthenet.com has lots of information on what you can do to help.
I hope you'll all join me in shouting as loud as we can and preventing this moronic idea from going through.
Peace.
this.rant.end();
10 -
Today was hell on earth as for user support. Phone going non stop, tickets coming in faster than we were able to process.
At the end of the day I had to make a symlink for a customer which is fine. But, the day was so busy that I just couldn't focus anymore.
I've made 1K+ symlinks in my life probably but I couldn't remember if the source or destination comes first with a symlink.... The day has been hell and I just couldn't bring up a single second of focus anymore..
Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I know I can do this but I don't trust myself with this right now in case of a huge webshop (swap the source/destination: webshop gone).
I think I'll thank myself for this tomorrow.13 -
We hired a developer and he has very minimal experience. I feel most of our conversations end up going something like this.
New Guy: I'm not sure how to do this obvious task and I'm incapable of searching Google.
Me: Give me your hand so I can hold it and walk you through the process of copying and pasting code from stack overflow.
New Guy: Ok...give you my hand...right...how do I do that?
FML7 -
Following a conversation with a fellow devRanter this came to my mind ago, happened a year or two ago I think.
Was searching for an online note taking app which also provided open source end to end encryption.
After searching for a while I found something that looked alright (do not remember the URL/site too badly). They used pretty good open source JS crypto libraries so it seemed very good!
Then I noticed that the site itself did NOT ran SSL (putting the https:// in front of the site name resulted in site not found or something similar).
Went to the Q/A section because that's really weird.
Saw the answer to that question:
"Since the notes are end to end encrypted client side anyways, we don't see the point in adding SSL. It's secure enough this way".
😵
I emailed them right away explaing that any party inbetween their server(s) and the browser could do anything with the request (includingt the cryptographic JS code) so they should start going onto SSL very very fast.
Too badly I never received a reply.
People, if you ever work with client side crypto, ALWAYS use SSL. Also with valid certs!
The NSA for example has this thing known as the 'Quantum Insert' attack which they can deploy worldwide which basically is an attack where they detect requests being made to servers and reply quickly with their own version of that code which is very probably backdoored.
This attack cannot be performed if you use SSL! (of course only if they don't have your private keys but lets assume that for now)
Luckily Fox-IT (formerly Dutch cyber security company) wrote a Snort (Intrustion Detection System) module for detecting this attack.
Anyways, Always use SSL if you do anything at all with crypto/sensitive data! Actually, always use it but at the very LEAST really do it when you process the mentioned above!31 -
!Story
The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.
I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.
They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...
And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.
So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.
I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.
After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.
I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.
So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.
Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.
So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.
I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.
Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.
We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.
"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"
I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.
My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.
If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.
Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.
9 -
this is the state of hiring tests:
1. can you take an english sentence, and without a tutorial, write a for loop?
2. okay now write a full parser. but not in the language we want to hire you in.
also we can afford to pay you in bananas, experience, and exposure.
p.s. we also need you to do this backend test because this is a backend job even though the ad is for front end and you specified an hour ago when the interview started that you only trained for front.
on the positive side, we have a ping pong table and a bean bag chair. and a two hour commute. Think of the benefits!16 -
This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...
Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]
Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.
[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]
Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.
May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.
[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]
Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.
[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]
Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.
Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.
On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.6 -
"doEs AnYOnE HAVE IssUeS wiTh gETTing gIrl beCoz CodIng"
lmao what a fucking dweeb. What a loser really. How about we don't make a fucking job something akin to a personality trait?
were I single, would I sell myself as a "cODER" to a girl? fuck no, do some of you nerds really introduce yourself in such way? is this bs ass job your end all be all? aye, this be the easiest way to poise yourself in the complete opposite direction of the female sexual organ.
Fucking quit that shit, ain't no one really gasping for air because you can lay down some fucking js in a website, who gives a fuck? like really? these posts are so fucking annoying.
Grow a pair, and some personality.
Background: some dweeb complaining to me about finding it hard to get girls because of his "passion" station women would lose interest because all he would talk about is dev shit46 -
tldr:
everyone got the same hardware because senior dev liked it
So my project team was allowed to buy some hardware (monitors/keyboards/mouses etc.) so teamleader asked what we want.
senior dev: i need 1 monitor because i like to work with 1 monitor. i prefer this 27' zoll 4k monitor for around 1k dollars. since i work with multiple pc's i like this bluetooth keyboard and mouse because u can pair them with them and switch witch a click between the pc's costs around 300 dollar (1 setup of this costs 1'300 dollars)
me: so i like to use 2 monitors because i tried out multiple setups and this works for me the best (also what i have at home). but they dont need to be fancy. 2x 24' zoll montitors for each 200 dollar are enaugh (together 400 doller)
i also only work with 1 laptop and would like to have just a simple keyboard and mouse with cable because everytime they dont respons or battry runs out im fk triggered. so for me its okey if its this 30 dollar keyboard and 20 dollar mouse. it would be cool if i could get this mechanical keyboard for 80 dollars but not really needed. i only prefer mechanical keyboards a little bit more. and also i would like this mousepad i really like. it makes the mouse super responsive it's also just 10 dollars (this setup cost 510)
so at the end the teamleader was like. ah u know what senior dev has more xp and knows whats better for coding so we only buy this for every dev. but that 10 dollar mouse pad is okey u can get this extra its not that expensive.
WTF why u dont give me the cheaper setup which i more like. and why u even ask.4 -
Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------
Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."
Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."
Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "
-__-""""4 -
TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!
As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.
Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.
I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."
Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!7 -
I informed the CTO that one of the beta features from our Cloud Provider (that we used for free) was released to the public and now we're supposed to pay US$ 0.65 for each 1 million requests.
In our case, this means we would pay ~US$ 6.50 to support a businesses that receives literally millions in Advertising each month.
Then I was hit with "How can we reduce that cost? It's out of our budget!"
Oh, looks like we have a really small budget, so... Let me help them by announcing that I'll leave by the end of the week because I'm moving to another country \o/6 -
A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.
A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.
So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉2 -
So I'm going to get married next june. I made an app for the guests where they have all information available, can send music wishes and can share images of the wedding with other guests.
Here is my story on publishing it in the App Store:
Me: "Hey Apple, I made a small app for my wedding. Mind putting it in your store?"
Apple: "Yeah, whatever" *publishes it*
One month later:
Me: "I made really small changes, please take this update."
Apple: "Ha no, its not interessting for enough people." *rejects it*
I panic, because the app is mentiont in the invites to the wedding which are already printed.
So one day later:
Me: "Ok ok, I added a button in the intro where people can send me a mail if they are interested in using the same app for their wedding."
Apple: "That changes everything! We will accept the update."
I'm happy, that they accepted it in the end, but really?!? There are so many shit apps in the store, why do you reject any not-fart app, because it is not interesting enough??? And why the fuck do you accept it in the first place?15 -
So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.
The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.
In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.
40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...
Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow
Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow
Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to
Manager: uhm ok ... I see...
I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.
There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).
I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.
I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....
And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?12 -
From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)
Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"
Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"
Him: "But given the choice?"
Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."
Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."
Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!4 -
From a design meeting yesterday:
MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."
I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.1 -
I had this meeting with this new client and where talking about the possibility to exchange data.
And he told how his company now has everything in the cloud and if we also have it in the cloud it should already be connected since it's both in the cloud.
I tried to explain that because its both in the cloud that does not mean it's connected to each other. We still need to develop a way to exchange data.
On wich I got the answer that our data probably is not in the real cloud.
In the end I just said that we can probably exchange data but it the easiest way to accomplish this is talking to someone who maintain the data in your cloud. And we could adapt our system to theirs.
Sometimes it's hard to communicate with less tech savvy people about tech stuff. Explaining things in a way they understand but also is technical correct.7 -
Near the end of a massive (1,000 user bridgeline) conference call today:
[ P = presenter, RCn = random caller n ]
P: ...so, does anyone have any other questions they'd like to---
RC1: Hey! Yeah, I'm still on this STUPID call right now... I dunno, we've been in here for like 30 minutes already - The guy came by the house to talk about it, but I couldn't get off this STUPID call - I think they said it would be around 800 dollars...
[ P, RC1, RC2, RC3, RC4 all overlapping ]
P: Um, we can hear you-
RC2: Dude, mute your phone!
RC3: As the presenter, you can mute that guy from the web UI-
P: Yeah, I can't find him in the attendee list; it's so long-
RC3: -Right-click on his name and select "mute line"-
P: I know how, but I can't find him on the list.
RC3: Find him on the attendance list on the right side-
P: [ louder and louder ] Yes, I know - but I can't find him in the list-
RC4: Should someone call an operator?
RC1: -so I figured we'll probably need to call Jerry and see what he says. I'll call him if I can ever get off this ridiculous, STUPID call - They are all talking at once on there now and no one can understand anything!
[ This went on for about 5 solid minutes, finally ending with... ]
RC1: I'm just going to drop this STUPID call and call Jerry for us. This thing was a total waste of time. [ boop-beep ]
[ long pause ]
P: OK, so now that is over, does anyone have any questions they'd like to discuss?
[ At least 10 people un-mute and overlap questions ]
#ConferenceCallProblems
Above everything else, the funniest part to me was his repeated, over-the-top insistence on how "STUPID" the call was.
#TellUsHowYouReallyFeel1 -
Interviewer: "Ok we are searching for a fucking god of the code, if you have a week for work on a new project you must end within 3 days and work on other stuff! And for contract maybe a stage can be a good solution, we can't pay very much, but you must work like a machine and you'll love it cause here we have lots of project!"
Me: "I'm not interested."
Interviewer: "W..what?? Why?? Is there something wrong??"
Everytime a cunt like this ask to a developer to work for him, somewhere in the world a browser crashes6 -
Back in college.
We had this course in which we gathered in teams and worked the whole semester for another teacher building a product. We had roles, like QA, devs, PM...all the works.
I was PM and during our first presentation of the product to our teacher and the client we showed the work of our first month of work. At the end, our teacher asked our QA, who have been silent the whole project and hadn't answered my mails asking for tests, if he had found any problems. "Oh, yes. The whole site is broken. I can easily break throught it"
The faces of the rest of the group showed a level of surprise that made the teacher ask if he had informed us: "No..."
Our client, another SE teacher, started to laugh and that was that.
It was awful3 -
Before starting a job at company CUNT, we had an interview at which I told them I do not want to work on legacy monolithic codebases. We had a nice agreement and they offered me to work as a back-end with one of their projects. I was super excited to start. CUNT was very culty, always talks about how carrying for employees they are and always keep promises on their end of the table.
A week has passed, the codebase is superb legacy shit hole, no fucking standards, monolithic as fuck (BE and FE projects live in one project folder with tons of depreciated tools - there are no docs for them. That’s how old they are). They even have secret folder in their project with YOU GUESSED IT - secret keys.
Told CTO today, that I want to switch projects, because this was not the thing I signed up for and remember THEY ALWAYS CARE ABOUT THEIR EMPLOYEES AND PROMISES MADE. He basically told me, that project owners (other company) will not understand this culturally and I can either wait it out and possibly get my hands on a better project or fuck off right now.
Also, I was told, that my judgment was garbage worth and I should work longer with project “shit hole” to fully understand it.
Such a fucking salesman.
Anyways, I told that this situation is not culturally appropriate for me either as they gave me a sort of promise and I wont leave the company as I just switched jobs and cannot afford to do that again. I’ll hopefully get another position in another project soon.
WTF IS WORNG WITH PEOPLE8 -
Why do so many people waste their time and their computers turning coal into heat? It really pisses me off.
Often I meet smart guys who are fairly decent coders and after what starts as an interesting conversation is instantly destroyed by cryptocurrency.
It is *exactly* like enjoying a discussion of the intriguing nuances of quantum chemistry only to have the guy say, "thats all cool, but how do you make meth?"
argh.
You want to use your decked out rig to make money? Fine. But please help us solve important problems instead of literally wasting electricity. Just google search "supercomputer physics" and you will find a thousand current problems requiring extremely fast computers for number crunching. All of them can make you more money than crypto and all of them help society at the same time.
We burn coal to make most of the electricity on this planet. Most coal stations burn around 20,000 tons of coal per day. The world burns about 250 tons of coal every *second*. This is converted into carbon dioxide. (coal = carbon, add two oxygens when you burn it, producing three times as much mass in CO2, which then goes out the smoke stack)
The big picture is this: currently we are forced to burn coal to make the world work. Turning off the boilers would result in an almost instant apocalyptic collapse of society. BUT, we don't need to burn it merely to produce waste heat in your video card array.
Please use your superpowers for good.
<end rant>16 -
God damn fucking Windows bullshit.
Why is the fuck does Microsoft HATE its users?
Latest updates, and no fuck Windows 11, completely BREAKS all of my WSL environments.
Home directories are gone, or the environments are corrupt and won't even run.
99% of the issues these dense shit-fucks cause are because they RaNdOmLy reboot for their dumbass updates instead of scheduling them with the end user. During these rebots, do you thing they wait for everything to shut down?
HELL NO!
They just shut that shit down like they fucking own it. Editors? Gone. Browsers? Gone. WSL Consoles? Gone. Docker containers? Gone. IEdge? Hey, we have great news, we made IE your default browser again! BTW, your upgrade to Windows 11 is free until we force you to upgrade!
I'm so fed up with it.....so fucking tired of it...
The only reason why I even use WSL these days is to ssh into my Linux devices or run some quick dev tests in containers. Why not use PuTTY for SSH? Because it fucking SUCKS that's why.
I'm feeling so many emotions right now over bullshit that shouldn't even be happening. I'm literally at the point that I'm just going to install Linux on this device and just create a Windows VM on one of my hosts so I can still do "work" things that involve leadership.19 -
Looks like I'm destined to be fucked in the ass every time I'm on vacation...
This boss : https://devrant.com/rants/1330624/...
Told me he is gonna implement the new backend of a web app we have while I'm on vacation...
He was trying stuff with python for it and I tried to explain him the benefits of polymorphism and the ideas behind it and he was looking clueless, as always...
I'm screwed... Last time I went on vacation they started using react ( no complains ) and firebase ( fuck this shit ) ...
Now we are moving this web app away from firebase but I can see it is gonna be shit and a lot of rants will follow from his "back end" that this motherfucker here is gonna have to help implement after 2 weeks of fucked up code...5 -
We were already working overtime all Saturday. Boss came in the evening to demand some ridiculous shit. Me and senior dev agree it's ridiculous. It's already 1 am Sunday. I already explained to him why it doesn't make sense so he suggest more changes that doesn't even solve his initial problem. He asks me if I can do it by Monday morning. I can't. He suggested way too many breaking changes that I don't even agree with and I have to sleep like a normal human being.
I shit you not, he says he will do it himself. This guy barely even codes and has never seen a single line of code for this project. I didn't stop him. I went home and slept.
End of rant.8 -
I think the hardest thing about being a programmer in college with a security emphasis is when I approach a business for a penetration test or for a vulnerability analysis (your pick) is that they almost always say, "you are pretty young don't you think?"
Ummmm not sure what that has to do with it. If it would make you feel better I have claimed bug bounties from an antivirus company, a bank, several local businesses in my area and I do this for work at my 9-5.
And this week I got this, "I think I would like someone older so we can define the goals better."
Oh so rules of engagement, yeah of course I understand that and that's something we would discuss and draw up a contract for...
"Well we really need someone more skilled."
---- End of story ----
I don't understand, you haven't asked about certifications or schooling and you glanced at my resume for exactly 5 seconds what the hell do you want? Me to double my age over night?7 -
This isn't really a Dev related rant, more of a life rant. Things have been going pretty badly for me lately, so I apologize if this comes across as complaining or whining.
This morning, I got in a car accident that totaled my car. It was a 1996 Chevy Camaro that I had been fixing up and restoring over the last few years and I had it running pretty well. The accident was my fault and I told the police as much, because I value honesty over screwing over others for my own benefit. Money has been very tight lately because my wife was out of work for the last bit of her pregnancy, so we ended up having to move to a 1 bedroom apartment that I could afford rent on my own. She also has a son who is now 13, so space is pretty tight. Money got even tighter once we had the baby. She's 10 weeks old now.
I've barely made the $1500/month rent on my own here, usually paying 1-2 days late because we're living paycheck to paycheck. Our lease is up at the end of July and they won't let us renew because of this.
The bad part is that I was driving a car that had expired registration because I couldn't fix it to pass the state smog test and my license expired two weeks ago. I haven't been able to afford insurance, so every time I drove, it was a gamble.
I'm now going to have to pay these damages out of pocket for the other car.
We're now having to move into my mother in law's house for about 4 months so we can get out of this financial hole we've gotten into.
I feel like I've failed as a father and a husband.10 -
User: The app is crashing! Fix this immediately. We can’t do our jobs without it!!
Dev: Patch applied, can you confirm it is now working on your end?
User: EXCUSE ME?! THAT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY! WE ARE WAY TOO BUSY, ASK SOME OTHER DEPARTMENT TO DO THAT OR DO IT YOURSELF!
Dev: …7 -
So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.
Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.
I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.
11 -
Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.
My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.5 -
Being a Woman in Tech® is exhausting because every time we know something a male superior doesn’t, we have to end our statements with “but maybe I’m wrong, what do you think?” so they feel like it’s their idea and take the topic seriously.
I used to be adamantly against this type of coddling but they beat it out of me. You can only be straightforward and confident a finite number of times before you’re pulled aside and told you’re “cocky,” “arrogant,” “irritating,” etc. So many of us use this strategy to avoid those labels, but it’s a tiring part of the job we shouldn’t have to think about.24 -
"Don't worry about pagination, we can just send the whole database to the front-end" ~ My Boss, being serious AF.
Worst of all, he has worked in system development for 20 years, he is not meant to be this stupid.6 -
I messed up. We have a senior executive that loves this phrase... "It's going to require all of us to make some sacrifices". 100% of the time he's talking about working 10, 12, or 14 hour days.
So after a few months of this I just chimed in with "this isn't church I don't give sacrifices to my employer. I get PAID for my work."
Honestly I can't say it slipped. I've been telling my wife the exact same phrase for a couple months now. Initially I wanted to discuss it with him directly. Maybe I could explain how making everyone work 14 hour days is not going to end well for us, short or long term. We already know the results short term. We got 50+ defects reported back in our first day of testing for a new project (I'm not on the project but we had a sort of "all hands on deck" meeting to talk about how we can "improve our process so that we don't make so many mistakes". I politely suggested move some people onto this project while we interview candidates. I volunteered to take some of the work items even. But that advice went ignored.
So that's why I asked to meet with the senior exec. He refused to even meet with me. Okay fine you're busy. I emailed him my concerns and suggested solutions. Never heard back. I knew he was going to pipe up with the sacrifice thing so I just blurted it out. It went ignored... So I guess we'll see if I have a job tomorrow or not.15 -
Can someone please explain to me WHY THE FUCK non devs feel like they know shit. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT HOW YOU FOUND SOME UNTRUE SHIT ON GIZMODO. I'VE KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT THIS SHIT, AND YOU LOOKED UP THE FIRST EXAMPLE YOU COULD FIND THE SUPPORTS YOUR CASE. The most recent time this happened was OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS when this DUMBASS that my friends and I BULLY but HE STILL HANGS AROUND. (By bully, yes sometimes we are mean to him, but we're not out to get him. He comes to us and we don't wanna be with him). So after the SEVENTH groupchat (on two apps) he created that night, HE WANTED TO SWITCH BACK TO ANOTHER APP I SPENT A WEEK TRYING TO GET THEM TO SWITCH FROM PREVIOUSLY (It was whatsapp, i got them to switch to telegram). THEN HE TRIED to ARGUE with me about how TELEGRAM wasnt secure. HE SEARCHED "is telegram secure" on Google and chose the FIRST ARTICE from the previously mentioned, GIZMODO which says that TELEGRAM chats ARENT ENCRYPTED by DEFAULT. HOW THE FUCK DO DUMBASSES GET THIS KIND OF PUBLICITY. There's a difference between ENCRYPTION and END TO END DUMBASS. Then he told me whatsapp is more secure than telegram. NO ITS FUCKING NOT. In telegram, your encryption keys CHANGE every chat, or every 100 messages. To my best research, whatsapp only has ONE key per USER. I could go on forever about how chat backups in whatsapp are UNENCRYPTED or how FACEBOOK stores your data, but blocked you works to.6
-
The lead dev left the company two weeks ago. His last hurrah involved committing a bunch of complicated code into our API. The code he writes is generally overly coupled but this particular code is INSANE.
It is so coupled that the tests for it almost mock the entire application end to end. I only found this heap of garbage when the deployment tests were hung after I made a simple change in a totally unrelated file. THEY DIDNT FAIL. JEST GOT INTO A STATE WHERE IT CANT CONCLUDE AND HAS NO ERROR MESSAGES. We are taking about entirely different parts of the code. As far apart in the code as it can get. It took six hours of playing Sherlock Holmes to figure out what was breaking.
He got the most junior developer to approve the garbage PR as well.26 -
Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.
Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!15 -
I am so sick of the stupidity and illogical reasoning of clients.
Client: Descriptions are no longer syncing. Can you please fix.
Me: Problem fixed and deployed.
Client: All the descriptions got overwritten by the sync descriptions. Can you please have manual uploads overwrite the descriptions that sync (but basically auto guess what the client wants). We may need a toggle.
Me: Toggle added.
Client: Can you go through the 100+ sites backups and restore all the product descriptions?
It's like are you serious right now!!??
Back to the cheeseburger concept here...
Client: Can I have a cheeseburger (comes with pickles, onions, tomatoes, lettuce), no pickles. A Coke? Oh, but I would like pickles on my cheeseburger.
Tender: Here is your order.
Client: Why did you put pickles on this!!?? I asked for NO pickles!
Tender: You added pickles towards the end, so we put the pickles in.
Client: No! I thought you would have known based off of my original statement that I asked for a cheeseburger with no pickles. That is the override!
Narrator: See how illogical things can get. We can't just assume/guess based off of illogical reasoning.3 -
Once I strongly hissed at my boss from that time in a "stop now or I start yelling" voice.
We had an emergency and I was already working late to fix it. 8pm, only the both of us were still in the office. I was in the zone, still searching for the source of the problem and he kept coming in every 2-5 minutes offering his help, ripping every shred of concentration right off my skull, but he had absolutely no relevant technical skills, experience or information. There was nothing he could do.
In the end I hissed at him "Get your fucking ass out of here and let me do my job. This piece of shit kills my day and there is nothing you can do besides to say 'go home'."
Then he finally let me do my job. -
Client support ticket: we printed the ID cards without leading 0’s can you fix it with software?
Me: unfortunately we cannot because the ID number can be any length. ID 123, 0123 and 00123 can exist. What barcode would 123 go to?
Client: this is ridiculous we will cancel our contract.
Me: i’m sorry we can’t correct for a mistake on your end.
(Side note: I know allowing 0123 and 00123 is dumb but my team didn’t design the business logic)7 -
While I am self employed, my clients can end up like my boss. In this case, one of my clients is the best "boss" I have ever had. We discuss everything from ethics to npm to development to board games. And we still get the job done.
He challenges me constantly to improve, and then we laugh over how we disagree with concepts, frameworks, etc. And we still get the job done.
It's fantastic to have a client who understands that you should be paid for your time, that lets you get what they hired you to do done without micro managing you (you trust me to actually do what you hired me to do? *gasp, shock*), and still enjoys the small talk. Though some of our ethics and society discussions can be rather large discussions.3 -
I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.
Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.
There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.
It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.
Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.
One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.
I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.
I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.
But some people just really are polished turds.4 -
Coolest thing I’ve built solo?
Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.
So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.
An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.
This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.
So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”
This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.
This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.
The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....
Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous. -
Dear coworker,
We have a very nice SASS setup so WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU POLLUTING OUR HTML WITH INLINE STYLES!?!?!? It's not like it's even necessary to use inline in this case, I can achieve the same thing by just moving your styling to the scss files. So I ask again, WHY THE FUCK???
Sincerely,
A mildly pissed person who hates front-end dev work3 -
When defining a range, let's say from 1 to 3, I expect:
[1, 2, 3]
Yet most range functions I come across, e.g. lodash, will do:
_.range(1, 3)
=> [1, 2]
And their definition will say: "Creates an array of numbers ... progressing from start up to, but not including, end."
Yet why the fuck not including end? What don't I understand about the concept of a frigging range that you won't include the end?
The only thing I can come up with that's this is related to the array's-indexes-start with-0-thing and someone did not want to substract `-1` when preparing a for loop over an 10 items array with range(0,10), even though they do not want a range of 0 to 10, they want a range from 0 to 9. (And they should not use a for loop here to begin with but a foreach construct anyway.)
So the length of your array does not match the final index of your array.
Bohhoo.
Yet now we can have ranges with very weird steps, and now you always have to consider your proper maximum, leading to code like:
var start = 10;
var max = 50;
var step = 10;
_.range(start, max + step, step)
=> [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]
and during code review this would scream "bug!" in my face.
And it's not only lodash doing that, but also python and dart.
Except php. Php's range is inclusive. Good job php.4 -
boss: we should map all the possible ways to do things in the system so we can test them and make sure we fix the bugs.
Me: yeah, well, that is exactly what automated tests are for, every time we find a non-mapped way that breaks this we make a test out of it and fix, this ways we end up mapping the majority of ways.
Boss: yeah,yeah ... Let's sit down latter and map everything on a document.
I bet my ass we are never gonna have tests as a part of our workflow.3 -
<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”
It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.
Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.3 -
Context: we analyzed data from the past 10 years.
So the fuckface who calls himself head of research tried to put blame on me again, what a surprise. He asked for a tool what basically adds a lot of numbers together with some tweakable stuff, doesnt really matter. Now of course all the datanwas available already so i just grabbed it off of our api, and did the math thing. Then this turdnugget spends 4 literal weeks, tryna feed a local csv file into the program, because he 'wanted to change some values'. One, this isnt what we agreed on, he wanted the data from the original. When i told him this, he denied it so i had to dig out a year old email. Two, he never explicitly specified anything so i didnt use a local file because why the fuck would i do that. Three, i clearly told him that it pulls data from the server. Four, what the fuck does he wanna change past values for, getting ready for time travel? Five, he ranted for like 3 pages, when a change can be done by currentVal - changedVal + newVal, even a fucking 10 year old could figure that out. Also, when i allowed changes in a temporary api, he bitched about how the additional info, what was calculated from yet another original dataset, doesnt get updated, when he fucking just randimly changes values in the end set. Pinnacle of professionalism.2 -
Tl;DR; version:
French designer, Mexican PSD -> HTML converter, Indian VueJS developer, Spanish project manager and a Taiwanese back-end developer. Application was made like an tower of pizza from bullcrap held by boogers and constantly licked by an orangutang to keep it standing.
Longer version:
We had to take a "half-finished" project from one of our clients, received the code for full-stack project. The css/design was so unbearable that it mostly broke on anything that had higher than 720px wide screen, structure was full of tables/divs and no fucking flexbox/grid... Then the fun part - we saw it's conversion to vueJS - a single fucken App.vue file that had shitton of conditions for pages.... yea, not even multi-component/routed app, just conditions!!!! And then... A back-end (in which I mainly specify myself) - it was made by a developer that had to mainly use Java/C# as their daily driver while all being build on php and Laravel. 0 Fucken laravel functions used, 0 of models, logic and so on.... Most of the page was running on RAW sql queries. Names... Oh my god the function names....
`getTheUsersThatHasAtLeastOneSpaceAssignedToThemByGivenCompanyId(int $id)`
And it held an RAW sql that was coming from a model....
All of this was managed by a random spanish manager who couldn't really understand what our client needed and what he actually wanted so from 100% of the site, only 20% was correct in logic....
And yet, according to the whole "package" (team) - they did everything correctly, saw no issues and our client was ungrateful fucker that refused to pay 10x the amount that we asked in order to completely re-do the application....
Morale: Remote teams are great... As long as all of them can work remote in TEAM.5 -
Let me tell you the story of how a feature request no one asked for got put in an early grave:
PM walks into weekly meeting with a single use case that one user called in about, despite never having this issue during the past year and a half that our app has been in production. PM's boss (genuinely one of the best people i have ever worked with) happens to sit in this particular meeting for no reason other than he felt like he should once in a while.
PM brings up use case and wants to devote 3 weeks' development time and another 3 weeks to test RIGHT NOW while other projects are already in motion. PM's boss speaks up with this: "Listen if this guy is really this upset, we can just tell him to build his own service. All the other end users have no problems with this, so it's not worth spending the resources on, i don't think."
And that is how i went from "this is bullshit" to "i love you" in the span of 20 minutes.2 -
When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.
Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.
4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...
Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!
With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.
In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.
We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.
In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.3 -
My dream project. Although we have tools like facebook, twitter, whatsapp, you name it, and although whatsapp is 'officially' (between quotes because I won't believe that until proven by source code or something) end-to-end encrypted, I would like to create an open source platform which basically everyone can use which features all usual tools like email, calendar, voice/video calls etc while being entirely decentralized/end-to-end encrypted.
I'd like to create this because of my own daily struggle of refusing to use closed/non-encrypted tools for communication while a lot of people don't care about privacy and don't want to use tools like Signal, Tox and so on.
It's me not about making money, it's about providing a safe place where people can do their things without the possibility of being spied on without reason.16 -
So when I was working for a web dev shop, one of the clients asked us to have a drop down of all the different combinations you can have for street types to appear on the address form of their shopping cart. So stuff like "Street", "St", "Drive", "Dr", "Lane", "Ln" etc. We told the client that it wasn't possible since the possible combinations and how some street don't all end with a type.
But the client was adamant about having this so we ended up building a section in the administration section to allow the client to add any new street type to a database table that will populate the dropdown.1 -
Conversing with developers can be frustrating.
Here is a good one from today. 2 people 1 women (let’s call her W) and one man (let’s call him M)
W: “Hey guys! Our team is looking for lots of great developers. Front end, back end, data, dev ops. At above market salaries with a great team! Reach out to me is you want to chat. I would love to hear from you.”
Translation: I have a great offer and want to help others achieve and strive in their careers.
M: “also, guys/less-gendered-alternative plz” proceeds to chastise this women about using the word guys.
Translation: I have no level of social awareness, but I have a need to feel big and important. So I’ll take offence for those who aren’t offended to make me feel better about my lack of fucking personality.
————
I’m not really concerned about opinions about the gender issue. It isn’t about that.
It’s just tiring dealing with these people’s bullshit.
It’s time to grow up folks, stop arguing on the fucking internet.
————
I also once saw a developer chastise 2 women we worked with while we were out for drinks for the exact same thing; using the word guys.
He was so busy “defending” them from themselves that he ended up making them uncomfortable and then they left.
He was saying “don’t exclude women” while fucking excluding the only women there.
What a fucking douche.
4 -
!Rant
Lessons from this picture:
1. Not all opportunities are to be taken. Some are traps.
2. A person can become so determined to destroy another person that they become blind and end up destroying themselves.
3. You fight best in your natural element and environment. Here the bird has advatange in his natural element.
4. Know your limits, we all have them.
5. Sometimes the best response to provocation is not to fight.
6. Sometimes to accomplish something you need team work, you will not always win alone.
7. Stick to what you do best and don't pursue what will kill you.
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
2 -
The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....
After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.
They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?
They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???
I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.
At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.
I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.2 -
First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.
My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.
I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.
That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.
I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."
If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.
Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.15 -
*looks for some reviews of a dentist*
Yelp: ah yes we have that.
*Enters Yelp site*
"Oh noes, you have JavaScript disabled! You should enable it because it can make websites really cool (why does this seem like a front-end wank), gives you compliments when you had a bad day (fuck you Yelp), can save the world from tragedy on its own (does savetheworld.js exist yet?). But that you'll never realize anymore. Because YOU disabled JavaScript, filthy piece of shit you are. So enable JavaScript so that we can have so much more fun!"
Ah, not providing any content that I visited your shitty site for, guilt-tripping me into enabling JavaScript for your dribble, and on top of that saying that we'll have fun when I whitelist you. Fun ey.. you know what'd be fun Yelp? For me to go there and shove my dick into every one of your front-end and marketing cunts' faces until they turn blue. Now THAT would be a lot of fun!!!2 -
I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.
Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.
So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.
How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.
Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.5 -
Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.1 -
So I finished my first semester in NYU as a CD master. During the first semester I took a class called heuristic problem solving. Every week a competitive game will be introduced to us, and will be played in two weeks. And trust me, the games aren't easy. I teamed up with another guy who I had no idea was and named our team as we don't know. At the end of the semester we won seven out of nine games, and by won I meant that we beat the whole class in the match. And my teammate became a really good friend.
By telling this story, I want to make a point. I love problem solving, and not problems in a algorithm book where you apply an algorithm and do some trick to solve it, but real world problem where you hope for the best and anticipate, predict your opponent's move. However, American's school system doesn't teach that.
When I applied to graduate school, no school wanted me because I have an average GPA of 3.6, and no outstanding achievements. I can solve problems in my dream becaus I have an active mind, I can propose solution to a project one month before my teammates realized they essentially were doing what I told them the solution should be. But so what, I can't write those on my application.
One of the professor told me that my professor shared the story of my team during a faculty dinner, and they were very impressed by our achievement. So I guess I'm not dumb. But after all, companies and schools will look at your transcript and decide who you are.
I love myself for having random thoughts all the time that can lead to innovative problem solving. But I also hate myself for not able to study like the good kids are.10 -
"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.
I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.
When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).
The answer I got was following:
Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"
Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"
Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"
Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."
Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"
Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*
What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."
WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???
But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.
And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.
Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.
And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.2 -
Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.
We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.4 -
So one year ago, when I was second year in college and first year doing coding, I took this fun math class called topics in data science, don't ask why it's a math class.
Anyway for this class we needed to do a final project. At the time I teamed up with a freshman, junior and a senior. We talked about our project ideas I was having random thoughts, one of them is to look at one of the myths of wikipedia: if you keep clicking on the first link in the main paragraph, and not the prounounciation, eventually you will get to philosophy page.
The team thought it was a good idea and s o we started working.
The process is hard since noe of us knew web scraping at the time, and the senior and the junior? They basically didn't do shit so it's me and the freshman.
At the end, we had 20000 page links and tested their path to philosophy. The attached picture is a visualization of the project, and every node is a page name and every line means the page is connected.
This is the first open project and the first python project that I have ever done. Idk if it is something good enough that I can out on my resume, but definitely proud of this.
PS: if you recognize the picture, you probably know me. If you were the senior or the junior in the team, I'm not sorry for saying you didn't do shit cuz that's the truth. If you were the freshman, I am very happy to have you as a teamate.
3 -
Maybe this ever tightening straight jacket of surveillance and restrictive legislation is pushing the internet in the right direction. We might end up with a proper free and anonymous interwebz.
Personally, I'll start worrying when they ban the operation of Tor nodes... And that will probably pass easily since regular folk don't know the implications. The smear campaign will be ez mode: just call it a hotbed of pedophilia and criminal activity and push the new laws as something along the lines of Put an End to Naughty Individuals and Scumbags (PENIS) act. Done and done.
I mean... if they can threaten to take away the memes without being stopped then there's nothing they can't do, lol.3 -
So, we have this ma'am at work that is the least direct person I know.
She can transform one sentence in a paragraph and the meetings/talks with her I usually end up in my "happy place" at the middle of her phrases and come back latter when she isn't finished and I'm like
"wtf is she talking about yet? Damn I went away again, shit... Just nod and smile..."
We had a meeting scheduled with her and some clients today... She missed it... MOST FUCKING PRODUCTIVE DAY EVER!
Thank you.7 -
My biggest regret is the same as my best decision ever made.
The company I work for specializes in performing integrations and migrations that are supposed to be near impossible.
This means a documented api is a rare sight. We are generally happy if there even IS an (internal) api. Frequently we resort to front-end scraping, custom server side extensions and reverse-engineered clients.
When you’re in the correct mindset it’s an extreme rush to fix issues that cannot be fixed and help clients who have lost most hope. However, if your personal life is rough at the moment or you are not in a perfect mental state for a while it can be a really tough job.
Been here for 3+ years and counting. Love and hate have rarely been so close to each other. -
Waking up from a dream with a girl in it.
TL;DR: We fell in love and I can finally somehow remember her. Not completely though...
(To the perverts: We did not have sex nor did we kiss.)
The worlds I am becoming a part of are very complex. I won't get into the details of how they look like. I will tell as far as I can remember.
<vaguely remember the beginning>
My sister, my mom and I went into a house which turned out to have weird things inside.
Suddenly I became something like an agent and I had a special mission. I went to the basement of this building. Saw a few guys chilling there. Grabed a walkie talkie which was taped on the right wall. I have listened to it while moving back to the entrance, when I have arrived there, it began to do disortion type of sounds.
<I have been to a lot of different places here. Telling each of them would make me to not come to an end lol>
Then I have decided to go outside. The outside-of-the-house world changed. I was at floor 8 or something like that. It was very high when I looked down. All of the sudden I got into a waterfall type of thing which was about to suck me in to a circle. The waterfall was limited to the area of where this house was. It was basically hovering above the streets, but never reaching the streets.
I somehow met the lovely girl in a cube type of thing that helped us not to fall down through the spiral. We enjoyed the action the waterfall created. It made us move in a circle and we had to hold ourselves at the wall of the cube which luckily had knobs to hold on.
After that whole action I have been in my bed and sleeping. She somehow found me on a social media platform and contacted me with "Meet me on <some strange date>".
<some unlogical world shit happens here. I will just skip them until the date>
The day to meet her comes. She is up on a hill with a "purple?<idk it was purple-ish>" sky.
<can not remember the dialogue>
We had a great time and I felt that she had feelings for me.
She then went away. What about me? And me, too. ;)
The next day I went to see her again. She was gone. I found out that she has a brother. I talked to him about where she might be. Turns out her brother was a demon or satan <idk they all became agressive and god-like powerful lol>.
He told me that she must be there where <random name of enemy> is to fight the enemy to rescue her mom.
Her brother went to help her. I followed him since I did not know where the enemy was. Let alone where I was. The world has changed for the 99999th fucking time lol.
I followed him up another hill with trees and a lot of people. It was autumn.
Then we found her sitting on a hill looking down to the sea beneath us with cherry blossom trees around her.
The dream was about to end. I felt it. So I have asked her a few questions after the happy greeting, but I can not remember them and her answer anymore. But I do remember that she did not say anything after one question. She just stared at me looking through my eyes which immediately did end the dream.
I was able to get into the dream shortly after it a few times, but I was not able to interact with them.
Besides of that: I have had "Battle Symphony-Linkin Park" playing as a background music for the whole dream a long.
The good thing is that I somehow would be able to recreate her. I know how she looks like to about 60%.
I do not even know why the fuck I am telling y'all this.3 -
Another rant about my school: the default password system.
Each student's username is FirstnameLastname, and the same applies to teachers. The passwords assigned are <First initial><Last initial> for students, and the same for teachers with "teacher" appended to the end. As students, we figured out this system pretty quickly, and we were able to log into the computer system as any teacher who we knew had requested an account. (Teacher accounts had unfiltered Internet access, student accounts did not).
I now teach in this school, where they recently got Google Classrooms accounts for each teacher during Covid. The accounts use the same naming/password scheme! I somehow doubt the teachers replace their passwords, so any student clever enough to figure out the system can log into their Google for Education account.1 -
Simple there are four other developers on my team. Yet, I do all of the work.
I'm picky about spesific tasks, so I would rather do THOSE by myself, by we have a Trello board where I've marked the tasks I want to do myself, and everything else is open for grabs.
Some tasks I will asign others (one developer specifically) and days will pass and no code gets touched. So I end up having to take it over. :|
Like, guys, I get it. You have other things to do. But could you atleast *try* and help me without me having to ask? If not, then why did you even sign up? I want to get this out the door so our project doesn't go under and we can make some money. I have other things I would like to do as well, you know. Like take a day off, or spend time with my girlfriend.9 -
So, it's time to fucking rant!
Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.
A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.
He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.
In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.
So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.
- a week later
The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/
He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"
This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."
The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.
After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.
In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.
- 2 Weeks later
This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"
This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...
1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.
So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.
- 2 weeks later
Customer leaves. Good riddance.
- sometime later
I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.
It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.
To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS
I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.2 -
CTO: We'll use epochs for any time related fields in our services.
After service integration...
Dev from producer team: Hey the time field is showing up as 1970 and not null in your table. That seems to be a bug.
Me: Code looks fine. We are converting epochs to timestamps here. Null is taken care by the library function itself.
The same dev: Actually we are sending zero instead of null values in that time field. But we'd want the end table to treat that as null.
Me: Why can't you send null then?
The dev: Actually avro doesn't support nulls. Hence the zero.
Me: WTF??????
Manager to me: Actually you need to convert them as null. Anyways, this is not a blocker and we can live with it for now.
END OF RANT
Why can't they fucking send it as null? And when I asked about the details, that particular event type doesn't require that field. Still the manager insists on sending that field for it.23 -
Not a question, but an answer to an architecture challenge. "This might sound weird, but I think I can solve this using blockchain. Do you mind if I try?".
He couldn't in the end, but managed to explain exactly why not. We made him an offer all the same. -
This was a comment I made on another ranter's post.
* Tailor your resume (and cover letter if needed) according to the job. No generic resume.
* Research about the company and make sure you have the same interests as the company. Clearly let them know why they should hire you. One question you can expect is: Why should we hire you?
* Show them that you're passionate about the job.
* Be curious. Ask questions. That's how they'll know you're interested.
* Be open to opportunities. Let's say you're applying for Full Stack developer role. Be open to take up Front End or Back End developer role. You don't have to accept everything but at least roles tangent to your job (provided they match your interest).
* Be flexible but focused.
* You don't have to know every listed requirement but make sure to know the majority.
* Don't lie. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work with dev roles.
* Be confident in telling them "you don't know" if you don't know. Also make sure to tell you're willing to learn that.4 -
Project in college, many moons ago.
Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.
3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.
The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.
The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”
Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.
## Week 1
We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.
He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...
## Week 2
We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.
After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.
Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.
Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...
“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”
And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.
## Week 3
We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.
Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.
You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.
## Night before
We say fuck it and do the thing.
In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.
In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.
## The day of
Partner 3 comes into class and says this...
“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)
Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.
“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”
He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.
We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.
Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.
He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.
The teacher ask him to stay after class.
## Result
We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).
Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.
Bonus Content:
That same asshat above once said this to me...
“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”
Yes, he wrote all code like this...
const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}
Fuck that guy🖕🏽3 -
Never buy crappy, consumer-grade SSDs for use in production servers/RAIDs. This might sound obvious but at the company I used to work for, through a series of bad decisions by management and cheapness, we ended up with the cheapest consumer SSDs you can imagine powering all of our storage.
This turned into a nightmare spanning years of failed hard drives and a continues cycle of ridiculousness. Drive failed after a few days, gets taken out, sent back to manufacturer and then replaced with another equally crappy drive destined to fail within days/weeks.
Our ops people were going to the data center multiple times per week to replace failed drives. Lesson I learned: cheaping out on system-critical hardware and software can have long standing consequences and in the end usually doesn't end up actually saving money when you account for time employees have to spend dealing with issues that result from it. -
daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦♀️ -
Fun issue
Swedish client is unable to enter a currency conversion rate in a field and submit. 'Not a float' well we can clearly see that it is a float when he does it (0.5 for example), not an issue for us though.
Reproducing was a nightmare, eventually it boiled down to the fact that the framework we were using had automatic locale checks. Now because our numeric fields are actually weird text fields (front end nonsense), it was converting the period to be a comma (Swedish people would write 0,5 normally). And if you actually entered 0,5 the range check (0.01-1000) failed because it couldn't parse the comma (no locale check on that one)
Godamn facepalm. Really confused the hell out of us when we saw the error, had to go diving through library code. To top this off, locale checks are supposed to be disabled as of about 2 years ago
In revenge against our oppressor :PHP: on slack is now an alias for the shit emoji5 -
them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...
it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.
also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.
if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..12 -
Long meeting with a coworker presenting a huge, complicated system to track changes to configuration files.
Basically, whenever someone needs to change a config file, this person is supposed to manually enter an entry to a changelog file, and the build system is supposed to give an error if the person forgets to update the changelog.
At the end of the 1 hour long presentation, I raise my hand and say: "we are already using git for our config files, look:
$ git log <filename>
here you can see the list of changes to the file. What you describe is already available, no need to reinvent it."
Long akward silence in the room.
The presenter: "okay, I will look into that. Any other questions?"
Haven't heard about that project since then.1 -
I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.
First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.
That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.
This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.
We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.
TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.9 -
Holy fucking shit... this didnt happen! IT FUCKING CAMT HAVE! NO NO NO NO! IMPOSSIBLE!
I LOST MY FUCKING BAG! RIGHT BEFORE ONE OF MY MOST IMPORTANT FUCKING TESTS! Ok, a little backstory, everyone in Switzerland or (due to alice's request) german can skip this part:
Here we have something called a "Lehre" (I think its called an apprenticeship or sth?) which usually goes 3-4 years, and in the middle, (end of 2nd) we have a "Teilprüfung" Which is basically a test which you HAVE to pass, if you dont, wait another year, and do it with the Final exams... and if you dont pass, your fucked. very very deep in the ass. And guess where I am? Yes. end of 2nd year. And guess what happened?
I LOST ALL OF MY STUFF! GONE. LOST. IM SO FUCKING SCREWED RIGHT NOW! (I have a small backup tho) BUT THIS IS JUST BAD! VERY FUCKING BAD!
OH GOD...
WHY THE FUCK ISNT THIS A DREAM!
I cant sleep...
send help.
fucking srsly.
send help.4 -
My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.
-
Management has been promising we'd leave .NET framework for 2 years now. Never fucking happens. A new ASP.NET project was just started last week and yup, OF COURSE, its .NET Framework 4.8.
I'd even be happy with one of the earlier .NET Core versions at this point for fucks sake. I have no clue why tech leads are so happy to create a brand new project on a deprecated framework version.
And yes, I have checked thoroughly. Our whole infrastructure works with .NET Core onward. People are just too lazy to learn new stuff.
Stuff like switching to .NET 6, actually doing unit testing, improving our CI/CD pipeline, refactoring problematic codebases, etc. -> all this stuff is the kind of things they promise me I can work on later whenever I'm so bogged down with work that I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. All empty promises.
Ideally we should be on .NET 6 since its LTS and just stay on the LTS versions as the year goes on.8 -
Dear Coffee,
I ask for your help.
I need to pass this exam, and at the same time a client is angry.
I invoke you.
Like the function I'm in.
A function of time, a function that will probably never halt but you cannot prove it. You hope it will stop soon, but deep inside you know it will continue to compute.
I beg you, Coffee. Make this function of procrastination stop. Please.
I see no escape.
It is a tail-recursive function. You realize it as soon as you reach the end.
You can do nothing about it, you're trapped inside this loop. At each iteration you hope to reach the bottom, but you never know. You can only hope that the bottom is close.
This is the last one, you keep repeating to yourself.
Please Coffee, let it be a non-pure function.
Make the environment change.
Only then we can be saved.
3 -
* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *
Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)
Client: Sure, don't worry.
* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *
Client: Can you solve this bug?
Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...
Client: Can you solve it now?
Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...
Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.
*Dev Team internal chat*
Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck
PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.6 -
So... After this bullshit https://devrant.com/rants/1523838/...
Me: hey boss, so.. I made a list out of those PowerPoint's on Trello ( more than 50 cards ) , can we sit later to priorize them?
Boss: well.. We can but for me all those are important. And we are gonna have those other requests (THIS IS THE HUGE ONE) next week.
Me inside: aaaaahhhh... Scream to your faceeeee!!! I'm gonna kill you and use your skull as a fucking mug!!! Motherfucker!!!
Me: ok.
Our deadline is end of this month :)3 -
I’ve been tasked with finding an experienced Project Manager for ‘a sensible cost’ - no specific budget amount shared.
That sounds like “we want the best, but want to pay very little” right?
It’s a massive project, they said “you developed this, did all the documentation and research, you can PM it right?”
“Can’t we just start making progress and adapt as we go?” They asked.
Sure I said (thinking Agile), but they said I just need to get on with it and let them know when finished! So no stakeholder interaction... this is not going to end well...
2 -
First rant from my new job.
I got a position as backend-dev in a startup and for now i'm learning angular. Yes, you read that correctly, because the frontend-team is short-staffed i decided to switch teams. We are 3 people and neither one has sufficient angular-experience (the framework was a management decision).
First of all i got confused because we use slack and trello but the frontend-lead decided to do some stuff via google-spreadsheet too. Then we didn't have any code in our repository until yesterday. I tried to check out the repository after that, did an npm-install but when running ng serve i got an error "css-file not found". It turns out you had to download some files from the official website and put them in the unversioned node_modules directory. It was the teamlead's decision to do so and me and my coworker got really annoyed when we tried to set up everything on our end. But that's not all, yesterday the other dev's merged their first versions of the project. But not via git, that is way to mainstream. The coworker had to upload his code into the cloud and the teamlead copied the files into the project folder.
Aside from that the code already isn't the best, some things should be done differently imo and we have credentials in the code (not in some separate files, but in an if-else-clause that checks node.env.production).
We'll have a discussion about this tomorrow, let's hope things can be straightened out.3 -
So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).
The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.
We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.
We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.
In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)
The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)
I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)
Feel free to ask about anything concerning it! -
We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.
Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.
Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:
Day 1:
We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?
Day 2:
We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.
Day 3:
We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.
Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.
Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)
I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.
Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.
Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.
Day 5:
End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.
Day 6:
Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
Day 7 (Today):
Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.
What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.
Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.
You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.
When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.
Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.8 -
A couple of years ago, we decide to migrate our customer's data from one data center to another, this is the story of how it goes well.
The product was a Facebook canvas and mobile game with 200M users, that represent approximately 500Gibi of data to move stored in MySQL and Redis. The source was stored in Dallas, and the target was New York.
Because downtime is responsible for preventing users to spend their money on our "free" game, we decide to avoid it as much as possible.
In our MySQL main table (manually sharded 100 tables) , we had a modification TIMESTAMP column. We decide to use it to check if a user needs to be copied on the new database. The rest of the data consist of a savegame stored as gzipped JSON in a LONGBLOB column.
A program in Go has been developed to continuously track if a user's data needs to be copied again everytime progress has been made on its savegame. The process goes like this: First the JSON was unzipped to detect bot users with no progress that we simply drop, then data was exported in a custom binary file with fast compressed data to reduce the size of the file. Next, the exported file was copied using rsync to the new servers, and a second Go program do the import on the new MySQL instances.
The 1st loop takes 1 week to copy; the 2nd takes 1 day; a couple of hours for the 3rd, and so on. At the end, copying the latest versions of all the savegame takes roughly a couple of minutes.
On the Redis side, some data were cache that we knew can be dropped without impacting the user's experience. Others were big bunch of data and we simply SCAN each Redis instances and produces the same kind of custom binary files. The process was fast enough to launch it once during migration. It takes 15 minutes because we were able to parallelise across the 22 instances.
It takes 6 months of meticulous preparation. The D day, the process goes smoothly, but we shutdowns our service for one long hour because of a typo on a domain name.1 -
Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps
Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long
My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...
TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.4 -
So i have been working as a graduate developer in this company i joined 5 months ago with some other graduates. I was on probation and it was supposed to end in near future but it got extended because " i was not being punctual". The feedback i got was " you are technically brilliant and have done all the tasks you have been asked to do but aren't being punctual and coming late to the office sometimes ".
I am indeed at fault that i sometimes enter the office late like 5-10 mins from the mentioned range. But whenever that has happened i always made it up while working late at work, this is my first job and even though i was being funny with the manager when we were discussing this i am not so happy right now, is it a big enough reason for extension ? Do you think if it can become a reason for termination ? Some other graduates have their probation extended cause of other reasons like late task completion.
Just need to understand how badly am i fucked.9 -
story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions
big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with
the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while
* everybody laughs *8 -
Co-Worker: How can I see what's linked to x variable in the database for this website? [we can't see the actual back end]
Me: Do a var dump...
Co-Worker: but what var do I dump? -
Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.
Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.
Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.
But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.7 -
Tuesdays at work suck. This is something I've put a lot of thought into.
Take Monday for instance, we love to hate him, when it comes to Mondays we all know the score we tell Monday where he can go and he takes that and owns it. He knows we hate him and we all know where we stand.
Wednesday is hump day, not great but we know we're halfway through the week. Thursday gets us a little excited cos we can see the end of the week.
Friday is the one we've been waiting for and we love him, Saturday and Sunday are bliss.
Tuesday... What's Tuesday got? It's just a day, there's nothing going on with Tuesdays.
Well except this week, in the UK we had Monday off as a statutory vacation, so this week, this week Tuesday is the day we love to hate, he's now got all this beginning of the week rage directed at him. The other days are unaffected, Thursday and Friday still have their thing, Wednesday still marks the half way point.
Monday has buggered off and let Tuesday be something for a day, I don't think he can take it. If he could Monday would probably go into retirement. Monday probably has more hatred directed towards it than Katie Hopkins (and that's saying something).
In short, no, no I do not want to get out of bed and go to work today, but I will, cos that's just what we do, but fuck you Tuesday.
Fuck you with a bag of spanners...
...Sideways...
...With habanero sauce...
... And a pineapple.1 -
First rant incoming!
I love when bizDEV people who are clearly not technical try to be technical. I mean I get when you want to try and understand something and I am totally down for letting you in on why we (the engineers) decided to do something a certain way. When you then go and tell us “no” and give the reason of “because I said so” it really doesn’t still well. Then you wonder why we don’t want to talk to you about anything? I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you know nothing about anything we are doing but sure, why don’t we just go along with your plan because you are totally omniscient.
Then he decided that he wants to be in all the “idea” discussions... I really don’t understand because my ideas are not scheduled and I am not going to set up a meeting and write them down for later so you can feel needed and important.
This project had such a good chance of becoming something great but I have a bad feeling it’s going to fail now because non technical people are in charge of technical decisions.
End of rant, thanks for listening.2 -
I would like to rant one more time about my internship.
I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.
To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.
The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.
We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.
Here began the troubles.
We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.
She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.
The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.
To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.
Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.
Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.
Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.
Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.
They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.
Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.
Fucking this shit.
I'm in France.
EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...7 -
I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *
After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...
I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges. -
Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4723170/...
So last post I said day three. That's incorrect, and here we are at the end of day two. Today was filled with everything from extraordinary views from snowy peaks, to rain and snow being blown parallel to the ground, as well as river crossings without bridges or paths, and a whole lot of soaked socks. After our 22km hike we finally arrived at the outpost at which we were served an amazingly good meal. Due to us arriving so late and having to eat almost immediately I didn't the chance to snap a picture, but I have this picture of a few reindeer, so I guess you can have that instead.
Now it's time to button up my pants, leave this toilet booth and head to bed. Cya tomorrow!
4 -
Here's to @Wisecrack:
Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.
Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.
A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.
And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?
So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.
So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)
Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁
Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.
FML?
3 -
So we've got a gif that doesn't show up in our React Native application. Of course, the designers assume it's me: "are you sure the gif is in the codebase? how are you using it in your component"? yeah ok boomer. I'm like, look at this other gif, works fine. "oh" So I tell them, double check the export options on how you are building the gif, maybe there is something there. so now they are asking ME for those export options. I'M A DEV, NOT A DESIGNER, DO YOUR JOB AND FIGURE IT OUT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT PROGRAM YOU ARE USING
oh as an aside, I was putting up a website for a client and they are like "my logo is quite similar to many others, is this something to worry about legally?" OH, SO NOW I'M A LAWYER TOO??!!?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE GOOGLE IS LITERALLY IN FRONT OF YOU
why do people continually think just because we can code we are fucking designers / lawyers / astronauts
/ god?
man this pisses me off - i think of that draw red lines with blue ink expert video, in the end, just smile and nod: "i can do... absolutely anything... trust me, I'm an expert"4 -
I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.
Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.
Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.
Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.
Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").
Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).
I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.
<my cents="2"></my>3 -
I've been a developer for 15+ years, all the time as a consultant with so many different clients, have been mobile developer(ios and android), front end, backend, and many other roles, I love programming, but lately, I don't know, don't feel excited about it anymore.
I lie on every interview when they ask what am I looking for in a project, to be honest, everything looks the same to me, just showing some parsed data, which is provided by a backend which is stored in a database, at the end everything resumes to this, I do not see any challenge, or any interesting thing about this anymore.
I don't know, I mean, you can get good money on this profession, be in big offices and stuff, but, there is something missing, at least for me, is like, nobody speaks each other, no friendship, no honesty, no connections, is like, come on, we spent most of our most useful hours day after day in here, there should be a connection or something, I see many people(including me) having lunch with their cellphones, is kinda sad, I wonder if it was like that in the past.
I don't know, it feels so gray lately.13 -
Developer: we are going o have to do it this way because it's the only way I can get it to work.
Other developer: what are you on about that's a easy thing to do you should not be doing it that way you idiot are you thick or something! do it this way the correct blah blah way, "let me show you moron (says out loud to everyone in the office) to show how superior and awesome they are"......
Two hours later, "yes we will have to do it your way in the end, my way doesn't work"
I fucking told you that 2 hours ago. Some people just don't believe lol #timewasted1 -
Migration in progress (long one, lasting over a month)
PM: Let's schedule a meeting to discuss migration progress
PM: Let's schedule a meeting to agree on what should we test
PM: Let's schedule a meeting to get specs of the new infra
Seriously, PMs. One 1 hour long meeting costs at least 4 hours of productive time (1 hour for travel, 1 hour for the meeting, 1+ hour for preparing for the meeting, 1+ hour for post-meeting discussions). And more often than not all meetings end with "We will come back to you later in regards to <some question not answered during meeting>" and it always means "we'll continue this chat via emails"
Why can't you first ask "do we need a meeting or can we sort this out via email?" ??? Or are you intentionally wasting everyone's time?4 -
Best way to avoid procrastination : We tend to avoid commitments or to do large tasks as even visualizing them seems tiring and the longer it takes, the vulnerable we are to distractions
So I use this simple trick
I break my task into numerous sub tasks. For example if I need to finish a feature before day end, I would first list down all the cases I can think of in order and write them down using actual pen and paper.
I then start implementing them step by step.
I mark them checked once done.
It gives me a sense of achievement as I see those checks besides the sub tasks and I can also take breaks between steps.
So all it takes is just first five minutes of planning.
I had to do the above procedure, for this post as well.
Hope it helps fellow developers
:) -
All this started around an year back. In college we had this subject of web programming where we were given a mini project to do. The topics were given related to college stuff. Mine was an attendance system. Made a simple website using all i knew about bootstrap, jquery, etc since i had some previous experience with web. The professor liked it and asked me to further improve it so that it can actually be implemented. This was six months back.
Since that day, to this date, that guy asks me to add a new feature or just modify something every two weeks. These guys just want free work and think everyone is just free. Neither does he help a bit... just demands... god knows when this forever loop would end! It has become frustrating now...it just feels as though why i showed my skills in the first place 😐😖5 -
Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.
My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.
To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.
We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.
Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.
Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!5 -
A "partner" company has created a "REST" API we use on an online shop we developed to send all shop-related requests to.
At least once a month, something fails on their end and the customer calls us every time, expecting that we did something wrong, but it has never been us.
These "partners" do exactly zero testing, are extremely slow in solving API bugs, have almost no logging and have no monitoring on the API at all.
Today at noon, suddenly no customers were able to order anything anymore for 4 hours.
How the fuck can you run a business so unbelievably brainless that this keeps repeating monthly?
Time they fire all their "devs" and everyone in charge of the company and operations. TERMINATE.11 -
Last day of agile project i get asked for confirmation that the alpha system can handle 100000 records. We have had no load testing requests only feature pushes every sprint.
I see the back-end guys have used EF in a search function that eager joins a bunch of tables. Then the results get sorted and filtered in application code. It works fine for a few hundred records but the customer will do about 100k new records a year.
Yeah this won’t meet requirements. I wish they asked for some load testing before the last day. They aren’t going to like that one person can do a search every 15 seconds by the end of the year when I tell them. FML12 -
Lead: I want you to make this library we wrote mockable, so that we can write better tests.
Coworker: Ok
...
Lead at the end of the day: How's it going with the library?
CO: Good, I have made all calls to the library mockable.
Lead: you mean inside the library, right?
CO: No, all calls to the library
Lead:
3 -
we need you to implement some front end components but design department is not following their own standards, and changing the fucking mockup, so now you have to change your shit again
like fuck, how hard can it fucking be to hand me the locked in design and ill make it, i dont wanna have to muck this shit up and fight css again1 -
Rant about IT teacher
(This happened a few months ago)
I go to highschool and in ninth grade you learn about Excel and databases in general. In the first half of the year we learned how to use excel and in the second part of the year we learned about SQL databases.
So we learned SQL and how to set up a database using LibreOffice Base. At the end of the year we had to do one final project which was setting up a database and writing some queries.
We had to do it in groups of two and we had to choose for what we wanted to make a database.
We had like 5 minutes time to discuss it in the groups and me and my friend decided to do something like GitHub, so a database with tables for all the users, repositories, etc.
Then we had to tell our teacher what we wanted to do. Others made databases for hospitals, shops, netflix, app stores. The teacher asked the other groups, they told him what they wanted to do and he wrote it down. Here is how it went down with my group:
Teacher: So what do you want to do?
Me: A database for something like GitHub
Teacher: For what?
Me: GitHub
Teacher: what?
Me (very slowly): G I T H U B
Teacher: what is github?
Me: ...
(I was very surprised that he didn't know GitHub)
Me: well, you can upload files and work on them together with other people. There are also things like branches...
Teacher: Ah ok, so a cloud service
(I was done and wanted to end the conversation)
Me: Yes... it's a cloud service...
(Me in my mind: why do i have to be here)
We named our project 'GitGud', a little bit passiv aggresive.
Yeah so apparently my IT teacher doesn't know GitHub, however he installed Ubuntu on some of the school computers so I guess that's nice
We got an A so that's good.11 -
***ILLEGAL***
so its IPL(cricket) season in india, there is a OTT service called hotstar (its like netflix of india), the cricket streams exclusively on hotstar..
so a quick google search reveals literally thousands of emails & passwords, found a pastebin containing 500 emails&passwords ...but those are leaked last year most of passwords are changed & many of them enabled 2FA.. after looking through them we can find some passwords are similar to their emails , some contains birth year like 1975,1997 etc, some passwords end with 123 ..so after trying a few different versions of the passwords like
1) password123 -> password@123, password1234
2) passwordyear -> password@year
2) for passwords similar to emails, we can add 123 ,1234, @ etc
created a quick python script for sending login requests
so after like 30-40 mins of work, i have 7 working accounts
*for those who have basic idea of security practices you can skip this part
lessons learnt
1) enable 2FA
2) use strong passwords, if you change your password , new password should be very different from the old one
there are several thousands of leaked plaintext passwords for services like netflix,spotify, hulu etc, are easily available using simple google search,
after looking through & analysing thousands of them you can find many common passwords , common patterns
they may not be as obvious as password ,password123 but they are easily guessable.
mainly this is because these type of entertainment services are used by the average joe, they dont care about strong passwords, 2FA etc6 -
Today's been majorly tough 😣, I might lose one of my fav an most high paying clients 😐
He's OK in taking risks in his business because he has money to fall back on 😐 I have none we are sorta partners in projects. So we have this one project he never wrote in this project brief/outline maintenance or sign off ,😐 it never occured to him .
So now this app is ongoing I got paid nothing they just released it I need to do these jobs to make money 😐 but I'm stuck helping him 😐
There have been so many issues it's been ongoing forever 😐 I dunno what I can do .
To make it worse the code is a pile of shit 😐 literally couldnt be worse.
Why ? Because there has been 4000 minor adjustments. I'm a good coder I swear , but this job is killing me 🙁
Here's an example start of the new year the new iOS kicked in on the 12 Dec I started get more n more bug reports! Saying iOS is messed up.
Because of an update it's not my fault. 😣, 6 months this project took 😐 every 2 weeks I've had a major issue come up like that.
😖 I'm near my wit's end I feel like the best move is to just say I'm sorry I can't anymore I understand that this app is important and that we need to get paid less to grow it etc but I can't let my business die because of that.
Times like this I really appreciate this app
I guess I have to stick it out 😧1 -
Now I have a Course called "Microprocessor and Assembly Language" this semester. I'm not understanding much of it from the classes (I don't find our teacher very good at teaching). So couple of days ago she says we have to submit projects at the end of this semester and it must be something related to hardware, not software(as she thinks Assembly is a language for Hardware). Now I have to submit a proposal to her very soon with an idea for the project. I'm killing myself over it but can't find any idea. Can anyone help me regarding this matter?16
-
Meeting at 'Derp & Co', the topic was what data model should send the back-end to frontend & app via API calls:
- Coworker: 'we should send the data structured like this for reasons'.
- Me: 'Yeah, this nested object.object.object should do the trick for the front end, but this will be a pain in the ass to convert to POJOs. Why not use something like idk better structure?'
<Mad/intrigued faces>
- CoworkerS: 'Why you need to use POJOs?'
- Me: <More Mad> 'cause I work with java in android... and we have/need/like objects?
<Captain Obvious left the room>
- CoworkerS: 'Oh yeah, well... we can do it the way you say'.
Why you need Objects... what is the next?
- Git? For what? Did not have the usb key from day one?2 -
I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?5 -
Command: "Infantry unit, this is Command. The enemy is approaching, what's your status?"
Infantry Unit: "Command, this is Infantry unit. Just a quick note, my pronouns are they/them. Can we please use that in all communications going forward?"
Command: "Infantry unit, the enemy is upon you and you're worried about pronouns?"
Infantry Unit: "Command, this is Infantry unit. It's not just about me, it's about respect and inclusivity"
Command: "Infantry unit, you're about to be inclusively dead. Defend yourselves!"
Infantry Unit: "Command, this is Infantry unit. Wait, what? Oh s***."
(End of transmission)15 -
Moral of the story: sometimes you've got to take a hit to be better off in the end.
A client asked me to design flyers for him, at first I was hesitant since this would be a stand alone design task instead of one incorporated with development.
He kept asking since he liked what I designed for my other clients (logos, etc..) So I finally said yes and we agreed to a final preview before he would pay me. I had asked him for color schemes, certain pictures, info, etc. but he told me it was completely up to me.
I finished the design, sent him the preview and he told me it was shit compared to my other work and that he didn't want it anymore 😅. I used to get mad as fuck every time this happened but now I don't even bother .
I know many people are going to say "You should have had him sign a contract, bla bla". I know, I know, but you can't let people sign a contract for every small thing, it completely depend on the situation and I prefer to know which of my lesser known clients are assholes so I can quit accepting tasks from them. This saves me much more time in the end. -
TL;DR: intel stripped the hosted network function from the drivers for my wifi chip. Older versions can still so it
Every month I travel by bandbus to neighbouring countries for a show.
This usually takes 7+ hours.
So i have my laptop with me and if my brother is along as well, we game in the bus.
Using a cable for internet connection isnt handy, since we sit on opposite sides of the bus. So i looked up if I can use a hosted wifi network for this.
We both checked out our drivers and both said no hosted network support.
And some posts on the internet said that customer support told them that the chip can't do it
But thats weird. My laptop is high end. So I searched a little only to find out that I can do a hosted wifi network if I DOWNGRADE my drivers.....
Fuck you intel. Fuck you hard for stripping that function from the drivers1 -
I remember a certain prank that amuses me till today....
Just add some devices to monitoring and the notification queue of the build chain / ... ...and wait patiently.
I still cry tears remembering an manager screaming what the hell "the poop train clogged the drain" means and why this is a critical system failure.
(Notice: next time check the mailing aliases of mailing aliases)
Although I can only recommend this if you know your team well. In my case we had a whole lot of fun after I got my head chewed off. XD (got an earful, but in the end he laughed his ass off)1 -
Demo for client goes bad when we encounter a bug adding a new entry into the back end. Entry shows up in the admin but not the front side.
<thoughtbubble> "I can't believe this, we just tested it! How can this be? How? How?" </thoughtbubble>
Perhaps, the cache? Nope.
<thoughtbubble> "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" </thoughtbubble>
Perhaps the front side is pointing to dev? Nope.
<thoughtbubble> "Oh shit... make something up quick. Make it sound good." </thoughtbubble>
Tells client we'll have to look into it. (real smooth)
Looked into it and it turns out the bug was actually a feature. Apparently when you assign an "end date" to a date in the past... by design, it won't show.
However, was it bad UI? That's a different argument.4 -
I hate those persons...
*sigh*
Don't do this.
Person does it.
Don't do it. We are currently overworked and this _must_ be a project every team agrees on. Otherwise it will end exactly like it is currently - a big mess that every team implemented differently.
2 hours later....
Person books time for said project.
Other team lead: Stop working on it. This makes no sense.
Person: yeah... But I needed to clean it up anyways, so I just started cause why not.
--
Me and the other team lead had a 5 min discussion about it shortly after...
Wasn't the first time said person has gone solo rogue *sigh*
Despite that this is driving me (and the other team lead) nuts...
WHY THE FRIGGING FUCK DOES HE ALWAYS DO IT WHEN WE ARE SO FUCKING OVERWORKED....
Really. Every fucking time this mother tugging bullshit kindergarten play.
I think it's the first time that I said: I don't care - I'll just trash his work when we start on the project as a team in 2 months (Yeah... That's realistic. 2 months minimum...).
The universe really has it's way to make me angry.
I hope he stops tomorrow, we really cannot deal with emotional bullshit at the moment.
*gooozfraba*
How can such fuckwads exist....12 -
I'm trying to bring some structure to the IT department, but I need help with something. I'm on my feature branch for some front-end stuff. I realize that there is some back-end missing that my colleague must do. How should we go about tackling this? Should he create another feature branch, fix the things, merge to master, and then i can merge from master?6
-
In Rx, what is the point of returning Single for all of our networking request responses, if every call to that method, first of all converts it to an Observable so that it can use flatMap, filters, combineLatest etc.
I get that Observable's have more overhead, Single can only return once, thats all clear. But is it not MORE overhead to create a Single, return it, convert it and now have the Observable we were trying to avoid in the first place.
I don't know if its just Rx I don't like, or how the team here is using it. But it is pissing me off, to no end, how massively overly complicated this is. It really feels to me like this is following a textbook approach while ignoring all the practical details.
<rant>
Next person to say "because its the Rx way", is getting a monitor thrown at their head.
</rant>6 -
Team Leader(TL): So you finished the sql scripts and stored procedures?
Me: Yep!
TL: And properly formatting the front end to look exactly how we want it.
Me: Yep
TL: Well we waiting on feedback from the boss so i guess you'll have to do the documentation.
Me: I hate documentation, please give me anything else
TL: It's not a lot dude, you can do it.
Me: Didn't one of the intern's and the database admin do it already?
TL: Yes. but you can take both of them and make one complete one.
Me: *You just don't want me to work on my own things you FUCKER* Fine, but don't expect it to be done this week.
TL: It's Tuesday, why not.
Me: Because i hate dcumentation
I FUCKEN. hate! documentation.4 -
Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).
Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.
This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.
- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.
Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.5 -
This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.
So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.
Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.
Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.
While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.
He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.
So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.
All in all, it was a pretty good day.6 -
So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..
My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.
So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..
The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).
This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.
At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.4 -
Just like JS frameworks, everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel with an OS, now more than ever. Some give it a better tread, but things are hardly ever adopted by the end-user, unless proven to be a leader.
This is where Windows and macOS excel.
I have a love/hate relationship with Ubuntu, and use CentOS 7 for my servers (so I can get genuine, hands-on Debian/RHEL experience) but honestly, it ends there for me - which, again, is close to lightyears away from what the average person would use outside of our industry's cliche.
However, just like JS frameworks, there's a reason that each one exists; to fill a gap the others don't. This is where it gets a bit personal to me, and reflects a habitual mistake made by the human race, in general.
If we simply worked together towards setting true standards based on non-competitive collaboration - we'd be happier, positive, and much more productive. -
I’m studying at uni remotely at the moment. I’m taking a software engineering class. I love developing software so I was super excited about this course. First assignment is to make a tic tac toe game in python. I finish the assignment super fast within the first hour of our first class.
We end up spending the rest of the fucking semester on this fucking program. No improvements, nothing. Literally just staring at this less than 200 line command line tic tac toe game talking about the same fucking shit every class.
Our fucking final is a presentation about this fucking program. The entire class is going to present the same command line python tic tac toe game
People told me that in the past, this class would find a local client and fulfill a request (making a website, etc)
However, now there’s a new prof teaching this course.
Best way I can describe it, 3 hours of this fucking prof screen sharing a google doc and droning on for 3 hours
I wish I could get the 20+ hours of my life back that this course has taken from me10 -
My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.
Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.
Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.1 -
missing rust's infinite loops in other languages now
also now I don't like variable++ and it throws me off
also missing iterators. because you can consume part of them and don't have to keep track that some of a list has already been "used up" so to speak. now I have index counters and laaame (granted not having to wrestle with borrowing rules... actually just strangely feels weird)
also why must languages have different naming conventions. this is a disaster now because my reflexes for what I name variables is all over the place. now I find snake_case more readable than camelCase because the letters are the same height so you can skim for names easier, and by how many words which correlates to how specific a variable is to the logical loops at hand
I guess end of the day we just develop a handwriting style in code our brains like and the idea of having to change your accent every time you switch a locale sounds annoying6 -
Prequel to my previous post:
I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.
They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.
Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.
Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible
Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.
I received the following group of responses:
- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)
Here is what I did:
Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).
Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.
They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.
So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input. -
!rant
This year marks our 5th anniversary of devopsdays in Amsterdam and the whole team is working hard on making it the most awesome experience of 2017 for anyone interested in the devops movement. :)
I really believe this will make us be less frustrated and rant less! Though, I never want this app to end! =]
But what is an amazing conference without amazing talks? That's where you come into the picture. We have spots open for talks (lightning and non-lightning) and workshops.
If you feel like you have a valuable devops story to share please fill in our CfP here - https://devopsdays.typeform.com/to/... .
You can expect about 300-400 people at a talk and somewhere between 10-30 at workshops.
When is it? 28th-30th of June (2017)
Why Amsterdam? Amsterdam is pretty cool. We make it extra cool and make sure you're never hungry or thirsty.
Hope to see you there!
And I need to see devRanters there to share the best stories!
❤️️ on behalf of the Amsterdam organizers.3 -
can we just get rid of floating points? or at least make it quite clear that they are almost certainly not to be used.
yes, they have some interesting properties that make them good for special tasks like raytracing and very special forms of math. but for most stuff, storing as much smaller increments and dividing at the end (ie. don't store money as 23.45. store as 2,345. the math is the same. implement display logic when showing it.) works for almost all tasks.
floating point math is broken! and most people who really, truely actually need it can explain why, which bits do what, and how to avoid rounding errors or why they are not significant to their task.
or better yet can we design a standard complex number system to handle repeating divisions and then it won't be an issue?
footnote: (I may not be perfectly accurate here. please correct if you know more)
much like 1/3 (0.3333333...) in base 10 repeats forever, that happens with 0.1 in base 2 because of how floats store things.
this, among other reasons, is why 0.1+0.2 returns 0.300000046 -
I've only been working for a about 6 months, so this is the best I got.
I'm working with a software/programming language I've never worked with before this, so sometimes I have to go ask my co-worker if what I did is correct, or ask him where some information is stored.
So sometimes I do someting, and then go ask him if it's ok and I can continue. He looks at my code, starts asking questions and (sometimes, not always) says something like "this is not it, let's do it together". Alright, I understand that, I know I still make a lot of mistakes and I'm still learning how to work with this. It's all still very new to me.
We start looking for stuff, making queries, programming, etc. and then we end up with the exact same code that I had made... But, somehow, now it's correct...
This happens so much, I hate asking him things now!8 -
Lets play a little python game together and win some devRant points :
We have an array of integers named L
We need to sort this array so that the biggest number be in the beginning and lowest at the end..descending order
Rules:
-You are not allowed to write more than one line of code in the comment...only one
-if you comment once...you cannot comment directly after that...you have to wait for two other comments after you so you can comment again
-you have to build your code upon the previous comments ... you cannot start from scratch
-the lucky one who puts the final comment is the winner..and we should all ++ his comment to give him the biggest amount of points
Lets start and see who will win :)15 -
Managed to derive an inverse to karatsuba's multiplication method, converting it into a factorization technique.
Offers a really elegant reason for why non-trivial semiprimes (square free products) are square free.
For a demonstration of karatsubas method, check out:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...
Now for the reverse, like I said something elegant emerges.
So we can start by taking the largest digit in our product. Lets say our product is 697.
We find all the digits that produce 6 when summed, along with their order.
thats (1,5), (5,1), (2,4), (4,2), and (3,3)
That means for one of our factors, its largest digit can ONLY be 1, 5, 2, 4, or 3.
Lets take karatsubas method at step f (in the link) and reverse it. Instead of subtracting, we're adding.
If we assume (3,3)
Then we take our middle digit of our product p, in this case the middle digit of 697. is 9, and we munge it with 3.
Then we add our remaining 3, and our remaining unit digit, to get 3+39+7 = 49.
Now, because karatsuba's method ONLY deals with multiplication in single digits, we only need to consider *at most* two digit products.
And interestingly, the only factors of 49 are 7.
49 is a square!
And the only sums that produce 7, are (2,5), (5,2), (3,4), and (4,3)
These would be the possible digits of the factors of 697 if we initially chose (3,3) as our starting point for calculating karatsubas inverse f step.
But you see, 25 can't be a factor of p=697, because 25 is a square, and ends in a 5, so its clearly not prime. 52 can't be either because it ends in 2, likewise 34 ending in 4.
Only 43 could be our possible factor of p.
And we *only* get one factor because our starting point has two of the same digit. Which would mean p would have to equal 43 (a prime) or 1. And because p DOESNT (it equals 697), we can therefore say (3,3) is the wrong starting point, as are ALL starting points that share only one digit, or end in a square.
Ergo we can say the products of non-squares, are specifically non-prime precisely because if they *were* prime, their only factors would HAVE to be themselves, and 1.
For an even BETTER explanation go try karatsuba's method with any prime as the first factor, and 1 as the second factor (just multiply the tens column by zero). And you can see why the inverse, where you might try a starting point that has two matching digits (like 3,3), would obviously fail, because the values it produces could only have two factors; some prime thats not our product, or the value one, which is also not our product.
It's elegant almost to the level of a tautology. -
Isn't it curious that most development libraries, frameworks, widgets in an ecosystem see a decrease in popularity when they reach a "no longer under active development"/ maintenance stage (especially exacerbated in the front-end)?
As if we just can't settle on a convention. As if, even for limited-scope solutions, a final stage can never be reached, there must be perpetual growth. As if we must constantly trade a solution for a shinier one, that just might provide us with 2% profit based on a doubtful forecast... or not. Sounds a lot like the investment capitalism that resulted in the 2008 subprime crisis. Not sure what to make of this thought but
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU -
Dear Kubuntu 20.04
You're not a programming language but I felt that you fit here in this wkRant so people can see how shitty you became.
It's about 6:27am CET, and you wasted my night, you used to be as simple as sudo apt-get install, now you're mostly PPA first or worse, make. You killed make now we use cmake. We are now looking for debs, which is a pain since you end up in an index site without download here. And the debs now don't work. Missing dependencies. You killed core libraries saying they are now incompatible or obsolete.
All I want is my god damn cli visualiser and osdlyrics back!!9 -
I absolutely treasure the bug reports we get from users. Nothing helps bring the product closer to perfection than the informed critique of end-users.
Recently, however, this one dude is filing a new fucking report every time he encounters the same fucking bug. "X happens for operation Y on file A"
"X happens for operation Y on file B"
.
.
.
"X happens for operation Y on file Z"
Jumping Jesus Christ, man, I'm pretty sure we can identify a pattern after the first two!
I don't expect him to know about the work we do to reproduce a problem after one report but fucking hell, have some faith that we'll get the picture after two or three.
These are fully detailed bug reports too, so it's not like he's just being a troll. -
its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.
we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)
after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)
we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..
[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]
..because we were not using VS code to find things in files
HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE
ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?5 -
I am going to rant about this here because there is nowhere else where I can "SCREAM".
My work process....
Working on a project that does not have mockups nor a plan. I am building as I go. Design, infrastructure, EVERYTHING. Because my boss is a "genius".
And the project goes like this....
1. Boss tells me to build something.
2. I tell him the functionalities and design.
3. Boss, "Figure out yourself and we will see how it goes".
4. Me, Builds something.
5. Boss does not like it and demands changes.
6. I make the changes.
7. Repeat.
1 year and a half for one project that is a simple e-commerce. Show the products, a search functionality, users sign in and can order and show their orders.
A simple page in which does not take time, but without a plan, without A FUCKING PLAN this project will go on forever.
I am losing my mind. I put on test and tell my boss to test it for bugs. He demands a meeting and tells me, "we need to add this".
OH FOR FUCKS SAKE. TEST THE SITE FOR BUGS YOU FUCKING USELESS THING. I WILL FIX THE BUGS AND THEN WE WILL TALK FOR NEW MODULES.
I am doing documentation, database infrastructure, front-end, back-end, testing (because my boss cannot do it. It took him 2 week to start testing for some things after asking him every fucking day "Did you test it", "Did you test it").
Maintaining out CRM for bugs and new modules and maintaining our company's website.4 -
**Front End Job Interview**
Recruiter:We want people that have 7 years in react
Me: Well I have 5 considering react came out in 2014
Recruiter:So why did you come here ?
Me:I’m broke, I need a job and I have skills
Recruiter:Ok then..
Recruiter:For your code question,we want you to make a responsive web page with these frameworks and the source code.
*gives link to source code*
Me:Ok I can finish this in 3-5 days
Recruiter:we expect that you have 2 days to finish this
Me: Ok challenge accepted
*Finished website in 2 days*
Recruiter:This is a well made website, I’m impressed
Me:Thank you, it took time but I did it
Recruiter:You know what that means
Me: What?
Recruiter:Welcome to the club, you start next week
Me:LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOO, WOOOHOO, I’ll make you proud with my skills!!!!.
Moral:If you have a little humor and skills, you WILL get the job
I started the job a week later and it was AMAZING
*Based on a true story*2 -
My own little version of moore's law:
In 1986 the connectome (the brain) of c. elegans, a small worm, was mapped. It would take decades before the research caught up to the point where we had the hardware to simulate it.
In 2024, we have successfully mapped, and fully simulated (to matching observed behavioral data) the brain of a fruit fly, a total of 139,255 neurons and corresponding connections.
Thats a 38 year period.
If the period is roughly 40 years, and the leap in successful neurons mapped *and simulated* is by an average of 461 times the prior number of neurons, then by 2062-2064 we will be simulating box jellyfish, fruit flys, zebrafish, bees, ants, honey bees, cockroachs, coconut crabs, geckos, guppys, sand lizards, snakes, skinks, toirtoises, frogs, iguanas, shrews, bats, and even moles.
By the dozens or hundreds in any given simulation.
By the year 2100-2104 we'll be fully simulating the brains of mice, quill, crocodiles, birds such as doves, rats, zebra finchs,
guinea pigs, lemurs, ducks, ferrets, cockatiels, squirrels, mongoose, prairie dogs, rabbits, octopi, house cats, buzzards, parakeets, grey parrots, snowy owls, racoons, and even domestic pigs.
And in the years between 2100 to 2140, starting immediately with domestic dogs, we will ramp up and end with the capacity to simulate human brains in full, probably by the dozens or hundreds.
This assumes we can break the quantum barrier of course.20 -
My Data Communication & Computer Networks (DCCN) teacher was the best teacher I've seen.
Teaching can be super hard. You're one against like sixty others who aren't interested in being there. To make that good learning environment, making the subject interesting etc, it not easy. Some justify that, "I can only bring the horse to the water" & proceed to just regurgitate whatever is on the book. Others cross question you & impose punishments - try to make you learn by fear.
But my DCCN teacher - she had the right balance between strictness & humour. So kids took her seriously (did homework, weren't late), yet never feared her - we felt comfortable asking doubts/questions.
She had some good tactics, like asking us to teach certian chapters - that made us learn better. She would revise them in the end also, incase we missed anything.
My best moment with her was when I scored the highest in my internals. She picked up my paper & showed the class - "see? Just two pages & he scored so much". There's was always those students who pump out a lot of stories/essays or whatever that comes to their mind about the topic in question. Lots of teachers just blindly give marks - "oh, s/he wrote this much, so it must be right".
But my DCCN teacher had zero tolerance for garbage. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Some even believe that the number of marks = number of lines you have to write!! Doesn't matter what you write. So, I was super glad when this teacher upped the standards. -
Rant #1
I’ve got a new client wanting me to take over their website, okay... I’ll take care of you.
What’s the hold up?
1. Anon, Get ahold of this person, they’ve got the info you’ll need.
2. We will get together sometime to go over paperwork.
3. We are waiting on the board to sign off on a contract switch.
4. I’m needing this changed immediately on the site or we will be fined, but I understand you don’t have the information to make that change - can you get ahold of X to get the information?
5. *gets ahold of X* - still waiting on Y to approve contract release and change.
Listen, I have my faults too on running my own business but at least I know what I can and can’t do when either accepting or turning away a client. I’d be happy to work on your website, but you’ve got to get approval from those on your team before you make a change, that’s not on me. It’s cool that you need whatever changed on your site before the end of the week, but I can’t help you until I’m officially signed on. Please don’t request content change when I don’t have access to the content to change it.
Go get approval by your team first before you call me about making changes to your site, we haven’t even exchanged any information or paperwork yet.
Rant #2
If you call me again knowing that I’m on a two month leave from work, I’ll slit your throat and fuck the wound. It’s 1:40. There are other techs, you’ve got the on-call list in front of you. I’m flattered you went through the trouble of finding my PERSONAL NUMBER, but I have rants to write damn it. -
Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.
So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.
Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.
Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]
One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.
I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.
The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.
"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"
I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.
The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.
This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.
Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.24 -
TL;DR - I came up with an ingenious version of a solution to a problem and still got 0 marks.
In my bachelor's degree we learned about abstraction, as usual for CS degree students.
In a later exam, a coding question asked us to swap two variables values without using a third variable and print the before and after on the screen.
You can read the question above again, because wait for it....
So this is what I wrote basically (JS equivalent solution),
class Solution {
constructor(obj) {
this.var1 = obj.var1;
this.var2 = obj.var2;
}
swap() {
return {"var1": this.var2, "var2": this.var1};
}
}
let input = {"var1":5, "var2": 7}
let object = new Solution(input);
console.log('Before');
console.log(input);
let solution = object.swap();
console.log('After');
console.log(solution);
Now look, before your boomer asses jump in and say "aCkChUaLlY tHiS iS iNcORrEcT"
I did include all kinds of comments that this is abstracted. The swap function is hidden away and the object variable doesn't need to know what it's doing.
In the context of this question, this is absolutely acceptable as a solution since the end-goal is to print the results on the screen and the user wouldn't see the source code.
I still got 0 on that question and I still get pissed about it sometimes, when I remember it, like just now.16 -
Actually I have two stories
The first one, that one project I talked about with a big company when I was at school. It wasn't that much coding since it was mostly researching, but it was a big project that seems really interesting, with Image Analysis and Machine Learning.
The projects at school this year got drawn randomly for each group, so when I've been announced that I've been chosen for the biggest project, thinking about every side of the project, I was hyped. And even a year after we finished it, I'm still happy and excited about it.
The second is something a little more funny :
So we got some projects to do during December for school including cryptography. Again, those were randomly drawn (but some can really fuck you up) and I got to do a Password Manager, like KeyPass. We were 4, and we thought we had the time to do it.
But we misread the date. At the end of Christmas break, I got a call of a friend saying that the project is due in two days.
Thing is, one of my three co-workers weren't contactable. And we got nothing.
So I kinda took the lead : I said to one to do the UI, another to do the cryptograph helper, and I'll do the linking and all the behaviour of it.
In two days, I literally spent all the time available on it.
Then first meeting with the teacher for saying what is wrong, where bugs are if they exist, ect. so we can fix the issues and deliver a clean code. They were like only 4 big problems. More is, I fixed them all in like two hours while thinking fixing only one. And we got something like the 2nd or the 3rd best mark of the prom. And everyone congratulated me for that. I got so excited I was able to do that in few time.
But never that again lmao -
!rant
Went to a hackathon this weekend. We didn't win, but at least I can say I enjoyed working with the guys and we finished the prototype on time.
So, if you have never been in a hackathon, you should go, it's an awesome experience and even though if you don't win, you'll end up learning a lot. -
I'm a dev lead. I'm trying to consolidate a squad. There's a senior in it preaching the dream of career climbing and LinkedIn optimization.
Now all interns want to switch squads. I'm all for personal growth... but now everyone wants to be everything at once and productivity stalled. The job descriptions for our squad were perfectly clear, there's tons of different tech stacks... We can build a lot of cool things in this scope, and now no one can see them because Data Science or Data Engineering or Front-end is suddenly sparkling.
I'm tired.3 -
This happened when I was in the first semester of my study (I'm currently studying Computer Science).
Didn't understand anything, never learned to code before. My first "project" from my lecturer was to write a mini-journal together with two friends of mine (which weren't able to code either) about the link of VR use with the increase/decrease of the user's heart rate.
We didn't find any way to record the user's heart rate automatically and periodically. The deadline was getting closer but thankfully we found an android app that can be used to detect someone's heart rate with the user's finger pressed onto the camera. Sadly the app can't be used to record the data periodically (it can only show us the average heart rate). We told my lecturer (who is supossed to "guide" us here) about the problem and asked him for solutions.
He told us to "modify the .apk and connect it to a database".
At this point, we didn't even know how to make a database, let alone "modify the .apk".
In the end, we used an oximeter, recorded it, and listed the results manually. 😂2 -
In reply to:
https://devrant.com/rants/3957914/...
Okay, we must first establish common ground here. What do we understand about "showing"? I understand you probably mean displaying/rendering, more abstractly: "obtaining". Good, now we move on.
What's the point of a front-end? Well, in the 90's that used to be an easy answer: to share information (not even in a user-friendly way, per se). Web 2.0 comes, interaction with the website. Uh-oh, suddenly we have to start minding the user. Web 3.0 comes, ouch, now the front-end is a mini-backend. Even tougher, more leaks etc. The ARPAnet was a solution, a front-end that they had built in order to facilitate research document-sharing between universities. Later, it became the inter(national) net(work).
First there was SGML to structure the data (it's a way of making it 'pretty' in a lexicographical way) and turn it into information (which is what information is: data with added semantics) and later there was HTML to structure it even further, yet we all know that its function was not prettification, but rather structure. Later came CSS, to make it pretty. With its growing popularity, the web started to be used as a publishing device.
source:
https://w3.org/Style/CSS20/...
If we are to solely display JSON data in a pretty way, we may be limiting ourselves to the scenario of rendering pretty web pages using aesthetic languages such as CSS. We must also understand that if we are only focusing on making a website pretty with little to moderate functionality, we aren't really winning. A good website has to be a winner in all aspects, which is why frameworks came into existence, but.. lmao, let's leave that to another discussion.
Now let me recall back my college days.. front-end.. front-end.. heck, even a headset can be a front-end to a pick-order backend. We must think back to the essence, to the abstract. All other things are just implementations of it (yes, the horrendous thousands of Javascript libraries, lol).
So, my college notes say:
"Presentation layer: this is the UI.
In this layer you ask the middle tier for information, which gets that information from a database, which then goes back to middle tier, back to presentation. In the case of the headset, the operators can confirm an order is ready. This is essentially the presentation tier again: you're getting information from the middle tier and 'presenting it' as it were.
The presentation layer is in essence the question: how do I bring my application data to my end users in a platform-and solution-independent way?"
What's JSON? A way to transport data between the middle tier and the presentation tier. Is that what frontend development is? Displaying it in a pretty way? I don't think it is, because 'pretty' is an extra feature of obtaining and displaying data. Do we always have to display data in a pretty way? Not necessarily. We could write a front-end script (in NodeJS perhaps) that periodically fetches certain information from a middle-tier is serves a more functional role rather than a rendering one.
The prettification of data was a historical consequence of the popularity of the web (which is a front-end) (see second paragraph with link). Since the essence of a front-end is to obtain information from the back-end (with stress on obtaining), its presentation is not necessarily a defining characteristic of it, but rather an optional and solution-dependent aspect, a facet.4 -
!rant
The new end to the idiotic code snippet head scratchers interviews (awkward for both parties but nobody is willing to admit it)?
Hometasks.
Infinite internet access, use whatever tools you want, do as much as you can in 2-3 hours.
The best non-toxic way to see how someone works as a dev.
This is the way I expect you to work, so this is the way I will interview you.
Sorry silicon valley, we don't need people who can write up a binary search algo from rote memory.3 -
we want you to be
- full stack developer (you do everything front end, back end)
- dev ops/SRE (you can sort out the deployment CI/CD pipeline, cloud platform services AWS/GC/Azure whatever)
- architect (you can design the software as well)
all in 1, you gotta be multiple roles/departments
good luck getting this experience on the job (hell in a startup is not for everybody and certainly not for me)
also why the fuck companies who aren’t startups ask for this idk
not sure if i missed any roles/competencies so far , don’t forget you need like >=3 years of experience possibly in every field for entry roles and more for anything higher than that9 -
Huge number of "no social life" response for Wk111 question sounds alarming to me.
I totally understand how our job can make us alienated from everyone around us. That's why we need to make extra effort to be part of a society. This is the reason I love devrant, where we all can share our solitude. Having said that, social interaction in person is really important. You should try to meet new people, go out of your comfort zone, take some risk, be venurable because in the end it would be worth it.
Being alone is a very fragile state to be in, like a ticking bomb.
I'm not sure if this applies to everyone but it does to me. I would like to know your opinion guys!1 -
At my company we have half annual discussions between supervisor and employees for development and knowledge stuff.
End of last year I had a very emotional discussion for over half an hour as somebody with a year of experience on why my stuff can be considered under knowledge. He never yielded in the slightest and tried to push me down in every way.
The outcome also reflects on the payment and therefore I tried to argue that we would need a third party, like HR, to help, which was debated down as to me not being able to communicate.
This is just one of the bad things I have/had to deal with.
Sadly I am still at the company mostly for legal reasons...
Still don't know if it was the right thing to debate and not getting in touch with HR :/
Worst3 -
I feel a bit like shit.
I started a new job about 2 months ago. Company is great， culture is amazing，project is interesting， processes are what i always dreamed.
This is after having learned the job from scratch at a startup that was all you can imagine. Tedious，hoping to be something that was not yet and so on....
So we are coming at the last week of a sprint. Its Tuesday and most stories are competed. We dont have a culture of jumping on others PR， its kind of like this is my PR kind of mentality. This is not established its more like an untold rule. But coming to the end i figured， especially if i knew exactly how to fix the PR that o should jump in a make it happen.
Person who owns those prs unassigned themselves from those and added me instead kind of like: “well take it if you want it....”
What are your rules regarding others prs and sprints?4 -
Boss: Great work on remediation, we have been working on this since for over 2 weeks but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Me: might be a train, coming our way!1 -
Just saw an article about a failing attempt at the UK to create a nationwide parking app.
Mostly because the many, *many* parking meter app operators in different markets don't want a single, interoperable standard.
But, there is one all of them must support or stop working entirely.
It is the "room temperature at sea level" standard for any western user interface: point and click, text input, English UI text.
Can't AI be a front-end for that?
This is also a rant about AI. There are sooo fucking many modules for siri or Alexa to be compatible with apps like uber or Spotify. Uh, why? Shouldn't the AI, that claims to he capable of recognizing images and text, just open the app and click on the right buttons?
I know why siri and Alexa and Google assistant and and chatgpt aren't capable of that - because it would free users from UX lock-in, and the corporate overlords would rather shut down the entire fucking internet.
But now with DeepSeek and other open-source moderately useful LLMs, could we finally be nearing the day when we can ditch the millions of marginally different apps and let the AI take over the piloting of their redundant GUIs?
Because then, even if app vendors don't want to work together and end up fucking up the aggregate UX for every smartphone user, we can just flip them the bird and let the AI blur their entire brand identity in the background of a "please wait while I operate some second-page apps to realize your request" message.2 -
! Rant
Social life.
Can anyone explain to me what's happening to the world?
Earthquakes... Hurricanes... Looks like the beginning of the end of the world...
We just didn't had any big tsunami this year (knocks on wood)4 -
Manager during daily stand- up meet: We are all going to upgrade to 20GB RAM machines by the end of this week.
Me: Noice, can open two Chrome windows now. -
Today was a rather funny day in school. School starts for me at 13:40 because our timetable planners are so qualified for this job.
First 2hrs: Physics, fine its good
Second 2hrs: Discrete Maths (however you want to call it)
Goal is to write a text (30 pages, 10, etc all those standard settings). Teacher prefers Latex over word, but we can do it in word if we want. We could choose a topic, I took primes because it looked the best. I decided to use latex because I'm a fetishist and it simply looks better in the end. A classmate was arguing with our teacher about ides: texmaker vs kile. And I'm like "I use vim". So my teacher is like kk
Later that class, when we actually started doing stuff I started the ssh session to my server because I don't know any good c++ compilers for win and I'm too lazy to get a portable version of cygwin (or whatever its called). So in my server I open vim and start coding my tool for Fermat Primes (Fermatsche Primzahlen, too lazy to actually translate). And this teacher seriously is the best teacher I ever met in my life. Usually teachers are like " dude r u hakin' the school server?" and I'm like bruh its just vim and I'm doing it this way because I cannot code on your PC coz I can't install a compiler. And this teacher is like "oh hey you actually use vi, all cool kids used it in 2000. I first though u were kidding and stuff..." And we continued talking about more of stuff like that and I have to say that this is the first teacher that actually understands me. Phew
Now I'm going to continue writing my 30 pages piece of trash latex doc and hope it'll end good1 -
After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...
So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.
Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.
Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.
Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...
So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.
Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).
We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).
I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...
Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks... -
Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.
Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.
Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.
We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.
Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.
Sick & tired of this shit. -
Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.
I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..
We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..
Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea
We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.
Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..
Guess who has to do it in the end..
Many question marks about this project -
Just setup a new phone cause old one is flaking out. Spent two hours uninstalling bullshit. The default weather app had fucking tiktok video ads running in the app! Fuck you motorola! I uninstall this piece of shit weather app. Then this non shitty weather app appears. Fuck you motorola! That should have been the default. Turned off all the suggestions bullshit, uninstalled like 20 garbage pos apps, took 10 minutes to figure out how to shut off phone because new android os is fucking retarded. Fuck you google! Seriously you changed the fucking power button to pop up the stupid voice shit! Fuck you google!
The whole time I am waiting for the setting I can't change so I can return this shitty phone. Fuck you motorola!
I dunno, we will if this isn't complete shit.
STOP RUINING EVERY FUCKING THING! Fuck you shitty ass phone manufacturers!
At the end of the day, at least I ain't a retarded Apple user... I am just a retarded aNdRoId uSeR!
What did go smoothly? Transferring my old data wasn't complete shit. Its a 5G phone, but it still only seeing LTE. Fuck you T-Mobile!
I hope there was enough "fuck yous" in this post.6 -
I have been working on some relatively complex web app and since the beginning every two weeks or so my boss decides that we should bring some relatively important changes on the flow of the app on screens that i already made. Anyone can relate to this? Is this common in the tech industry as a front end dev?2
-
So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.
-
!rant
27 days ago I asked here for advice on how to mentor software engineer student that was terrible at coding.
So, we are in the middle of the mentoring, my approach is for her to get used to normal engineering tools, in this occasion she is learning Git and "kanban" (basically we are using Clubhouse for this one) and Github PR submission and approval (I'm the one who approves them, naturally) by doing.
With git, things are hard because we cannot share a terminal session (via upterm) due to her using Windows on her laptop (WSL is an option for using upterm but her internet is so damn slow doing the configuration takes way too long), otherwise teaching her use git would be smoother than it is currently, with the other tools she is gaining a good grasp of them, it pleases me that the bottleneck is with Git itself.
She is working on a hangman game with Python, nothing fancy just the terminal. I made the stories with the requirements in Clubhouse for her to work on each as a unit removing some "thought process" of reading requirements and implementing solutions (at Uni it seems the professor writes a document of several pages detailing the background of the project and the requirements, I can see how it can become confusing for some students like her).
She will start Uni again this August 10th, there is a chance that our first "session" at this will end by then, my fear is that she forgets how to use the tools she learned, so I need to find a way to encourage her to keep using them somehow.3 -
Hey guys,
I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.
Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.
Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.
However there are some cons:
My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.
Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.
Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?
They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.
All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"
What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.
On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.
Any thoughts?6 -
First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P
Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.
Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think
Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee
And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output
Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)
Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D
Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude. -
Programmer lesson #3
- We can either spend our free time learning about new technologies or building something new out of technologies we already know.
- There is no right or wrong choice between this two and sometimes we even end up doing a mix of both
- Personally I feel it's better to strike a good balance between the two approaches to advance in our field 😄4 -
Senior: “we can go remote now, but you have to report what you did at the end of the day. Ex: 7am clock in work on bla bla to 10am. 10am -12nn still working on bla bla. Til end of day.”
What a crap. Now I don’t want to work remote with this bunch of reports at the end the day. Some bullshit in here.3 -
Stop staying “.... or whatever” or “pull blah, blah, blah” when discussing requirements. What you say, we will build. If you honestly don’t care what we build then let us end this call and we can make it up.1
-
Client is a group of designers and asks for a website reskin, we made the previous one.
They spend like 4 months fixing up their design and after they're done, we developer look at it and decide what can be done and what can't be done and we go on like this for a few days.
At the end, I begin the development of the website, the data structure is already done, it's there and it's working.
The design is there, we all asked to not modify ANYTHING about it.
After I finish making the website, which is kinda unusable bc of the UI, they decide to completely redo the about page (which took like 3 days to get done)
After all it's done they just say "ok, now we gotta just add animations and transitions between all of the pages"
It took like 3 months to finish...
Is it too hard for clients to actually have a specific idea on what they want to do? -
Got a call about production was going to fail. They thought it's the application server.
I'm the end it was bogus file mods which were scrambled by the backup tool.
Why we didn't find out earlier? Because the java application was coded like this:
-------
String content;
Try {
File bla = new File
content = ... Read operation
} catch (IoException | SecurityEx | RuntimeEx ex)
// nothing we can do here
}
doWork(content);
---------
Why the fuck do we have code reviews? Why not just log or throw a Runtime Exception? Argh... I thought it would be better in enterprise applications. Perhaps I should tell them to not just use pmd, also spotbugs and sonarqube. But the department for the build tools does not have enough employees. Dang.
Anyway. Earned some money for that.
Now it's 2018 and I still get money for the same kind of bugs as 2008.3 -
This aesthetics in physics that is hard to explain to someone outside the field. How beautiful for example that you can express the whole classical mechanics in just 1 equation and electro magnetism in 4, that sense of symmetry and clarity they express. Essentially in what Einstein and others believed: that the universe is a orderly place not chaos and that its rules can be understood by our crippled minds.
And I think there is a similar notion in code. As physicists are driven to more general and powerful theories that shall some time explain all interactions of matter that we know of, programmers, I believe, strive for similar ideals: brevity, conciseness, generality, abstraction, powerfulness of your symbolic system - one line of code to end it all. -
Jfc why do phone meetings always have like 20 cumulative minutes of radio silence? I swear, I ask a question and I may as well be listening for a pin to drop over there because no one in team leadership is saying a n y t h i n g.
It's upsetting because it makes me painfully anxious because Oh God What Did I Say but more than that, it feels like this huge waste of time to just...sit there. On the phone. And then when we go over time later in the middle of pointing a user story leadership's like, "Hey, can we wrap this up?" like sorry? That's not...my fault? I'm...
And I totally get it if you can't answer my question immediately, but if it takes you more than like a minute to come up with something just gimme a, "I'll get back to you on that," and move on. No need to wait for the end days, dude. We've got lives to live and better things to do, Clearly.3 -
Why do companies have a competitive coding round when at the end, they want the person to develop things. I know most of them want software engineers instead of developers but the persons developement skills also matters and at the end when the person does not have any developement skills, how is he gonna help.
In one of the program ran by one of the biggest MNC of the World, I was selected from a hackathon and there are some peoples who are selected by a competitive coding round. Now, we are given an assignment in which we have to make a tic-tac-toe game which is AI driven. During one of the meetings with other group members and mentor, many of the persons who got entries by competative programing round does not know any bit of HTML. Out of the 5 weeks of program, they have spent more than 4 weeks in just learning basic HTML, CSS and still they are learning. I don't know even they can complete the program in given timeline or not but this has been a major flaw in recruiting process which I thought is now good.4 -
The rear ducking continues. We've built a reliable translator in the dumbest fucking way possible, it's just lovely. I simply reused the structure for feeding data to the VM assembler, an array of arrays, where there's one array of (ins [args]) per node in the parse tree.
It's nice because nodes can be solved out of order without affecting the actual sequence in which the instructions are output. And if one statement (node) equals multiple instructions, you just push multiple entries to the corresponding array, or push nothing if you need to output nothing. Easy as goblin pie.
This is enough to convert an input language to the assembly-like intermediate representation we use for the virtual machine. So then there's doing it backwards: walk the same array of arrays, and map those virtual instructions to a physical architechture. I guess I could do the encoding to native binary myself, it'd certainly be interesting to try, but I'm burnt-out already so I'll just use fasm for now.
Initial test: wrote a test program in my own stupid language, ran the translator, dump output to file, assemble that with fasm, run with r2 -d.
Crashes? No.
Runs fine? Yes and no.
For fuck's sake, I don't have syscalls. Mainly because the VM doesn't have an operating system, lmao. I was testing virtual programs by just freezing state, terminating, then dumping the fucking registers and stack to the console, we have no I/O to speak of. Not even a real 'exit', VM handles that by reading a return value every step like a mentally damaged son of a bitch.
So anyway, I manually paste the linux mambo, you know:
mov rax,60
mov rdi,0
syscall
And NOW our program can end execution without crashing.
Okay then, so does the test code work correctly?
** DRUM ROLL **
Yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, mother fucking PESO is now a compiled language, and going forward I will be expectantly receiving your marriage proposals for reviewing. Oh, but not so fast, we still need a frontend...
Well, we'll handle that in the next few days. I'm just glad to be *nearly* finished with this fucking compiler, I want nothing to do with anything else ever, but we know that's not going to happen, so Lord please end my pain.
No sponsor as this rant has been paid for by tax evasion. -
So you guys know how universities can sometimes have TERRIBLE old software that hasn't been updated for years, and sometimes you want to do a specific process over and over again so you end up automating it, now, we've built a tool that automates downloading projects from the University Moodle website, and we would like to publish it for other students to use.
Problem.
The University is using SSO.
And so far we've made the application to work by observing the network connections over the Android app version in order to extract the cookie session, now imagine that we publish this little tool, and tell people to do those exact steps, of course it's impractical and misses the whole point of the tool itself for being easy to use.
So, where can I read more about SSO, how can I figure out what the University uses? And if I had to reverse engineer this, where should I start? (It goes over 4 pages and I'm not able to capture those requests to even figure out what's going on)
In short is there a guide where you take a university SSO service and build on top of it? I couldn't find anything that is helpful. -
I was going to rant today about lack of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in some developers, this rant was based on the interviews I have seen flop over the years.
But then, as I am typing it, people in my office start having this exact conversation. We get together and discuss it and in the end we come to the same conclusion as my rant.
Now it feels like a waste to rant about something on the internet when I got to have a real in-person discussion about it.
It’s like devRant in real life!
——
The outcome of the offline chat...
- Have a cultural policy that is strictly NO ASSHOLES
- Watch for people who are nasty on the internet, especially LinkedIn
- Be careful with people who have a lot of questions for you but answer your questions with “we are in stealth mode” or something similar
- There is no point in wasting your time on these folks in an interview, just politely conclude it as fast as you can and move on -
First let me start this rant by saying: Don't use SharePoint lists as your primary data store if you can avoid it. You're gonna have a bad time.
My coworkers and I work on a system where we need to pull tons of data down from a SharePoint site and run various algorithms and operations on it. Generate reports, that sort of thing. This is all done in the browser using a Typescript React SPFX webpart. Basically using SharePoint as a DB/DAL.
Because of the sheer amount of data we end up pulling down (our system in production is the single source of truth for one of the largest companies in Canada, and they're currently building a pipeline as we speak), in order to maintain a reasonable speed while using it, we have some pretty intense caching logic implemented, logic that ensures we get new items when new items are detected, and merges changes to already exisiting objects. It's pretty brilliant, and that's before we even consider the custom paging that my coworker implemented in order to get around the IndexedDB max size of 100MB.
Well that's all well and good, and works great in production, but it is a horror to work with. Because EVERYTHING we touch on the server is cached locally, it can be IMPOSSIBLE to detect data anomalies, be they local or server side -.- You don't know how many hours I have completely WASTED fixing a "bug" that didn't really exist... Just incorrect data in the cache12 -
I’m trying to update a job posting so that it’s not complete BS and deters juniors from applying... but honestly this is so tough... no wonder these posting get so much bs in them...
Maybe devRant community can help be tackle this conundrum.
I am looking for a junior ml engineer. Basically somebody I can offload a bunch of easy menial tasks like “helping data scientists debug their docker containers”, “integrating with 3rd party REST APIs some of our models for governance”, “extend/debug our ci”, “write some preprocessing functions for raw data”. I’m not expecting the person to know any of the tech we are using, but they should at least be competent enough to google what “docker is” or how GitHub actions work. I’ll be reviewing their work anyhow. Also the person should be able to speak to data scientists on topics relating to accuracy metrics and mode inputs/outputs (not so much the deep-end of how the models work).
In my opinion i need either a “mathy person who loves to code” (like me) or a “techy person who’s interested in data science”.
What do you think is a reasonable request for credentials/experience?5 -
Mark: hey guys I wanted to connect with you all (on FB) and have a quick chat before the meeting.
Cook, Pichai, Bezos: ok, mhhm... what's up?
Mark: yes so I think we gonna be in for a grilling so want make sure we minimize the damage.
All: uhhm....
Mark: I'm suggesting we agree on the order which we join the webex so we don't look bad..
Pichai, Cook: I don't get it...
Bezos: ... oh I think I get it.... you mean appearing as FAAG?
Cook: hmm..
Pichai: what's that?
Mark: not important but anyway... The solution is simple.
Bezos: yes Sundar just login first and I guess can send us all push notifications to our phones.
Pichai: hm... Ok... Wouldn't this get us in trouble though.... This sounds like collusion...
Mark: ok guys... Uh let's just end it here then... This chat Never happened...
-
So I am working in this startup at Stockholm for 6 months and 1 week ago decided to leave.
I am still under probation period(5 days left until probation period is over), so I should have actually given 1 months notice. However we had many meetings about this and we decided that I will give 2 months notice.
Like we decided, previous week I gave founders a notice of 2 months and they agreed to it. I sent them e-mail and they confirmed it so I have proof.
This week all of a sudden they are saying that their plans have changed and there won't be much work to do for me so they are are forcing me to leave after 3-4 weeks.
I understand their point of view. Since my salary is 41k, they are spending totally 53k sek on me monthly. So their idea is to save extra 53k sek by forcing me to leave 1 month earlier. Also I've heard that they plan to hire another person 2-3 months later after I leave, so essentially they will save 150-200k sek and that's fine, I get it, it's business as usual right?
What I don't understand is how can they be so inhumane?
We agreed that notice is 2 months. I informed all my relatives (since I will be leaving Sweden). I gave notice to my landlord (deposit is 10k sek) and etc. I wanted to have 8 more weeks to plan what I'm going to do when I leave.
When asked wether I can leave by the end of this month I didn't know what to answer. I said that I will need to think about it and now I'm "thinking" about it. First of all I mentioned to them that I am risking to loose my deposit. Instead of offering any compensation, they keep asking me how they can help me to leave as soon as I can?
Situation is really messed up.
Since according to the contract I am still under probation(even though I started working earlier than stated in contract, so technically I shouldn't be under probation) I have no idea what they can do if I don't agree to their terms.
As far as I know they are obligated to give me 1 months notice if they are firing me while I'm under probation, so it doesn't seem that I would have much power in this situation.
If I would try to force them to keep me around for total 8 weeks, they can just officially fire me while I'm under probation and I will have to leave in 4 weeks. However after one week I will become a permanent employee and then they will have to give me 2 months notice if they want to fire me. So it seems that they are trying to save their face by trying to force me to leave earlier on my own will.
My current plan is to agree with them and actually leave at the end of this month. But with conditions.
First I need to get in touch with my landlord, explain the situation and hope that he would give back my deposit even if I'm leaving 1 month earlier than I've told him before.
Also, since these guys decided to mess up my plans by trying to save some money, I think I should demand for some compensation? Like 10-15k? I had plans goddamit and we agreed that notice will be 2 months via e-mail after all.3 -
So we now do continuous deployment to a development environment. Once a PR gets merged it gets deployed there. We then have to manually deploy to staging every so often.
We did this because QA wined that the Dev was constantly breaking Staging, when we contentiously deployed to that.
So now we have a staging instance that is always behind. Which isn't big deal, because its supposed to be stable right?
Well now the stupid fucking QA team is always making mountains of tickets and noise for stuff that is already fixed on the development instance.
Fucking shit that they message me about, or have to call me about. "Hey let me tell me about this thing I found." And then I'm like I already fixed that thing last week.
So it seems to be wasting everyone time to not just CDCI into staging. I have to wait weeks to retest my bugs on staging. To make sure that some other stupid fuckeshir on my team didn't undo or break my fucking fix. Shit keeps getting kicked out of QA Review. Fuck. lol.
Then there like I can update the thing on the database through the front end tool. Well tough shit buddy, your going to have to wait a week unti next staging deployment to see if that tool is fixed. This is your fault for fucking up our pure CDCI with your ideas. Now everything takes longer for everyody.
To sum things up. Some dumb bug makes it into the manual staging deployment and gets fixed an hour later. Doesn't get deployed until next fucking week. QA makes a bunch of noise about it. A thing that is fixed and in the pipe-line.
Also a dumb fucking bug will make it into staging, lets say a critical front-end back office tool that needs to send numbers to the backend, they send a fucking string instead of a number and break it. Now we have to redeploy the tool and backend to staging because there related. Then if we deploy backend we have to deploy the client facing site too. since it also depends on backend.
Its a fucking hassle.
Now if the fucking DevOps guy could do his job, and make a god-damn deploy button for all the staging servers that would be great.1 -
(going through some stupid thoughts and just wanted to vent out. sorry for your time waste if you keep reading this)
i think there's something fundamentally wrong about my personality that makes me unloveable .
i only fell for 2 girls in my life, told my feelings to 1 , she rejected nd then i rarely ever tried. this was all 10 nd 15 years ago respectively . and after that, i rarely ever thought about love and relationships as my personal life was already a running hot mess that needed my attention.
however for last 3 years i have been financially stable, goal oriented, and an achieving job person. I feel super lonely, so I have been trying to look for love and companionship among the people i know.
First was this company colleague that i kinda liked and had a crush on. I liked spending time with her, she was also a mobile dev and we tought each other lots of things and in a few days i told her that i had feelings for her. She rejected. Very well, we are still office mates, i am kinda broken but oh well.
I thought that my mistake was telling too soon, so i learnt . My personal pride also took a hit, so i started working upon whatever things i can improve : i switched for a better package, i bought financially show off things, i started working out, blah blah blah. I have a shity face and a tiny body, nd that's god fault.
next was this girl that came to be known via common friends. She was cool, lives alone, likes to roam and go to places. My friends were busy on my birthday, but she was sweet and casual enough to meet me alone . i took her to my favourite restaurant and had a nice chat with her. then nexr week we went to watch the (fuckin) barbie movie . we were known for 3 months and have met many times together or with friends, so i kinda liked her. i thought this was some exclusive treatment to me on her end, so i casually asked if we are friends or we are dating, and she straight away replies "friends" . well , alright 💔
this is stupid. why am i born on this fucking world if i am destined to be just alone most of my life24 -
Some long thoughts about state of desktop operating systems.
I always hated window management on desktop. There is basically no difference in usability between mobile and desktop in terms of application management. There is still finite amount of apps you can have in focus and you need to switch between them so they’re left from your screen.
What you end up is finite amount of screens you can connect into your computer or pounding switch context shortcut every other second.
We pushed computing so far and screen resolutions doubled from 1024x768 but the active desktop size is still the same.
For me adding additional display to laptop is not an option. What I love with remote work is that I can lay in my bed or on sofa or wherever I want to and write some code. My point is I don’t want to be stuck to my desk if I want to write / debug something.
Back to the desktop I think there is missing part of our state of desktop right now. The most we have are virtual desktops we can switch between but we can’t get parts of two desktops on same screen.
What I would love to test / develop is smooth infinite desktop with pinch and zoom - drag and drop navigation between my apps.
The problematic thing is determination of where user want’s to focus - is it fullscreen app or multiple apps on same screen and how to handle partially visible windows.
But I would love to test it. Maybe one day I switch to linux desktop just to try to implement the infinite desktop as an alternative to virtual desktops.
Maybe some rich frustrated kid would make it someday while I’m stuck at working my shit ass to pay for being able to have a decent life on this fucking planet…
I wish I can retire to focus on such things.2 -
They added Fail Mode to Super Mario Odyssey — a set of ridiculously hard maps where you’re expected to fall down, but your gameplay is recorded, and in-game NPCs laugh at you. But, if you jump really far using boosters from Mario Kart, you can end up in rock climbing mode. When you reach the end, you get to a half-oasis, half-purgatory where there is a poker table, and other NPCs greet you.
There are a lot of chips, but they mean nothing — you got to invent your own rules. Among those chips, I found a surf green-colored micro SD card. I put it into my Switch, and the whole new game opened: a hybrid of Mario and Subway Surfers where I’m being chased by half-Peach, half-Thomas the Tank Engine.
When we reached the end, we lost our furry friend. But he was hiding in a dresser drawer, with a sex doll. Not an inflatable one, mind you, and not a silicone one either: the material resembled that of Barbie dolls.
She was a human-size, pretty Caucasian girl. I talked to her. Yes, she could talk, and the voice wasn’t robotic — she was definitely alive. Despite being a completely empty shell, she was conscious, albeit very dumb.
Her name was Near. This is the joke she told me:
— Knock-knock.
— Who’s there?
— Andy.
— Andy who?
— Andy who was imprisoned for sexual assault five years ago, duh! -
Le Angular programmer
Me: I need to add all these fields across this 30 page (seriously) questionnaire to the dataLayer for Google Analytics...I'll see if I can loop over all the controls and get the native element so that I can do things with it.
Also me: WTF do you mean I don't have access to the native element? Damn it! What does Google say?
**terrible french accent**
A few moments later
**end terrible french accent**
Me: I don't want to have to create a directive to put on every single one of these fields. That's dumb. Not gonna do it...bad vanilla JavaScript?
**terrible french accent**
Several minutes later
**end terrible french accent**
Me: Wait...if we use this directive then the directive can handle all the things AND we can use it outside of this questionnaire. The rest of the app can send this data so that Google Analytics can know all the things
Man Google..You sure do know what I want before I know what I want...Are you spying on me too?1 -
I don't often have reasons to rant, but today is the one.
We had a deadline to finish a project, because today people are being trained on it. I've been working my ass off on it for a year now.
I "finished" about 2 weeks ago, meaning QA could start for real 2 weeks ago. As you can imagine for a project this long, there was bugs. Lots of them.
We did our best to fix most of them, or find work-arounds we could use during the demo.
Let's just say it isn't going great so far. We have several known bugs, which at some point may crash the app, a very low confidence in the fact that it's going to work well.
Oh and obviously the client is one who already use heavily the solution. Today we figured we never tested on a device with 0% disk space. Files are cut partway because of that, and obviously things crash.
I have a feeling there will be yelling sometime soon.
Right now I'm enjoying the calm before the storm, with coffee in hand.
Why do people still continue to promise dates to clients, after me telling them for 5 years not to do that?
We are a 2 devs team, with 11 apps on 2 platforms, 2 back-ends (one is legacy) and obviously our marketing site, which doubles up as e-commerce. We just can't promise anything, because any emergency reduce our development bandwith for new features either to 50% or 0%. There are so much known bugs it's not funny anymore, and we don't even have time to solve those.
To add insult to injury, at the beginning of the month, the SaaS provider for our legacy back-end (which have not been maintained for 2 years now) decided we had to update to PHP7.1 before 1st October. If we don't do anything, on monday this thing is broken. I hate that thing, and I hate having to maintain it even though I was promised I wouldn't have to ever have anything to do on it.
Monday will be "fun"...2 -
I wish I could get our technical lead fired for incompetence. No transparency about deadlines (it's always "Oh and we need it today"), always overpromises to business ("I told them you can deliver this in two days" - we estimated a week's worth of work), and she never documents anything except through email (she never uses Jira, which we use for our task logging - we end up creating the tickets ourselves, which she never reads or updates either when there are blockers she needs to address).
Dozens of retrospectives later trying to find a solution to her poor organizational skills have failed to produce anything remotely close to an answer. She just stubbornly refuses to change or improve. I'm at my wits' end just dealing with this on a daily basis to the point I can't wait to clock out and go home.
It's a Friday tomorrow. I intend to slack off and just put in a couple hours of work because fuck her and fuck this company and its inability to fix itself.1 -
Recently I had the "pleasure" to participate in a recruitment process for a web developer internship position.
First of all, a nice lady calls me to confirm everything and sets up a meeting. She mentions about a qualification test and gives me several technologies like python, c#. I was confused but we explained everything and she knew I was not interested in these technologies since I didn't apply for python or c# dev.
Later on I go to their company building to take the test. I get the test, I overview all tasks - 80% of the test was composed of OOP and C#. OOP - this I can understand but fucking C#? Seriously wtf? I wrote the test the way I was able to do it and at the end the guy says it was deliberate to put other technologies so that he could check how would we find ourselves in a situation like this.
Honestly, I felt like the whole process was a big joke for them. I wasted time going there just to see that I'm taking the test that includes the things posted in the job offer only in 20%.
Fuck them. -
Once upon a time I was a student. We had QBasic programming with graphics involved in it. Once I was thinking about animation as we were told in the classroom. In order to perceivably move an object, we were supposed to draw the object, erase the screen, give some delay then draw the object again at a slightly different position....repeat the same thing all-over...
I suppose I had not done this exercise even once.. I might have seen it happen at our labs, I did not like it.. because I was clearly able to make out that screen is clearing...there was too much fluctuation..it did not look good as an animation..
I tried to better the process by redrawing in black color instead of calling a clearscr() routine and keeping all other things same.
I had also put an infinite outer loop so that I can see the process all over again after the circle (it was a circle I was moving btw), started from one end of screen and reached the end of screen.
As I hit F5, I was so impressed by the results...that I kept staring at it for 10 passes of the circle.. it was pretty darn smooth.. -
Group project at uni, we're learning how to do scrum sprints. So here's a small story about all the ways it can go wrong.
We assign scrum master and product owner roles, what do those do? "We want to do design tho" they say two weeks later.
I end up doing the organization part and structuring the backlog.
"Alright, you guys will be the frontend team, your tasks are X and Y"
No response
One day before the review I ask again
"So, what's the status" (well knowing that they didn't do shit so far)
They start scrambling around, and manage to do like 30% of their tasks at best, I end up doing most of the work for them.
Next week, new sprint, our tutors somehow don't notice that literally 95% of the code has been written by me so far.
"Alright team, hopefully you will do better this time, so and so will be your subteam leader since he knows this stuff"
No response
Some guys start working on independent things without collaborating with each other, sometimes replicating stuff I already did (but obviously worse).
So that's the situation so far, I really would rather kill myself than keep working with these guys, jeeesus1 -
So. is it possible you fucking freaks could NOT mess up national geographic like you did the history channel ? in fact can we just murder anyone who watches ancient aliens or ever produced a single episode of forged in fire ? or any of this other stupid uninformative bullshit where they use sound effects and cast ruined creatures pretending to be normal and/or decent people ? thanks. this is why we're stuck you know. because you people can't be allowed to completely replace a culture with your bullshit or the world will never recover. civilization will in fact end.16
-
We have a dashboard that does stuff and one of the things that you can do is to turn these devices on or off. I the front-end guy made it look better and added some new visuals from the back-end data for better use. So I wanted to disable the off button if the device is off and vice versa. So I found out that when I turn it off or on let's say on, the device turns on but the data I get from the back-end still shows it to me as off because the data comes from the server and even though a device is on it updates the server about that periodically so I wait 10 seconds for that update.
The back-end guy tells me he just can't do anything about it and that's why it was like that at first. Then a few hours later this guy complains about this little space in between elements. Like dude, if you are such a perfect guy go find a way to make your thing work so the dashboard can have up to date information.2 -
Anybody watch the "Electric Dreams" episode called "Safe and Sound"?
This makes me think this is where we will end up with tech companies altering searches/websites for the individual. Making people believe things that are not true by representing false narratives. The actions of these individuals will reinforce narratives presented to the masses. There is already people finding that search engines and social media can sway elections by several percentage points. It seems like someone could use that same tech to target someone and turn them into a <fill in the blank here>. Urging them to some action. The rest of the world is like "WTF just happened?".
This is not a world I want.2 -
!Rant
I'm helping a customer who calls in all the time for support. At the end of a call this exchange happens.
Customer: So I have this game...
*Points at a solitaire icon on his desktop*
Customer: If we open that up, there's this little thing here...
*Game opens and there's an ad in the bottom right corner*
Customer: Can you get rid of that?
Me: I can't, not in applications like this. This is the free version of the software and add are how they make their money. If you did want to play without ads, Microsoft has the Solitaire Collection for free
*Makes shortcut to Solitaire Collection on desktop*
Me: There you go -
Working on a project for myself and to put in my portfolio. Talking about it with a (non coding) co-worker and discussing where I am in the project as I've been really excited about my progress since I'm working from scratches with no frameworks for the back-end(the only side I've worked on so far). I was talking about the registration page and getting ideas as to what I should let users put on their profiles and she chimes in, "This would actually be better as a mobile app. That would be much easier to use." Well yeah, probably, but I'm a web developer, not a mobile app developer. Plus making it a web app means users will be able to utilize it through any medium rather than just their mobile phone. I can (probably) make it responsive enough that users don't mind it being a web page rather than an app.
I'm still learning, I know PHP, Python and a little JavaScript, not really enough to build a mobile app. Yeah I'd love to make this an app, but then I gotta support multiple products across several hundred different devices in multiple languages and I'm just not ready for that. Let's get the back end finished and we can go from there.1 -
Starting to wonder why I tend to like our QA people so much: they often seem so much saner. Yes, sometimes they quibble as with the complaints about a page that is hidden from the user anyway, but they would usually not creep to deep into the hole creating most unintuitive workflows and abysmal logic.
Disclaimer: We're more like backend devs, but we had to do a UI which was beautifully slaughtered by the CEO messing with it - guess what's happening with the new one - and because of that... thing I already nearly smashed my Mac because stupid entered credentials for updating software would only be applied if you defocused once out of the password entry box. Fucked up stuff like this, which devs meddle with, give up, just shrug it off and dump it on the (l)user.
Or a more recent example: So PM wanted a stupid "Apply to all" buttons on a list that can be filtered. Guess to which items the actions should be applied if you filtered it and you currently only see a small selection in your window! Yes, of course it still applies to all items in the universe. QA guy who's just trying the buttons comes to me: "Hey, you sure this "apply all"-stuff supposed to work like that?"
Third example to end this long QA-praise: So there is this virtual appliance we build and we should support another stupid hypervisor.. and he found the kernel modules I have to activate additionally so we can just convert the existing image without having to create a new build system.3 -
I think I just realized what my biggest gripe about our career paths that I hate the most.
This is something that has worsened over time, especially the last 2 to 3 years.
As developers, we have far too many options. Some of the most powerful apps are written with languages that have hard, and I mean HARD, guardrails in place. If the app is written in a language that does not meet this criteria usually a framework has been used to install those guardrails.
We just get our minds so wrapped around the possibilities and the opportunities in the software, that we just can't focus on the end result. We're like puppies that are excited about something and we just piss all over everything.
In my career I have met far too many developers that don't have the capacity and mental fortitude to take control of their actions. Because of this I think the only way for us to stop this corruption, that I feel we are nurturing, the solutions/services that we use need to push back on us and install those guardrails for us.
All this came from a change that Microsoft put in place that seems well intended, but introduces yet another choice and a multitude of opinions in how you release code.
It used to be a simple check box. If it was checked it was pre-release, if it was unchecked it was a production release. That's it. On or off. The simplest choice you ever needed to make on a release.
Now though, there are two check boxes. One for a pre-release and one for a latest release. You can also not check either for some "ephemeral" release? So now something as easy as on or off has been made into a difficult decision on how this works within my pipeline. Now every time I make a release I have to ask myself, "which one do I check?"
I shouldn't need to spend more than a second to identify a path forward on simple shit like this, but here we are with a third choice.
Can we just stop overcomplicating shit?6 -
Oh let the rant time begin…
So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.
Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.
Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.
Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.
So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.
Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.
I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.
I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.
So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.
After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.
I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.
Frustrating is not the word.1 -
You work in a team, for a team to move forward successfully the team should work in sync. A team always has a goal and a plan to get to it. There are times when the team needs to take a different direction therefore the set path should always be available for change because our environments dictate it.
We all have different styles of working and different opinions on how things should work. Sometimes one is wrong and the other is right, and sometimes both are wrong, or actually sometimes both are right. However, at the end of it all, the next step is a decision for the team, not an individual, and moving forward means doing it together. #KickAssTeam
The end result can not come in at the beginning but only at the end of an implementation and sometimes if you’re lucky, during implementation you can smell the shit before it hits the fan. So as humans, we will make mistakes at times by using the wrong decisions and when this happens, a strong team will pull things in the right direction quickly and together. #KickAssTeam
Having a team of different opinions does not mean not being able to work together. It actually means a strong team! #kickAssTeam However the challenging part means it can be a challenge. This calls for having processes in place that will allow the team members to be heard and for new knowledge to take lead. This space requires discipline in listening and interrogating opinions without attachment to ideas and always knowing that YOUR opinion is a suggestion, not a solution. Until it is taken on by the team. #KickAssTeam We all love our own thinking. However, learning to re-learn or change opinions when faced with new information should become as easy to take in and use.
Now, I am no expert at this however through my years of development I find this strategy to work in a team of developers. It’s a few questions you ask yourself before every commit, When faced with working in a new team and possibly as a suggestion when trying to align other team members with the team.
The point of this article, the questions to self!
Am I following the formatting standard set?
Is what I have written in line with official documentation?
Is what I am committing a technical conversion of the business requirement?
Have I duplicated functionality the framework already offers?
I have introduced a methodology, library, heavily reusable component to the system, have you had a discussion with the team before implementing?
Are your methods and functions truly responsible for 1 thing?
Will someone you will never get to talk to or your future self have documentation of your work?
Either via point number 2, domain-specific, or business requirements documentation.
Are you future thinking too much in your solution?
Will future proof have a great chance of complicating the current use case?
Remember, you can never write perfect code that cures every future problem, but what you can do perfectly is serve the current business problem you are facing and after doing that for decades, you would have had a perfect line of development success.1 -
When do the front-end developers get the APIs.?
How does the communication between front-end and back-end works.?
I work in a startup and I'm getting the feeling that this communication is way off the place. Many-ier times we have to wait for weeks for the API to come. Till then, we build mock data structures and implement it. The API gives us more and less exactly what we need. And you can guess it sometimes the structure gets changed in such a way our front end code gets to be refactored.
Is it the correct way.? The whole mock data structures and wait for the API thing. One of my colleagues says, "It's much better if we get some part of API first and integrate it progressively".2 -
so i've been working with a ux/graphic designer on a pretty large project that will likely have many services attached to it, it's been in "active" development for about a year now. something that concerns me however is how uncertain i feel about what i'm doing, constant questions like "am i doing this right", "is this secure", and many like them plague my mind while i'm coding and it's really discouraging. when i was just learning i didn't really take any heed from these questions, intact i never even really thought about them so why am i now? i feel kid if i'm able to just work and have fun i will be so much more productive and happy. my partner has been learning front end and has been doing great me i'm working on front and back end. i have been making most of the decision in regards to our stack but i feel like i'm making them arbitrarily and to attribute to this fact, i have switched things up several times, we went from react to an mvc framework and now i'm considering going back to react. i just can't seem to keep on track with my decisions, if any of you have experienced this before i would really like some advice on how i can be productive and again and not fall into this never-ending abyss of doubt.3
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I just woke up from this horrific dream. It was a super dark talented mr ripely style nightmare.
This estranged relative had come back into my life and things were going fine but got weird fast. Eventually we’re at this point where I’ve already half killed then with a hammer and it’s been this insane back and forth/psychological torture as they fade between character. They’re weeping and naked crawling toward me pleading - but it’s way past that.
I’m trying to save my mom and escape - and I can tell they are about to get another wind and charge me. I look down and realize they have no shoes either - so, I spot a porcelain lamp and crash it to the ground and it shatters and fills the space with shards. Their eyes full with rage as they switch character and realize we cannot be manipulated. This is the end. We narrowly escaped as they run across the floor and cut their feet and slam to the ground in shrieking agony. Super scary.
Then I thought... this feels terrible.
Kinda like being on Reddit - or just in a bad comment thread. -
Fucking taiga wasting my day.
Client asked to set up a private taiga (taiga.io, some open source Jira alternative).
All goes fine and dandy until you need to link domain user creation to taiga user creation.
Seems I have to choose between having public registration (allows to programmatically create users, but also randoms to sign up) or use their private registry API that asks for a fucking token that is supposed to be returned from their membership/invitation API, that, guess what, doesn't return any bloody token. You can only get the token on the Django admin control panel.
Guess I'll have to end setting up LDAP or integrating with their existing gitlab, but this gig is already starting to smell, and we are close to the weekend 😡1 -
I got called for a 1 on 1 with my manager. Nothing out of the ordinary, I thought. We have those from time to time. This time it was because I've been losing the trust of my team. I haven't been communicating with them very effectively and it's taken a toll on our working relationship.
We talk on slack when we run into issues, and we give a daily update at the end of the day and during stand up in the morning.
Anyone have any suggestions on ways I can increase the communication to help earn my teams trust back?9 -
CEO wants some Genie magic!!!!
I work at a start-up were we have interns from the university go through trainings and mentorship before joing our team. Budget is very tight and spending is unthinkable.
Took me a lot of pains and sleepless night, reading of tech books and lot of strength to be were I am and I still do it because I want more but recently I got into intense coversation with CEO and he wants me to do some genie magic, he is like.....
CEO: we need more hands to do client work and build our products base , why is it difficult for New developers to start working on our code base?
ME: those guys are not developers, there is a big margin between being a developer and a university graduate in the country.
I was wondering after the whole stuff , if those guys can just grab this thing and become genius overnight, well if that happens then I am screwed, it will imply I am an asshole who spent time at simple things but we know this things can be uneasy to wrap your head around especially when the concept or language is new to you, I was pissed up at the meeting and gave some anoying unreasonable options which tells I was angry, at the end that understood my point and we got a way forward and reasonable4 -
Hey Devrant fam!, well i'm basically trying to see if i can change up this A* algo we need to implement for an assessment, and from what i know basically most people have copy and pasted it, but not me!, so there is this one called Easy A* (star) Pathfinding By Nicholas Swift and my goal is such that i would like to make it input friendly!, here is the code in my main function
def main():
start1,start2 = input('Enter co-ordinates').split(',')
end1,end2 = input('Enter co-ordinates').split(',')
drive_mount()
open_map()
# test1 = (start1, start2)
# test2 = (end1, end2)
start = (start1, start2)
end = (end1, end2)
print(f'start co-ordinates:{start} \n end co-ordinates:{end}')
our_path = astar(our_maze, start, end)
print(f'starting co-ordinates:{start} \n ending co-ordinates:{end} \n Your shortest-path:{our_path}')
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
however i am then greeted by this error, on line 62 specifically it says "TypeError: must be str, not int" and my original thought was to put str() around all of them, but that does not seem to work :-) any advice? thank you!3 -
We get our degree from a high-end higher education institution and with it we have proven that we studied Computer Science and a number of important programming languages in-depth.
Now why is it that when we get a job as a Software Developer, that people only seem to value you if you get industry certificates in those programming languages?
I understand a degree forms the basis with which to tackle modern-day software problems, but for your entire education to be practically invisible to stakeholders? That's what seems strange to me. We are valued by the number of certificates we have? Something doesn't add up. The only reason for this I can see is that the Business department hasn't had the thorough STEM education we had and thus thinks we are still novices who need to get 'trained'.2 -
Hola community!! Everyone going over this, please read this once and honestly answer my query.
I am on a probation at a startup. When i will be full-time, then the startup has promised me to provide CTC of 7,50,000(inr) i.e 10,000$ (usd).
Now I want to switch this startup company. Here are my reasons -
1. Less people, more work. - Well, that's what we call a startup. The tech team consists of 3-4 members only and we ourselves have to do the whole thing from end to end. This consists of designing the architecture, PR reviews, qa testing and coding ofcourse.
2. I see myself that I am capable enough to earn 1.5 times more than the above CTC. Also, all my friends are earning 2x the above ctc.
3. Also, there is no senior in the team except founder himself. This really seems awful as can't learn from anybody.
4. Also, i have plans of higher studying due to which i have to entrance exams. So i need to prepare them too. Switching to an established company can mean more money and less work.
Now, can anyone suggest me whether my reasons to switch are legit or vague??1 -
Funny how I sat here watching a fictional depiction of a police interrogation and it made me doubt that I know they are not effective against a specific group of people who plan everything in advance even creating or recruiting their victim ahead of time in a group activity so everything adds up.
And then also this allows collaboration with dirty cops. And of course polygraphs are inadmissible.
Thank God at least once they commit their crimes the story imprisons them. In the story.
But being a purist I was thinking how just knowing they lie is not really enough. Determining who coached them who they were in contact with how they were hooked up with them etc and what the organizational graph looks like is needed.
And even a socially retarded, nasty little empty hearted, soulless piece of garbage can stonewall away the tragedy that claims an innocent life against the background of a system that is supporting them and causes them to feel camaraderie with other more sophisticated monsters.
So then I think. A pair of skinning knives and an ekectric hand crank generator and a cauter might work better than sodium penithol was fabled to do.
So.
When a real person dedicated to justice and dedicated to the war against monsters is confronted with the truth of said monsters
And they laugh
And smirk
Or hide behind shallow masks of innocence my question is thus.
If a man so gentle and kind as I began and mostly remain can be tempted towards this
What does an angry man whose seen even more than I have whose hate for monsters burns endlessly because it's constantly fueled by exposure feel ?
In the end
Remember monsters
You think hurting something small and weak and innocent or simply alone and naive and lying makes you strong ? Makes you a big bad monster?
We're everywhere, and our hatred burns white hot. And when we explode we don't hunt weak innocent things that can't fight back. We hunt things that no one could ever pity and the death of which makes the world better.
And best of all because of this bullshit some of us can pass the polygraph even the next day.
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