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Search - "we had fun"
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Well that was a fun call I just had.
Owner of the company I freelance for: Hey I forgot to tell you something.
Me: What?
Owner: I bought you a plane ticket to fly to Puerto Rico. You're heading out in a month.
Me: What?! Why????
Owner: To set up cryptocurency mining rigs.
Me: Just because I know a bit about mining doesn't make me an expert.
Owner: We have $80k in our pocket in investments from outside parties, with another $20-30k on the way. You get 20% of the coins mined for as long as you manage it.
Me: So we're gonna set up several rigs, utilizing a b250 motherboard, g4400 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 10 GPUs each. We'll have AMD rigs for monero and Nvidia rigs for Ethereum and others. We'll use awesome miner for profitability switching on the fly. Each machine is probably going to be $5k each, possibly $4k with bulk discounts. We'll need at least 1500W per rig for power, 2000W to be safe, so we need to make sure we have ample power delivery to the mining warehouse.
Owner: I thought you weren't an expert?
Me: I'm not, but when there's money involved my motivation to Google goes into overdrive.26 -
Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.
We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).
Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.
Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.
Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).
Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.
Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.
Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.52 -
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).24 -
When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.
The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.
No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.10 -
Dutch DevRant meeting was awesome! Talked a lot, had quite some drinks, had pizza and just fun in general!
At least one selfie was required imo so here it is :). Of course, we had to include Devy ;).
Also overlooked a comment from someone wanting their face censored so took the old post down and hereby an edited version.112 -
Root ain't givin' no fucks no mo'
My boss just demanded that I join a conference call. So, I call in, and there's three other people there.
He starts chewing me out for talking with some vendor directly (their VP emailed me directly and asked for a few things, and i was instructed to make him happy). Apparently I used "confusing wording" and "did not talk his language." Bossman was really getting into gear for a ten-minute berating.
It turns out that the guy in question only read half of my first email, and totally ignored the second email where I told him everything was finished and live and working. I told my boss quite bluntly that the guy should have read what I had written, and that he was an idiot. The boss's defense of the guy? "Well, he's a sales guy." I just laughed at him.
Later, bossman started in on me (once again) for not making enough progress on this ridiculous shared-spreadsheet sales tool he wants, saying "We discussed this a week ago!"
I casually reminded him that we had talked about it for the first time ever on Friday night (today is Tuesday), and he had said it wasn't going to be a priority for the next three weeks(!). Again he stopped in his tracks. Again, I laughed at him.
Guy's a tool and I'm so done with caring.
Root's going to be flippant and angry. Root's going to have fun (:
What's he gonna do, fire me? 😂25 -
Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)53 -
Me and my love-hate Linux.
I lost virginity really early. In the age of 5 it was my first time with windows 95. I spend almost 10 years with Windows before something happened that would change everything. I met Linux. Her forename was Arch. I had a crush on her right from the beginning. It didn't take long for me to abandon windows. Arch had everything I wanted. She had latex which was pretty hot and looked simply and elegant on her. Sometimes she was really hard to deal with and almost drove me crazy, but I knew I fell in love.
Until that day. I had to write a short paper which was quite fun and Linux helped me alot. It was a breeze to work with her. The evening before the deadline she was quite thoughtful. She sometimes was, so I thought it'll be alright, but this time was different. She struggled a bit, so I put her to sleep and she never woke up. I brought her to the emergency lab which was open 24/7. Since no one was there I had todo the surgery myself. After 5 hours I was almost to tired to continue when she finally woke up. I asked her about the things she should remember for me - then I killed her. I started to hate Linux for what she had done to me. The unbelievable stress and horror.
I returned to Windows. Besides that she got a bit more curious what I was doing when and where nothing really changed and she was glad to have me back. I just was happy how simple our relationship was.
One day then, I couldn't believe it at first, I met Archs sister. Manjaro. No matter how strange that is, but it was as if I would meet Linux again for the first time. She was just a bit simpler but as flexible as arch. Since then we are happy together. It seems that we both just grew up a little.
And with Windows? She got even more curious! Actually I have the feeling she is stalking me now, but I don't regret anything!15 -
Developed an android app for the client. It was going great. Prototype for the initial (and static) content to show to the client was on the way. All until...
*goes back in time to when we were developing the prototype*
The asshole boss: "Wow this is good, just remove the login after the splash screen. Redirect it to the dashboard immediately."
Me: "What? Why?"
TAB: "He (the CEO of our company) said that the client doesn't need to see the login."
Me: "Well, alright." (Orders are orders, better remove it)
*A few days later, we present the prototype to the CEO. He'll be the one talking to the client. TAB isn't in this meeting.*
CEO: "Where is the login screen?"
Me: *dumbfounded and confused, in silence, and pressure rising*
The Good Boss: *whispers* "Where is the login screen? I thought I told you guys it should be there."
Me: *whispers* "TAB told us to remove it."
TGB: *Looks toward CEO* "TAB told us to remove it."
CEO: "Ugh. TAB is sick."
A little giggle. Nonetheless the meeting continued. He was displeased. I was a little guilty. The login screen's code was already there. Just couldn't show it since the app doesn't redirect there anymore.
*A discussion after the meeting*
TGB: "Why'd you guys remove the login?"
Me: "You and TAB had a meeting with the CEO the other day. After the discussion TAB went to us and told us to change it."
TGB: "But the CEO said no such thing! Anyway, let's go back to the office and straighten this out tomorrow."
*The next day, TAB was in the office*
TGB: *Chatting on messenger with me* "He is completely denying it."
Me: "WHAT?"
TGB: "He said he never told you guys anything. And he is persistent. I kept telling him it was his fault, but he denies all of it. He never approached you guys to change anything."
Me: "Well yeah. I guess we magically thought to ourselves and said, 'Hey, let's remove the login screen for fun. Let's show them less content because that's how we please our clients!' -_-"
Seriously, what kind of assholefuckery is this. This shit is a whole new level. I am so TRIGGERED.
I don't really care that the meeting didn't go as planned. Just MAN UP AND ADMIT YOUR MISTAKE YOU FILTHY SON OF A GOOSE. Never listening to this asshole again. Thought he could be trusted. I will always ask my good boss next time.18 -
I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".
So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.
But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.
So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.
So THE FUN began.
Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.
One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.
So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.
So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.
While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.
Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.
So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.11 -
Had this recently with a client, mysql server of one of our shared hosting servers went down:
Senior engineer 1: heads up guys, mysql of {server name} is down, working on it! *calls second engineer in*
Support people: thanks for letting know! (in case clients call about it)
*triiiingggg*
Me: good afternoon, how can I help you?
Client: this site which we manage for a shared customer says it can't connect to the database...
M: is it hosted on {server name of mysql problems}
C: yes.
M: there's a mysql disruption there right now, we're working on it!
C: *starts guilt tripping me about thy they chose us for stability reasons and now this happens*
M: sir, I can't change this situation so you can go on and on about that but it's not going to help anyone.
C: okay, so what can I tell my client?
M: you can tell that we have a mysql server disruption right now and are working to fix it as soon as possible!
C: and what am I going to tell my client if they don't accept that answer?
M: you can tell that we are fixing this disruption as soon as possible.
C: yes you said that but what if they don't accept that answer, what am I going to tell them THEN?!
M: Listen, sir. We have a disruption right now. It's not fun but whether I tell this by writing it to you in a fairy tail or shout it at you, it's not going to make a difference.
We have a disruption and we are working on i....
*click*
Well, fuck you too.7 -
Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..
Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.
In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.
For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.
We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.
It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.
😅4 -
This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.
Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.
At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.
Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.
I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!
Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.
And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.
But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.
Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.
We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.
Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.
From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.
Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.
The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.
Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!13 -
Making a game with my friend. He drew shitty images (sprites) and I made a shitty game. We had so much fun!4
-
I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of awesome people early into my career.
At the company I worked where I met @trogus, I became friends with a few people, including Tim, that I think were my favorites. It was a really fun bunch and though it may sound immature, but a lot of the times it felt like we were kids so for me coming out of college it was awesome.
There's so many stories from working with that bunch that come to mind for me. One of my best friends there was this guy "Dirty Devin." He started around the same time I did. When I first met him he seemed really boring and professional. After getting to know him, and after he'd been at the company for a few weeks, his actual personality started to show and he was like a child (in the best way possible) and was absolutely hilarious/made the work place a blast.
Our office had a ping pong table and neither Dirty Devin or I had ever really played. We started playing against each other and we both very quickly got really good.
I also met a guy named Botond (he's the one in the photo). He was very similar to Dirty Devin. Lots of crazy stories but the photo is actually a really funny one - we both got to work a few minutes early one day. And we couldn't get into the office. We kept trying to enter the door code and it wouldn't work. We kept joking that we must both be fired. Turned out that they had fired someone the night before and didn't bother to send out the new door code :/
And of course, Tim. I think we clicked pretty early on and had the same friend group at the company.2 -
We were all 16 once right? When I was 16, my school had a network of Windows 2000 machines. Since I was learning java at the time, I thought learning batch scripting would be fun.
One day I wrote a script that froze input from the mouse and displayed a pop up with a scary “Critical System Error: please correct before data deletion!!”. It also displayed a five minute countdown timer, after which the computer restarted.
I may or may not have replaced the internet explorer icon on the desktop with a link to my program on the entire student lab of computers. Chaos.12 -
Second semester
Java - OOP Course
We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone
Neat shit
And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.
BUT
Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.
A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.
Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.
3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.
So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.
I loaded that.
The bug is back.
But
REPRODUCIBLE.
OMG.
So I started setting up breakpoints.
And guess what the issue was.
FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS
(Basically the calculations were not as expected)
Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.
Most satisfying night yet.
Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.
Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.18 -
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 -
Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"
Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"
Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"
Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."
Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."
Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."
Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"
Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."
Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."
Cprn: - "Please do?"
Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"
Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."
Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."
Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."
Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."
Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."
Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"
Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."
Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."
Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."
Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."
Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"
Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."24 -
One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.
We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.
Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.
This is where the horror began.
I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.
It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.
"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."
Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.
The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:
"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."
Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!
I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.
Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.
"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."
Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"
"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"
What. The. Fuck.14 -
Even though I'm a web developer I work in a very small IT department, which includes just me and my colleague.
Yesterday we got a pretty usual request. Someone forgot the password to an excel file. We already started a brute force attack, but we had some fun going through the worst passwords we ever stubbled over in our carrier.
He was like:"Maybe it's just his name?"
Me: "Oooh or maybe it's just the brand and 123?"
We laughed a lot. Not really considering we could crack this "important" file.
But it really worked out. The password was the brand of the business unit and "2017".
I've sent everthing back to the user, telling him exactly how we cracked it... His answer was:"Oh yeah! I knew it was something easy, so me and x could remember it easily!"
...
Why do you forgive easy passwords anyway? If I can crack it within 5 minutes... Everyone can! ...
And if you do it to "remember it easily"? Why the fuck don't you remember it?4 -
Private chat pops up. (- separator for new message)
Hello
- (1 min)
Can you help me?
- (2-3 mins)
Please it's urgeeeent!!!!!
- (1 min)
Come on you're online, I see the green dot.
- (5 mins)
Ok then I won't be able to work. Will write this down in the ticket.
- (15 mins) - new private chat pops up
Hi, we need to talk.
- (3 mins)
Regarding ticket XY, why aren't you responding? It's really urgent.
- (5 mins)
Please notify me as soon as you're available, it's really important!!!
- (20 mins, new private chat opens)
Hi mate, I think the devs are up to mischief. Said you're not reachable, I'll try to poke them with the stun gun.
- (60 mins, message in the official and only endorsed support room)
@all We broke staging, <Me> never responds and <Team mate who tried to use the stun gun> wasn't helpful either.
We really need this now!!!!!!!
- 30 mins later... la me:
@all I was in a meeting with the stakeholders as we had an priority meeting... What was so important that you not only ignored the rule of not messaging privately and even ignored <team mate>s instructions?
- 5 mins later, answer
no need to be so unfriendly.... We broke staging as we had to test stuff out for next week's sprint review [something which is still 3 days away or sth like that]. We really need to take a look in the team at it and for that we must have staging working now!!!!
- (La me)
If you need it urgent now, you didn't plan ahead. And if you didn't plan ahead, you have to wait for others. The sprint review and all other important days are planned ahead for a reason.
- (Silence)
- (20 mins later, private chat, team lead)
Will you finally fix staging now?
- La me
If it could wait 3 hours now and you / your team ignored all netiquette, it can wait till next day, too. We had this discussion more than once, I don't think I need to explain this further.
(Silence)
All in all, the joys of communication...
Now the fun stuff is when this not only happens with 1 team, but many teams....
Having 35 - 40 private chats and chat window looking like a christmas tree thx to the immeasurable amount of notifications and colors... Yay...
Did I mention that I hate the ego some programmers have -.10 -
One comment from @Fast-Nop made me remember something I had promised myself not to. Specifically the USB thing.
So there I was, Lieutenant Jr at a warship (not the one my previous rants refer to), my main duties as navigation officer, and secondary (and unofficial) tech support and all-around "computer guy".
Those of you who don't know what horrors this demonic brand pertains to, I envy you. But I digress. In the ship, we had Ethernet cabling and switches, but no DHCP, no server, not a thing. My proposition was shot down by the CO within 2 minutes. Yet, we had a curious "network". As my fellow... colleagues had invented, we had something akin to token ring, but instead of tokens, we had low-rank personnel running around with USB sticks, and as for "rings", well, anyone could snatch up a USB-carrier and load his data and instructions to the "token". What on earth could go wrong with that system?
What indeed.
We got 1 USB infected with a malware from a nearby ship - I still don't know how. Said malware did the following observable actions(yes, I did some malware analysis - As I said before, I am not paid enough):
- Move the contents on any writeable media to a folder with empty (or space) name on that medium. Windows didn't show that folder, so it became "invisible" - linux/mac showed it just fine
- It created a shortcut on the root folder of said medium, right to the malware. Executing the shortcut executed the malware and opened a new window with the "hidden" folder.
Childishly simple, right? If only you knew. If only you knew the horrors, the loss of faith in humanity (which is really bad when you have access to munitions, explosives and heavy weaponry).
People executed the malware ON PURPOSE. Some actually DISABLED their AV to "access their files". I ran amok for an entire WEEK to try to keep this contained. But... I underestimated the USB-token-ring-whatever protocol's speed and the strength of a user's stupidity. PCs that I cleaned got infected AGAIN within HOURS.
I had to address the CO to order total shutdown, USB and PC turnover to me. I spent the most fun weekend cleaning 20-30 PCs and 9 USBs. What fun!
What fun, morons. Now I'll have nightmares of those days again.9 -
An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..
She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.
The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.
AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...
A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me
Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"
She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.
And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...
Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.
He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.
Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!
Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.
all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.
the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:
Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.
Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.
Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?
Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends
Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.
After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.8 -
There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD4
-
Story about an obscure bug: https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/...
"We had a ‘fun’ one on LittleBigPlanet 1: 2 weeks to gold, a Japanese QA tester started reliably crashing the game by leaving it on over night. We could not repro. Like you, days of confirmation of identical environment, os, hardware, etc; each attempt took over 24h, plus time differences, and still no repro.
"Eventually we realised they had an eye toy plugged in, and set to record audio (that took 2 days of iterating) still no joy.
"Finally we noticed the crash was always around 4am. Why? What happened only in Japan at 4am? We begged to find out.
"Eventually the answer came: cleaners arrived. They were more thorough than our cleaners! One hour of vacuuming near the eye toy- white noise- caused the in game chat audio compression to leak a few bytes of memory (only with white noise). Long enough? Crash.
"Our final repro: radios tuned to noise, turned up, and we could reliably crash the game. Fix took 5 minutes after that. Oh, gamedev...."5 -
So I teach a Lego mindstorms class to 5th graders for fun on my spare time. My other classes the kids usually seek me out for any programming questions but this one class of rambunctious boys would always say they're fine when I offered to help and then when they thought I wasn't looking would ask the male teacher or would pretend to listen to my explanation to not hurt my feelings. Finally my co worker told the guys "you know guys she went to school to program she does this for a living full time when she's not here. **room goes silent** In fact she's way better at programming then me". The whole room the boys mouths were open and one kid actually said noooo. We blew those kids minds. Most quiet day of class we've ever had after that.11
-
I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.
But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.
So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.
So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.
So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.
Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)
So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.
I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now15 -
Had a fun little conversation with a potential employer...
Him: We use git for version control. To work with our team you'll be expected to do the same and be proficient at it.
Me: Not a problem. I am well versed with all things git! May I ask, what does your work flow look like?
Him: All of our source lives in a single repo and everyone commits straight to master.
Me: 😐...
Him: Conflicts will not be tolerated.6 -
8:30 - get into office, boot windows
Windows: "Oh man, here's this update. If you're not doing it now, I will start in 15 minutes. No questions asked!"
9:45 - checking update status
Windows: "Well i'm nearly finished, just give me a sec..."
9:55 - whats's my pc doing
Windows: "Hey mate, I did it! I also restored those neat shortcuts to MS EDGE for you. Please use my browser"
10:00 - Well i can finally start working
Windows: "Yeah... you would. But i had to remove theese few applications, because they are not compatible anymore."
11:00 - Okay, installed all my stuff, did some coding. Time to test it. Lets boot up my VM.
Windows: "Oh so sorry mate. Not gonna show my network devices to Virtualbox anymore. Have fun reconfiguring your connections without them."
Fuck this fucking Windows 10!
The only reason we have Win10 on our machines, is because people in my office panicked the last day of the "free upgrade period" (and i was on holidays)...16 -
TL;DR: disaster averted!
Story time!
About a year ago, the company I work for merged with another that offered complementary services. As is always the case, both companies had different ways of doing things, and that was true for the keeping of the financial records and history.
As the other company had a much larger financial database, after the merger we moved all the data of both companies on their software.
The said software is closed source, and was deployed on premises on a small server.
Even tho it has a lot of restrictions and missing features, it gets the job done and was stable enough for years.
But here comes the fun part: last week there was a power outage. We had no failsafe, no UPS, no recent backups and of course both the OS and the working database from the server broke.
Everyone was in panic mode, as our whole company needs the software for day to day activity!
Now, don't ask me how, but today we managed to recover all the data, got a new server with 2 RAID HDDs for the working copy of the DB, another pair for backups, and another machine with another dual HDD setup for secondary backups!
We still need a new UPS and another off site backup storage, but for now...disaster averted!
Time for a beer! Or 20...
That is all :)4 -
!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.
As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.
So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.
Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...
The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.1 -
This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.
Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.
The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.
At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...
So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!
Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.
'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'
Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!
I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.
So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.
Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!
My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.5 -
Management had the idea to have a hackathon on saturday. Everybody should gather ideas what to do on this day, but top priority is to have fun.
In the end, management decided that we should work on tasks from our backlog.
Yeah... unpaid work on saturday... sounds like fun10 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.
Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.5 -
Not laughing.
Not cursing.
Both for interviewing and being interviewed.
Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......
"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."
"Ok, what did you do?"
"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."
"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"
"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".
I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.
When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.
IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.
Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...
For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)
Even worse is the patsy.
When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:
- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....
All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.
:)
The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...
A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".
And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.
"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".
Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath. -
It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.
The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.
Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.
At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.
To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.
The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.
We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.
Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.
After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.
We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.
End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.
We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.
We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)
PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.4 -
Really upbeat quirky music on full blast. That really gets me pumped up.
*Story Time*
In my previous company, I had the best co-workers both technically and personally. So this one time we had a product launch scheduled and there was a shit load of tasks that had to be done before the launch. The entire team used to work for 18 hours straight almost daily to meet the deadline. Sometimes stress used to get the better of us, so to help ourselves relax, we used to play pranks on each other. Like this one time one of my friends had left his email logged in. Obviously we shot out a mail to the entire company group that I have become a dad. The funny part about this was he wasnt even married. So things like these used to keep us going and there was always laughter and fun going around.3 -
I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.
I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.
At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.
They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."
I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.
He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.
We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.
A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.
I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.
I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.
As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)4 -
Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.
At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....
Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.
I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.
Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.
While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.
A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.
That is 2 strikes.
So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.
-- To be continued.10 -
WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?
WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?
When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.
I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.
Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.
The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.
I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.
She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.
She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.
She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.
And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.
And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.
But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.
I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.
I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.11 -
When we published our first game like Portal 2 mod in Apr 2016 and had the lead (female btw) developer of the largest Portal 2 mod let's play our small mod and say "pretty good, fun to play!"
Today >1100 downloads. <35 -
Today was a good day. The toilet door was stuck for two hours because the lock broke. After the locksmith came and tried his best, we had to kick the door in. Fun fact: a fellow dev was stuck on the inside...10
-
Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.
You would think.
After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.
Now the real fun begins.
Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.
Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.
After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.
Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.
This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.2 -
Professor in Programming 1 & 2, 54 years old, divorced, has two kids in our age, golf player
Every time, he came in, we started with the lecture, than he started to talk about politics, greta, the stupid young people, specially the women, always the women. While he was talking to himself or asking us students very personal questions to judge us and recommend how we should do it better, he was talking himself into rage. We never learned something about cs or java longer than 10 minutes, the other long hours he only talked and talked about personal stuff or politics.
One day he asked us about the method of training a dog. You train a dog with pushing his face into his own pee. Than he said with us it is more difficult and that if he would be allwoed he would use methods like this and other very effective stuff on us.
He always starts his emails with
Dear humans
To make fun about gendering.
Another day a student came 1 minute to late, the prof stopped talking became very angry, first he went to a armchair and was sitting there for 15 minutes without saying a word, than he left without a word the room for 30 minutes and when he came back we had to listen to one of his monologues for some hours like usually.
And these are only some samples, he always acted like a little kid, but our university is very poor and i dont think they can effort a better professor for this.9 -
FUCKING FUCK! THE TEAM LEAD WANTS ME TO MAKE AN UNNECESSARY UPDATE, AND IN THAT TOO HE WANTS TO IMPLEMENT A HALF ASSED FEATURE. Upon telling him what it takes(which he doesn't understand shit about cuz he's not from webdev background and has the level of experience that I had when I was midway my first webdev book), not to mention that he hasn't even seen the code of the project I've worked upon, which I got from an intern they fired last year cuz of not working and shitting around everywhere in the code(I asked if we could start afresh and he says that it'll take too much time - guess what, it took us two extra weeks already cuz of that and half of our required features can't be implemented cuz the code is beyond any hope), he tells me that "The client won't need this feature, but we're thinking of more and more features to provide (WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK).
Okay, you wanna sell your product; fine. I suggested that if we're letting the client select the time stamp on the initial date, then we should let him select the time stamp on the ending date too, right?
"No, we'll not provide this feature" ARE YOU FUCKING BONKERS?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM WITH YOU?!?!
I'll have to make major breaking changes in the code, for which I'm not the only one working on. Great.
This, coupled with the fact that he speaks unbelievably slow and it's so irritating cuz he repeats himself thrice.
What happens(has already happened), when he'll show this to the seniors, he'll say that this is either unnecessary/will suggest a major change, which WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH FUCKING BETTER IF TOLD BEFORE I START WITH THE CHANGE, YOU FUCKING CUNTS
I thought this would be fun. Well fuck me.2 -
We had a server that crashed every single Christmas four years a row. Last year I put a cross and garlic on it for fun. Everybody laughed at me... but it didn't crash!
Soo... should I protect it from the Christmas ghost again, this year too? 🤔👻1 -
Today the lead developer and I where loling and wtfing hard to the following code:
if ($looked_column == true)
{
$trunca = 1;
}
else
{
$trunca = 1;
}
Mind you, we had no clue why he named the variable $trunca, and even then it had been set at the top of the file as 1 to begin with....was never used up to this line and $looked_column had also a set to true.
This is why a lot of people give php a bad reputation. This right here is why people make fun of php......15 -
Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"
We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^8 -
So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.
The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d
Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.2 -
It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.
During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.
I guess I was just ahead of my time?6 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
Story, !rant.
This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.
So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.
So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.
So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?
Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.
But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.
I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.
Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.7 -
During interviews about a month ago my friend and i saw an astonishing girl.we didn't knew her name but we had the interview list containg names of more than 1200 candidates which were selected. Fast forward today we started talking about that day and all of sudden we thought wouldn't it be fun if we used the interview list to find her on Facebook. Around 400 of the candidates were female. Instead of doing it manually i decided to write a python script.
Give script list of names
It will go to all the Facebook profiles which came up by performing a Facebook search though your fb account and take a screenshot of every profile
All of it is done through automations
At the end you just have to look at the screenshots manually
p.s. we failed to find her name. You've to trust me when i say we're not creep😂29 -
So I had a fun week.
It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.
Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.
For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.
Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-
To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.
I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!
woah.5 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
I attended a data science meetup recently. There were many suits walking around the corridors because of some startup night taking place at the same time.
After some time a guy appeared infront of me, telling me he was afraid at first that this was a meetup for suits only. Until he saw all the dev and rock stickers on my notebook. He was reliefed that there was some nerd at least.
He asked what I was doing so I told him about my startup about optimization of heat generation plants jada jada. I asked him back.
He replied, "Well, I'm also part of some small startup. Among the things we develop processors and stuff. It's called Intel."
Well dude, that was nicely played. I had a lot of fun that evening.5 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta7)
//
After "Active Discussions" (implemented in v2.0.0-beta5), it was time to implement the last missing app section, "Collabs".
This is the biggest update since the start of the public beta, over 100 changes (new features, improvements, fixes).
Changelog (v2.0.0-beta7):
- Support for Collabs
- Notifs Tabs
- & more... read the entire changelog here: https://jakubsteplowski.com/en/...
Microsoft Store: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
I'm really happy to announce that the unofficial UWP client has now 100% of the features available on the official Android and iOS apps (if we don't count Push Notifs 😝 but they will arrive soon too).
It took several months of hard work, but I made it... it's here, it reached the level I wanted to reach since the beginning of this project (May 2016) (if we don't count Push Notifs).
I did it a lot of times, but I think they deserve it everytime, I would like to thank all the people who made this possible, all the active users, who opened issues, suggested features, or just used my app and had fun, posted positives (and negatives, motherfuckers, just kidding, maybe) reviews on Microsoft Store etc.
The entire community who made me want to do this project.
You're amazing guys!
Of course this is not the end of this project, I want to bring the app out of the beta and support it until I will be able to do it, releasing updates almost simultaneously with @dfox and @trogus.
Planned to be done:
- Support for Anniversary Update
- Push Notifs
- Custom Themes
- Close the 15+ issues (features requests, fixes) on the issue tracker on GitHub
- Ranti by @Alice: Your devRant Assistant <- I really hope it will become a thing :)
- Your future suggestions -> post them here: https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
Thanks for the attention,
Good ranting!10 -
A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.
I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.1 -
Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.
It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.
Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.
This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.
Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.
I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)
Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.
By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.
Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.
Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.
It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.
I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.6 -
It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).
// Sorry for the long post!
EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces8 -
!dev at all
Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.
While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.
My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."
I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"
"But i get all anxious and shit"
"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"
Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.
So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.
Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.
"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"
"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"
"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"
DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!
"Ok, but only if its you"
Daaaaaaaaaamn
Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.
Lord knows I had my fun with them.10 -
Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...
You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...
Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.
I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...
I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.
To the future!5 -
For a project day we had to write a game of our choice in Java.
"You should make this game using the JSwing library and make each component a JComponent"
Later I learned you can simply use a Bitmap as a canvas.
NEVER. EVER. BASE. YOUR. GAME. ON. SWING.
It inefficient to the top of my taskmanager. I had to wrap everything with something like a virtual playground where I had to manage everything myself to not roast my cpu.
I had alot more fun debugging hundred lines of C code with print statements than writing that shit2 -
So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
I had some fun once with "inspect element" while I were at my ex-girlfriends house. She asked me what I was doing and I told her about changing websites locally. I wanted to show her an example and so I went onto her school's website and played around a bit. I than changed the latest "News" post to a post about a food fight event organized by her school. She than took a photo from that post and send it into her schools WhatsApp group. They all went crazy how the school could do something like this and we had a good giggle. After a few minutes she told them that it was a fake and that they should stop believing everything that someone posts on WhatsApp. (Around this time a post was going around that was used to spread Missinformationen about the Berlin police)6
-
Post Anger Rant (Beware, Long rant ahead)
So there is this project we have been working for months, most of the devs involved are jr students so I was leading them in the architecture and what to do and they were doing it, the progress was slow but safe and fun.
On the team there was this guy, someone I trusted and in who I had special interest for his skills, so I let him own the github repo.
So the day of the first demo I pull the backend changes ( I had been working on front end ) and I realize that the code was different, so I started using my super awesome forensic skills to find what happened,and when I say different I mean a totally different architecture different database connections, different service pirts, basically other project, so during my criminal investigation I found out this guy I trusted had never really worked with us, from the beginning he went solo working on his own project and changing everything because of some tutorial he found on the internet, so I decided to reset to the previous version just to find out that he had already deployed the code and that a lot of fixes that we should have were only on his version.
So I went and confront him telling him that he did wrong and he had to learn team work and that I was trying to teach them good practices and he waits and asks me "so, my code was wrong?" Seriously what da hell dude? I'm talking about team work and all you can think about is your code.
Finally he admitted his mistake and repented (I think), but seriously how arrogant must you be to ignore a whole team, specially when on your first real project.undefined pichardo long rant up vote me will support soon pichardo for president screw him team work8 -
Interviewee was googling the answers to the technical questions on a Skype interview. Their CV said they had 2 years experience.
Us: "How does X work?"
Them: "Uhh...what's X?"
[clack clack clack of interviewees keyboard]
Them: "Oh.....X! [reads verbatim from the tutorial]"
We had some fun asking ridiculous questions for a while, seeing how big a hole they could dig for themselves. Once we got bored of making fun of them we ended the interview early. Much less awkward on Skype than IRL.7 -
'Twas a fun day today...
Construction workers cut into the fiber line to a medium sized company this morning. We got the splicer guy on site quickly, but it is going to take a while, because the whole cable needs to be extended a bit in order to repair it. We got the company online through a LTE modem for the repair duration. Oh and also had to set up VPN on all PCs to connect to their server in our datacenter. A fun day indeed.9 -
The girl I'm talking to right now (not officially dating), I met because I knew web dev. I've mentioned the story before a couple times, so I'll just give a TL;DR
She has a graphic design class with my friend. The class was doing basic web development and had no idea what they were doing. I decided to go in there to help out some. Started talking to her, now everything's fun.
Here's a picture of us from Friday (you can only see my face tho, not hers). We were just being cute, as ya do.12 -
This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.
I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.
Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.
A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.
I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.
These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...
I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.
A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.
Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.
Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)
Anyways, goodnight everyone.5 -
Best coworker I've had and still have is a girl I've met in training. Whenever our shifts overlap I work best. Last time this happened we watched Pink Floyd's The Wall while solving tickets and taking chats. Other times we rock out to music and every time we laugh at some customer's way of describing their issue. She also has a great lifestyle, she's an actress and she's got loads of fun stories to tell.
P.S. Hello, world!8 -
Introduction to graphics
Lecturer says "this is a very practical course. In fact I think we should have a practical exam"
All students agree. He would sort out that matter.
Meanwhile he taught us how to making shapes in java, then a house, then a game...
And the exam was for us to make a building where a user can walk through the building using the arrow keys...
What fun we had. We got out marks...and everybody did well!!!!1 -
So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.
This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).
UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.
Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.
I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.
It wasn't an image. It was the host server.
In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.
Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.
The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.
Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.3 -
It works.
How I hate that sentence.
Whenever that sentence pops up, I wanna take a frying pan, make some bacon, eat the bacon and slam the still hot pan with grease through someone's face till the skull breaks.
Why has he so many anger issues, one might ask.
Usually the sentence "It works" means that after looking at "working thing" it works wrong in 95 % of all cases, but hey - for 5 % it at least does *something* right. Not everything, don't get ya hope up.
We had this fun topic happening again today and I'm still too angry to sleep.
Lucene analysis of texts in Elasticsearch.
Stopword list? Multiple word n-grams per line, duplicates, not lower cased, not properly encoded.
Tokenizers? Duh. Why should one put them in proper order.... Or more realistic: There is an order in tokenizers necessary *devs with shocked faces*.
Language specific details... UHM. Wait. Languages are different? There are edge cases in languages? *more shocked faces*.
Even more shocking that if an text processing pipeline is implemented horribly wrong, it delivers wrong results. *mind blown*.
But our unit tests (this goes out to @kiki) were working.
Yeah. You dumb nuggets who even an amoeba would be ashamed of, when you only do positive tests in unit tests with the most obvious working examples, then your unit tests are just useless waste of nibbles.
Some of the devs are really a fucking waste of genetic information, should have probably ended better in a sock.
If this sounds too harsh, they had 2 weeks.
In just 3 hours I found out that they can redo that with supervision.
-.-
I'm getting too old for that shit. Seriously.4 -
Hey all! It's a me, Skayo, you might know me from the very early years of devRant, my highlight bot, my random quote bot, the devRant-Community on GitHub or any of the dumb rants and things that I've posted during my time.
Since I'm currently doing a cleanup of my old GitHub repos and this platform is still somewhat active, I have decided to pass on or publish all my projects and things I've created for this community back in the days.
Firstly, I have just published and transferred the source codes for the @highlight bot, the @RandomQuote bot, the @here bot, and some weird bot framework to the devRant-Community GitHub organization (https://github.com/devRant-Communit...).
Feel free to check them out if you've ever wondered what awful, awful code was running in the background all these years!
Secondly, I am offering any of the following to anyone who's interested:
- Ownership of the "devRant-Community" organization on GitHub (https://github.com/devRant-Communit...)
- Credentials for the @RandomQuote devRant user
- Credentials for the @highlight devRant user
- Credentials for the @here devRant user
- Credentials for the @devNews devRant user
- Ownership of the "devNews" Discord server
- Ownership of the "Community Programming Book" Discord server
- Anything else that I've forgotten about, maybe check the comments
If you're interested, message me on Discord "@skayodev" or anywhere else I am active under that alias (f.e. Telegram).
I might do a little background check to prevent abuse and I AM NOT SELLING THEM, just giving them away.
Thank you devRant for all the fun we had together and for introducing me to some of my current best friends :)
A thank you especially to @dfox and @trogus, who have created this amazing platform! (and sorry for all of the bullshit I did back then lol)
I wish you all the best <3
~ Skayorandom skayo random quote highlight bot here devrant-community devnews community programming book farewell skayodev11 -
Note that the example tags for rants includes Xcode... There is a reason.
In 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh and we got a computer that could barely handle multiple windows on the screen. But by 1986 multiple windows all over the place.
In 1985 Microsoft introduced Window 1.0 Yes boys and girls, no "s" because it hand only one Window. 7 years later in 1992 Microsoft got their head out of their ass and produced "MDI" or Multiple Document Interface and woohoo, had multiple windows on the screen... big boy pants 8 years after Mac.
Today we have Xcode from Apple. The old Window 1.0 engineers are apparently alive and well as Xcode is a One Window Trick Pony and if you fight with it, it starts randomly jamming your separate Windows into tabs into one window, completely fucking up your spatial organization of your working source code.
It is like the bastards going into a blind man's house and re-arranging his furniture for fun.
Xcode - it's only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.5 -
Debugging a system error with a good team of fellow developers/devops people is fun.
We had an issue on Friday where we were getting a pretty cryptic error in our error reporting system. A couple of developers and I got together with a couple of devops people and we worked it out well as a team and figured out a pretty complex issue in a reasonable amount of time with everyone playing a solid role.
Nobody tried to steal the show and everyone listened to each other's ideas on what the problem might be. Through and through a great debugging session and made me think about bad ones and good ones I've had in the past.4 -
Talk with a co-worker who has a bit of a motivational problem.
Him: if I had more fun, I would be more productive.
Me: you're not here for fun, that's why they pay us.
Him: how are you motivated?
Me: by money.
...
A bit later.
Him: do you plan for retirement some day?
Me: no. By then, there won't be retirement anymore. We will eat fried rats in the street.
He starts understanding why I'm wearing black metal shirts.10 -
When I was 14 or so, we had acces to some computers during break. I went through each and every one of them, rebooted into Safe Mode (yeah, Windows), logged in as admin with no password, and gave admin powers to my account (each student had one, at least). Then, installed a keylogger and one of those "trojaans" that let me remote terminal, keyboard and mouse control to all the PCs (I had tried telnet server, but this was soo much easier).
Then came the fun.
"Why does the start menu keep opening by itself?"
"Why is the CD tray opening and closing on its own?"
Etc.
Then I found out social media passwords like (translated from spanish) "bigdicks". Never used them, because I considered myself one of the gray hatted. I did it just for the fun.2 -
My son is into playing Roblox. He asked me to help him find an auto clicker that doesn't have viruses/malware. We looked into cheatengine (which I have used in the past), but despite getting it from a legit source it is getting flagged as malware. So we started writing one with Python. I did check to see what their policy on bots is:
"Using bots that are programmed to run disruptive, large-scale tasks"
is the only text I can find about bots. It seems like they don't care if you make bots to automate tasks or play the game.
I plan on having some fun with this and including a little gui to control the bot while the game runs in the background (the goal). I had tried to get my son to have an interest in programming so this is a good intro.11 -
know what pisses me the fuck off? when the manager of another department jumps over me and goes straight to the head of my department for a request that they want from MY department.
Currently, there are 2 stupid bitches that insist on doing this fuckery. One of them keeps getting owned by our DBA since for whatever reason she sends her requests to me, just for the DBA to remind her that I ain't giving her access to shit and bla bla
The other is the head of the human resources department. It goes like this: sends wrong data, task gets delayed cuz we have to sort her shit, gets impatient, bitches at head of department and his boss about us taking long(bitch 3 hours ain't long and your shit ain't critical) just for me to reply back with images and LOOK FUCKTARD YOU MESS THIS UP red arrows showing how what she did was wrong and I had to fix it for her.
Sends a reply back only to me saying thanks, ah no pendeja, I will forward aaaaaaall of that shit to everyone else, tried throwing me under the bus? well now ima do it to you.
And fuck those 3 applications you requested, have fun adding shit manually through spreadsheets and then go eat shit and die.5 -
Not a rant. Just a story.
So two weeks ago, a cat gave birth to two beautiful kittens in our balcony. We started giving milk to the mother and sometimes inviting the family to our house. The kittens are naughty charming. The mother sits for hours and sometimes sleeps while watching us do our chores (watching movies, coding, etc.)
Now, we live in New Delhi and Wednesday was Diwali. The family was playing in the balcony and we had to go out. So we locked the balcony door and went to have fun with friends. We didn't realize that people would burst firecrackers which could scare the cats. When we returned, the mother was very scared and (kind of) screaming. One of the kittens was missing!! We live on the fourth floor and I got scared too. We searched using a flashlight but there was no sign of kitten. After 30 minutes of search, We gave up. I assumed the kitten jumped from the balcony and might be dead. I tried to sleep but could not. Around 4 AM in the morning, I heard some noise. When I opened the door, the second kitten was there. Her mom was scolding (or so it seemed). It was a moment of joy.
Thought of sharing. This family has become our friends. Now I realize how cats are good companions.3 -
!dev
So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.
But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)
I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.
Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.
Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.
I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.
And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.7 -
Lots of fun open source stuff, but I had a lot of fun working on a survey taking m&m dispenser. The goal was to encourage students to answer survey questions that would help the faculty get a better idea of what the students found most valuable (different things they wanted to learn, classes they found useless, etc.). So me and another student built this :) Its a node server running on an Intel Galileo, which served up an admin and survey interface using React. When a student answered a survey question, a servo would turn a gear, which interfaced with a rack and pinion that had two little pits in it. When it would slide under the jar, two m&ms would fill the pits, then the rack and pinion would push them out. Then we had a webcam hooked up to the end of it that would compare the colors of the m&ms to see if they were the same. If they were the same, the student would get more m&ms. The gear pieces were 3D printed.
We could never get the webcam stuff to work right with the Galileo because OpenCV (the computer vision library we were using to interact with the webcam) could not be built/compiled on such a specific version of Linux. Later, I was able to do it with a RaspberryPi, but never got it reintegrated.5 -
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 -
Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.5 -
This happened when I got my first IT support job. Naturally as a 1st line support you get to do the fun and not at all tedious thing of resetting passwords.
So I take a ticket from one of our HR people where they say that 3 new employees can't access a certain system.
Without going into too much detail here I reset the passwords according to our procedures and be done with it.
But at the end of the day it turns out that one of those 3 new employees was the new CEO, and he was known to be not the most pleasant of people to work with.
So ofc there was a chain of emails with the words "How can someone not know who I am" in there somewhere.
Had a nice stressful weekend wondering if I'll still have a job after Monday and we had a whole new password reset procedure created because of that.2 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
Christmas reminds me of my favourite development team ever. I first visited the team for a quick hello, before I started working with them, at Christmas time. Unlike the rest of the the company they had decorations and Christmas treats and the radio was on with Christmas songs. This set a very good impression.
When I did come to join them after the holidays I discovered that this team like having treats, would often sing songs together randomly and even make up new ones about their code on the spot. They had a great attitude to work and made the working environment a fun place to be. We did get lots done but I also learned so much being with them. When I left they wrote me a card filled with raps they had come up with reflecting my time with them. I still have that card.
I miss you guys dearly. Merry Christmas xxx -
I wrote my first line of code at 12. I fell in love with it and continued. I'm 25 now and I'm a software engineer. I don't even have time or energy to work on personal projects anymore. Writing code isn't a hobby anymore. It's a means to survive. Why/how did this happen? When will building things be fun again? Before landing my first job as an engineer, not once did I consider salaries, equity, atmosphere, nor any of the other amenities (or lack thereof) of code as a profession. But, I don't even know when any of that fell into the picture and they've managed to suck the novelty out of a really cool pastime. I'm essentially a well-paid robot. Who did this? What's happening? What can I do to find the freedom I once had? When did I become just another cog in a machine? Should I try my hand in business, bent on making a lot of money so I can retire early and have time to experiment again? Is that unrealistic? Should I buy lottery tickets every paycheck? We only get one life and I realized this. I'm panicking because I know I'm not enjoying myself and that I'm not on track to leave the world better than it was when I was born into it. So much loss. I'm grateful, but this is not cool at all. I want my hobby back.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 -
The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.
TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.
So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.
This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.
Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.
Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.
Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)
I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.
At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.
But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.
Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.
In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.
A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.
Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)9 -
Hi yall! I've been here a while, but never actually posted anything. Love reading your rants though, always makes me giggle^^
Anyways, I'm a IT student and I got this new job as an IT-consultant.
So we had this big meeting today, together with the CEO and a lot of other new employees with different engineering profession... So everything went fine until the end. We were supposed to stand up and say our names, what we're studying and tell a fun fact about ourselves and I TOTALLY fucked it up... I kinda said my name, I completely forgot to tell what I'm studying and my fun fact was something about ppl having a hard time with my name. Like, wtf are you even saying dude?! All I wanted was to was write code, why can't I just do that?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 -
Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.
Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent3 -
The best teacher that I've had is one of the teachers at my university lab.
He teaches Data Structures. We had some programming assignments and I was good at it, but whatever I'd do, he'd always find bugs, ask me to resolve it and he'd always give me challenges in the lab which is fun in the lab environment. University labs usually sticks to the sylabbus. I actually learned alot from that experience..
'Trail and Error is the best method to learn programming.'2 -
Had my first car accident today. I was taking a friend to school, we were down the street from our school. Person in front of me slammed on their brakes for no reason (light was green, nobody was crossing), so I did the same. Almost fucking hit them, but whatever. As me and my friend started to recover from that, we get hit from behind.
I remember just looking over at her when it happened and going "DID WE JUST FUCKING GET HIT?", she looks at me and says "I don't know what else it could have been"
The guy that hit us was a really nice guy. When me and the person in front of me slammed our brakes, the guy behind us followed, but it was raining this morning and he slid into my car.
So the guy called the cops, had an officer come, we exchanged information and everything (wasn't a bad enough accident for an actual police report). I called my insurance company, they said to call his insurance company, so I did. Filed a claim, told them everything that happened, then they called the guy, he confirmed everything and said the accident was his fault. But since my car is fairly old (it's a 2001 model), they said it might not even be worth fixing and they'll probably just end up seeing how much the car is worth and sending me a check.
The fun thing is, my cousin is my mechanic and he can also do body work, and the damage isn't that much, so he said he probably wouldn't charge much. So I'll probably get to pocket a good amount of the money (maybe like $700 max but still)
So, fun day.9 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
So I am going to talk about interviews from a different perspective, the being on the question side of the technical interview.
We have had four interviews for a single Senior Dev position. I threw some very hard questions at the people and some very easy ones. The thing that amazed me was that people actually went for an interview when they where woefully under qualified.
The latest in this list was someone who didn't understand how inheritance works for object orientated programming, and when I asked him something very specific he needed to look at his notes...
The person that I felt did the best on the interview was the person that didn't have every answer but said clearly that he didn't know and talked about his ability and desire to learn. The people that failed the worst were the ones that were certain, arrogant, and wrong.
Technical interviews are fun 😏4 -
When your team's hard work receive such a mail from the client and still your Project Manager treats you like shit :|
A little back story
Me (hybrid app guy), backend (php api) guy and ui guy (html-css) worked fuckin day and night, to chase the fuckin less than 10 days deadline for this App
We hard to create the App for all 4 platforms including win mobile and blackberry (god bless UI guy and me :|) ~ 2013
Those were the coolest days of our lives , we had a super blast - working (slogging) + drinking + just having fun cursing + not giving fuck to anything and anyone + more drinking..
Cool thing is, our client was in an impression that full backend and front end TEAM is working on this App 😀
This mail still makes us laugh
"professional team" 😁😂
Unfortunately I got paid only half of the salary for next month and left the company shortly
(because official company timing was from 10:00 AM or else half day paycut and I am a night guy, I used to come at around 12:00 noon)3 -
!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.
---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).
Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.
Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.
they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)
Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.
And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them
"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".
They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"
"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.
I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.
Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.
Just wanted to share this :)5 -
I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.
You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.
Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.
Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.
I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.
It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.5 -
I hate some parts of this company.
They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.
Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.
For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.
Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.
(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).
But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".
I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".
I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.
He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.
I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.
Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.
Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.3 -
Can we rant about coworking spaces?
I like the coworking office concept and I love this desk I have for myself, I like this building, the supervisor is sweet and I made new clients here...
But I hate one of my "neighbours".
We have several office rules and he constantly breaks them.
No music allowed without headphones. Nope, gotta listen to shitty radio straight from the smartphone speaker.
No loud conferences or phone talks. Nah, let's set the volume to the max. And leave the phone behind and let it ring loudly forever.
You can only occupy one desk unless you rent more. In comes his coworker who keeps occupying an extra desk for free and who's as loud as he is. And bring the kids because hey, growing up bored inside a office is good for them.
And today's newest: no eating in the office. Coworker brought her kid who set up a -dinning table- on the extra desk and began eating her lunch leftovers. It wouldn't have been so bad and I wouldn't have noticed except the office was overflowed with the stench of overheated pasta.
This is a big office. I had to open the windows. I can still feel the smell. It's nauseating.
I didn't say anything because it's not the kid's fault they didn't take her to the building's canteen space. But at the risk of making enemies where I shouldn't, I need to have a "fun" talk with someone.8 -
I came first in a 48 hour 4x person gamejam with a game idea in 6 hours with 3x people.
Some info: I had an idea as soon as the topic went live, told the team this is the idea (button masher), we are going to do it in unity (at the time I was working at a studio that used UE4.x), and I'll also make a custom controller using an old keyboard to make it more fun. Ended up coming first place and won a nice bottle of champagne each, and at no point did we over stretch. Nice clean project with a good night's sleep in-between. The team was me (dev), an artist and a technical designer.
That was my first start to finish use of unity and C#, and now I exclusively use unity and make games for Xbox One and Steam.3 -
Bring the fun and curiosity back.
School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.
First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.
There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.
I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.
What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.
Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.
The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".
When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.3 -
There are many, but in in particular,
EA!!!
There could many reasons, overpriced games, micro-transactions...
All of them can be described as "just business"
But one stands out and makes it personal, the reason I wouldn't just shoot the game-designer but stab him and watch him drown in his own blood.
MASSEFFECT ANDROMEDA!!!!!
It felt like they took all the mistakes the third game made, and continued to add some more.
1. The PS4-Version had so many performance-issues, it was pretty much unplayable
2. Instead of a good story, interesting characters and fun battles, we got an open-world.
3. Facial animations and voice-acting from hell.13 -
Facebook has changed so much.
There was a time when we were so connected and had so much fun there with friends. Now it’s mostly about videos and ads. That’s all I see when I scroll. I hate it now.9 -
Dear Swift, we have to break up. I’ve found a new language to love. Oh don’t act so surprised, you know our relationship was on shaky ground. You never let me have any fun. You’re always telling me what to do and how to do it and I’ve had enough. You treat me like a child, and I’m moving on.
Things were good in the beginning, and you may have impressed me with your automatic reference counting, but my new language can do that too, and so much more, and does it faster than you could ever imagine. You see unlike you, my new language doesn’t boss me around. It *trusts* me, Swift. That’s the one thing you never could understand. I need to be trusted; and know that I can trust in you.
Well I can’t. Not anymore, Swift. It’s over. My new language just treats me better than you ever could. I’m sorry it came to this but I deserve better than you Swift. We’ve both known this for a long time.
I wish you the best, but you probably shouldn’t call.
I’m with Rust now.1 -
Just 4 days in at my first job after recently graduating and I already love my workplace. Everyone in the office is so lively and giggly that you'll hear good jokes and genuine laughs thrown around the place EVERYDAY. People are so friendly and outgoing that I just realised I had made so many friends in a short time despite my introvertedness. To scale; you probably heard or experienced yourself that Filipino communities are generally super friendly and possitive. Well as a Filipino, I can attest that this is on a whole other level.
Damn. Too bad I can't remember all their names tho. 😂
Then there are a ton of perks like free food, gym, etc. And then I met this attractive and fun girl my age who I think and hope is into me, idk. We hang out with her 2 other friends, all four of us being relatively new at the company, separated by a month or so.
This is the best experience I had in such a long time and I'm super excited to see where this leads to.22 -
At the first company I worked for out of college, the CEO was a bit like a child. Whenever he came up with a new feature he wanted to add to the product, it had to be done asap otherwise we were going to "miss the boat." Every single time.
So rewind to a few years ago. It's a normal day at work and then suddenly my team lead and the CEO call my team into the conference room. The CEO starts telling us about this industry conference (we were in online dating) that was happening and this flashy new company dating company was going to be showing off this awesome search feature.
Naturally, our CEO concocted a Hail Mary plan of how our company was going to upstage this company and get all of the press to write about us instead. Basically, the "plan" was for us to build a brand new search feature of our own, in the week before the conference, and then he stated that the press would "have to write about us because ours will be better."
Everyone on my team knew it was ridiculous but we were pretty young and naive so we busted our asses to get this search feature out the door in the short week. The Friday before we stayed until like 2 AM. It was a little bit fun because the people on my team were cool, but the whole situation was absurd and no one, except the CEO, thought this had any chance of working.
Annnnddd in the end we didn't get an ounce of press, the search feature was pulled from our site, and the "awesome" company that we were so worried about getting all the press is out of business. But hey, we did get it done!1 -
As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.
So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.
I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.
What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.
So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.
We are all good now :)6 -
Today I had to explain a bit of ressource planing for the coming quarter and ahead.
Hardware ressources.
All in all I knew what I was talking about, but given our tight budget, it''s a lot of moving stuff to either put the hardware to rest or to recycle it.
Moving in sense of new hardware, migrate old to new, decommission / recycle stuff.
After roughly half an hour I stopped and asked If I really should continue, as I felt bored by myself and it's really hard to follow when the whole thing looks exactly like the guy in the nice picture under the post...
A colleague of mine answered: I can still follow, but I'm terrified.
I somehow burst into a mixture of laughing and crying cause that was exactly my thought.
It's gonna be fun... Way easier than the last time, but still. XD
Was at least a funny meeting...
We stopped after everyone calmed down and talked the rest of the time bullshit.
By the way: I look exactly like the dude during planning. :)2 -
Just did a transplant on my friend's phone. He dropped it one too many times, and fucked it up real bad.
We were first going to simply put his SIM card into another phone. I had an old S6 that bricked itself during an update before I really knew much of anything about phones, so I dug it out and spent a day trying to restore it with heimdall, adb/fastboot, and eventually odin when I found a laptop with windows. Unfortunately it's a Verizon phone, and because Verizon likes to keep a tight chastity belt on everything, it was pretty much impossible to unbrick. After giving up with finding a custom recovery or flashing a stock ROM, we moved to Plan B.
We took both phones apart, switched the boards, switched the SIMs, and he now has a working phone in much better condition than before he dropped it seven feet from his girlfriend's bunk.
It's always fun to make life from two dead things.3 -
A friend saw me on stack overflow and said 'wow, 4,000 points - you must do this all day.' I explained that I just do it to reinforce my understanding and not really for points(although those are useful for bounties). I showed them an account with 22k and tried to show how one might choose questions for maximum points vs quick solves for noobs etc. I write overly thorough answers to try and pin-point the blind spot as opposed to just fixing other people's code. It's not often rewarded by points. My friend - conspiracist - was convinced that the 20+k accounts were cheating the system.
At my old work we had a stack overflow account just for asking embarrassing questions that you didn't want on the company record. Silly, I know. Occasionally some of the guys would use it to have fake arguments or just cause trouble for fun / vote each other's stuff up.
So - I reached into 1Password and signed into that account and showed him that you could essentially vote up your answers but that it's not likely how people get points. I voted up my last 5 personal answers as an example and made some comment like 'that is right.' And that was that. Closed the computer. The next day my account was suspended and I was reprimanded for sockpuppeting. So, - in case you think you can get away with cheap tricks - you can't, which is nice to know - but after reading the email - my face was red for hours. How embarrassing! Not quite as bad as that time I got caught stealing a G.I. Joe action figure at the mall...2 -
I loved what Flash used to be. Most people thought it was proprietary stuff. The program was. It's language was not. And damn, did we have fun together! We rendered vector graphics from code and pushed perlin noise into bitmaps while the HTML guys were still struggling with rounded corners. Oh, those bezier curves we dreamed up out of thin lines of code!
Other people just couldn't see how beautiful you were. They hated you because you were popular, and ads were beginning to dominate the landscape. And lots of dildo's made ads by abusing your capabilities, straining you with their ugly code that didn't remove event listeners properly. I always did, because I loved you.
They made fun of you because you had to be compiled. Look what those cavemen are doing now, dear ActionScript 3.0. They are compiling Javascript and pushing it to production. They are all fools my dear, unworthy to read even a single line of your gracious typed syntax. We were faster then Java. More animated and fluid then CSS. We were even responsive if we needed to.
But... I have to move on. I don't know if you're still watching over me but I can't deny I've been trying to find some happiness. I think you would have wanted me to. C# is a sweet girl and I'm thankful for her, but I won't ever forget those short few years we had together. They were the absolute best.
Rest well my dear princess.8 -
In sweden, probably in many countries, we have this chocolate calendar where u get one piece of chocolate every day til Christmas. This is usually for kids but we "younger ones" got one from a colleague as fun gift. After about half through December when I came back on Monday i realized that someone had emptied my chocolate box and had thrown it in the trash. I was devastated. So I wrote an angry email, ending with "Merry fucking shit christmas", to the whole office in order to make the guilty one feel more guilty.
As it turned out, another colleague had found an exact same box, emptied that one and replaced mine. He came crawling 2min after I sent the mail😂3 -
I just wanted to get this off my chest.
There we go, that time is finally coming: all of my friends are starting to look for jobs; we are all about to graduate, but i feel no desire to move forward... I wish i had their optimism, but all i feel is terror and panic every time they bring up the topic...
I have no plan, no idea of what might happen, and i don't feel like i am particularly competent in anything: I do not have much to offer to society, surely not in terms of technical skills: i'm a real shitty programmer with the attention span of a goldfish.
I am passionate about a bunch of topics, but i am not competent at them in any meaningful way: I like reading about x86 Assembly or Operating System design, but if you'd ask me to write them i wouldn't be able to really. Its all superficial, i read these things for fun but i never really accomplished anything.
And i know this is all in my head, that as soon as i find anything its probably gonna be fine, i just wish i had the enthusiasm and drive that people around me seem to have, instead of acting like a little bitch :)8 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
Running a wild UPDATE statement against an inventory database, it was chaotic and didn't have backups.... yea I know 😅 the backup service died god knows when and no one noticed. I was only new at the time so #notMyFault
UPDATE stock_on_hand = 0; WHERE id IN(1,2,3,4,5,88,972,7388);
# rows affected 1,234,567,890
> I think I almost died inside.
Oh the fun that mess was to clean up.
The positive outcome of this was, we had backups working again not long after and the inventory counts where accurate after that stock take.3 -
Humph. Just remembered something pretty cool. Last year I had a great math teacher and tech teacher. My class on the other hand: not great except my friends. We were being taught c++ in tech class and man were these kids the laziest i've ever seen. Just creeping up behind me and copying the code. Tech teacher walks up and opens up stack overflow on the kid's pc and walks away. Later during math class our teacher overhears kids talking about pokemon go. She then gets really excited and talks about how fun ar is to code and asks if any of the kids need c++ help. Turns out she had quit a dev position to become a teacher and give back to the community. She left halfway through the schoolyear because she was pregnant though. Needless to say most of my class caught the coding bug and it was thanks to both those teachers. The math teacher came back at the beginning of the year but then I moved back to the USA.
-
A bit different than wk93, but still connected and a fun story.
Back in high school when it began to digitalize everything, so began our teachers journey with technology. We, as IT class were into these things, but as far as I can say, others in the school including both teachers and students were like cave mans when it came to IT.
Most of them kept the different wifi networks password on the windows desktop, in a file 'wifipassword.txt'. When we were on robotics seminar, we had to use a teacher's laptop. The wifi network was incredibly fast and powerful,, yet so poorly configured that even the configuration page user/pass was the default admin/admin, because the IT admin wasn't the most skilled one.
We got the idea to sell the password of the wifi network to other students. Not much, for about 1 dollar a week. The customer came to us, we took the phone, took note of the MAC address, entered the password, and if the guy were to stop paying every week, we just blacklisted that MAC on the next robotics course.
Went well for months, until a new sysadmin came and immediately found it out, we were almost fired from the school, but my principal realized how awesome this idea was. You may say that we were assholes, and partially that is true, I'd rather say we made use of our knowledge.2 -
This happened 3 years ago in my previous company. It was a small start up company and we worked on PHP stack. One of the its ex-founders had written Windows Mobile App which now had to be upgraded with new features. So we hired this new dot net guy. I always thought dot net guys were ELITE coders and was excited to see how they work.
While I played Xbox and had fun, our dot net guy stuck to his workstation furiously working. My boss who was casually strolling out of his office for a stretch saw dot net guy working hard and suggested we all developers should take him as an example.
20 days went by and each day the dot net guy did the same. He came, he silently worked on his workstation, he left in the evening. In those 20 days my boss asked twice to the dot net guy if he has finished features he was assigned but he said he did not. After a month when he said the same negative answer and had nothing to show for the work he has done he was fired.
I was so curious to see what code that ELITE coder had written for a month but could not deliver a feature(Maybe some error he could not fix?). So I open the code repo on which he worked and I see 30 commits from that guy to it. He had made a single commit each day(Fair enough he wants to commit everday before leaving). It was time to check his commit diffs to see his ELITE code. What do I find? In every fucking commit he either added a blank line to the DocBlock or removed the same. Nothing less nothing more! So much for the hyped not-so-ELITE dot net guy...1 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).
One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.
Now, I am having fun again! An example?
For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!
Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔
BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.
Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.
Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀1 -
When I did games dev in college, it’s fair to say that most of my class started off really stupid. Like, I met these people. We were all dumb.
Except this one guy. His name was Jordan. He was huge. He smelled bad. Everyone made fun of him, (I kept my distance in fear of being decimated because he was known for his temper).
But fuck, that guy knew how to model and code. In the time we had spent working out how to build a single model or write a working line of code, he’d been working on this full scale Skyrim-esque environment that just reminded me of Whiterun.
I wonder what he’s doing now. -
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 -
One of my ex-trainees, mid-level dev at the time of the story, from the previous job asked me and insisted to work with me and if it's possible to open a position for him at my new employer (i was a team lead). We were also somehow friends, spending a lot of time together - including our girlfriends - outside of work.
He went to the interview, passed it and he received an approx. 1500 euros salary, jumping from around 1k euros. He was very happy with it and accepted the offer.
One week before starting his new job, my manager came to me and asked: "hey what happened with X?". I was like: "what happened?". "Don't you know? He sent an SMS this morning to announce us that he doesn't want the job anymore."
I had absolutely no idea about that. The second thing that I did was to give him a call and ask him about his decision. His argue was that "my current employer made my another offer: 1550 euros". I said something like "ok, have fun".
I got back to the manager to tell him about that. He offered to make another offer of almost 2000 euros to the guy, but I refused.3 -
My failed interaction with a girl:
So I go to a convention at the university.
It's nice I'm having fun, I see a girl dressed as Hermione, she is cute so I go talk to her for a little we joke around I'm really starting to like her. Then I say bye and hang out with friends for the rest of the evening. I see her leaving so I run to her and after catching up to her I ask if I could have her phone number. She says yes and enters her number on my phone. I'm super happy. I excitedly wait for the next day's evening to message her. We message for a while the next day she messages good morning, so I think things are going well, she must like me too right ? I mean we glanced at each other at the convention, she gave me her phone number and messaged good morning so I'm pretty sure she does...
Turns out she doesn't, she says she thought I wanted to be friends...
WHAT ?! FRIENDS ?? Are you 12 ? What friend would run to you to get your phone number and after getting it there would be a stupid grin on his face ??? She looks at 9gag and doesn't know the most overly used meme of "friendzone" ? Unbelievable either she was screwing with me or she is just that socially dense. So after that I'm pretty mad but I don't say any mean things I just accept the fact like a gentleman and carry on with my life. But also feeling depressed after believing we actually had a connection. Ugh I guess back to the coal mines for me huh, stupid conventions 😒9 -
Since it's 42 & I am fond of the number..
The 'most fun' I had was making a completely useless feature for our customers that we (our team) knew will be useless (&wrong) once finished and we will have to rewrite it. But we had to do it nevertheless till the end of the week, since the customer is the king. It turned out hilarious and fun because everyone was making jokes on the floor about what idiotic stuff we code and implement. Even the boss was like: yes, yes, I know but please do it, you can rewrite it later to not do anything, just leave the button on gui. It was crazy it was fun, a little bit of mindless coding to lighten up the atmosphere and it (coding & jokes) brought closer the whole colective reaponsible for that particular customer. -
/* Not a rant, more like a story with a good ending */
Le me finally got an interview for a big company, started preparing for technical questions, white board test, basically anything related ti a technical interview. The role was for a graduate software developer as i just finished my college and is my first ever interview with a company.
At the interview, he sat down and said " it will be a friendly and a very informal type of interview " and then carried on to ask me about my interests and past experiences and shared some details about the company and technology they work with. At one point i started ranting about some problems i was in due to javascript's nature of compiling even though syntax isn't right and we both had a good laugh as well about it. Idk but i felt like the interviewer made me feel really comfortable so that anything we were having a chat about was without stress, as i was nervous the whole time before the interview for being my first expereince ever.
After leaving the office i felt like this was too simple for the role i applied for and thought the company might not be interested, 4 days letter i got a mail that they are offering me the role as the feedback from interviewer was excellent.
Pretty wierd but fun experience frankly.2 -
I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.4 -
I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.
So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.
I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.
About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.
But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.
Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!
And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.4 -
Fun Story: My first official project was related to system files security. In first meeting project manager was talking about Macros and OLE i had no idea what the heck he was saying.just kept noding
Took us 2 months to complete the project now it has been deployed and working perfectly
Told my manager about this during final one on one meeting and he couldnt believe me,he still laughs about it everytime we meet -
My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer
My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.
After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila
we had copied a shortcut :)4 -
So part of my job is to watch movies.
Unreleased movies. Premier special movies. Restricted access movies. Special screening movies.
Fun part about being in a media tech company is you get amazing perks.
One of the product verticals we have, competes with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
So, we have to determine which movies to license and resell on our platform.
For which we have volunteer program where they assign us movies to watch. A couple of movies everyday. Folks have to submit their feedback on certain parameters and then the team evaluates and makes the decision.
As of last few weeks, Cannes 2022 was on and we had a lot of movies lined up. Got to watch some real good ones while some were mediocre.
Surely fun, don't get paid for it. Good perks. Loving it so far.10 -
Second intro to programming class we remade tetris, it was incredible
I probably spent more time making graphics than coding, but I also coded a mini graphics framework for the game
We additionally made incrediblly addictive modifications to the game, it's still super fun to play
We also barely had the knowledge we needed to code it, but I'm still super proud of it5 -
When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...
and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...
because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.
Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.2 -
I'm glad I have a job where we don't have team 'building' nonsense. We just come in and we team-build on the spot, as in, we get along.
Oh, the nightmare of my previous job where they resented employees for not joining some stupid party where they all got drunk and had forced 'fun'. I like authentic environments.5 -
I used to collect rubber ducks back in college. I was absolutely crazy about it and tried getting my hands on almost all different types available like the Punk duck, the Pirate duck, the Weed duck....and so on.
I met this girl who was into the same thing and we ended up banding together to create a sort of webpage where we'd write crazy and hilarious origin stories for each of these ducks. We'd go to great lengths to create ridiculous comic book style encounters between them and had a lot of fun doing it.
We dated for a while but it didn't last.2 -
TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.
Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.4 -
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.
it's fun! woot.1 -
My favorite quote from an article (jokingly) poking fun at React:
"I mentioned to a junior developer that his return function was getting a little unsightly with the lengthy JSX that he’d put in his render function. He told me, “Oh it’s cool. I’ll break it out into several functions that return JSX.”
I pushed him into a volcano.
The gods smiled upon us and we had rain." -
While studying business information technology (useless btw), we had to take these exams with Microsoft Office programs.
When it was time for Excel exam, we were given this sheet of instructions on what to do, and it even listed the exact functions you had to use.
The fun started when I realized that my Windows installation was in English, so my Excel installation was also in English. The instruction sheet and the functions listed in it were in my native language.
Because Excel is probably the shittiest thing ever made, this is the part where you know you are fucked. The functions listed in the instructions don't even exist in the English version (same goes vice versa btw), so what can you do?
You implement the fucking functions. Never used VB before that day, and never will again.
But I got a perfect score.2 -
!dev
i havent been on dr in a while, but here goes nothing. i started going out about 3 months ago with a girl who i've been texting a while.
she's everything i've ever wanted and i think about her all the time. this may also be a good time to mention i'm fifteen. well, i'd hang out with her all the time. it's the most fun i ever have. i tell my parents i'd be seeing my friends but i'd be with her or walk to her house. time with her was the best.
and, more recently, i've been engaging in some not-so-appropriate physicality with her.
a few days ago i asked my parents to drive me to my friend's house when i saw the look on their face. they found a used condom with a pregnancy test and some lube too, and they made me spill everything.
it's been a week since i last saw her. she decided to tell her mom what we did on the off chance my parents decided to tell her mom we had sex.
this fucking sucks. i'm grounded and can't do anything. does anyone have any suggestions on what i could do? i think i'll wait out my grounding then just see her whenever i can.11 -
I've been seeing a lot of rant about bad cs teachers for the week's rant so I'm gonna share about a teacher that I like. Maybe wk45? Anyway, I think I mentioned him before. Its the same teacher who taught our class OOP. He's a pretty cool guy. Gives out difficult tasks for us each week (Something that we don't like, actually..but thats just a student thing. But everyone agrees that it does help us understand the whole thing better) He grades our assignments and tests, and if he feels that we're a bit left behind, doesn't mind offering us one-to-one classes when he's free and makes sure that everyone understands what he's talking about in class. Some of us had still had some trouble getting the basics down so this was really helpful. Plus he likes giving fun examples and stuff in class so its never boring (usually food related examples).So yeah, learnt a lot during the class :D
He's not the only teacher that I like though, we've got a few other cool teachers as well. I guess maybe I have a bit of luck with this? -
We have the funniest and weirdest conversations during lunch, most of them not dev related. Have been thinking about ranting them for a while now because they are just good fun.
The following one brought a bit of a discussion so It convinced me to post it because i would like to hear all of your opinions about this one:
Imagine that one day you come home and there is a (deep) clone of yourself having sex with your wife, what would you do?
We got divided into 3 groups mostly.
Group one would send him away and let him life his own life.
Group two would make use of the fact that there are 2 of them.
Group three would murder him, the explanation Why Was quite interesting, because it was the first instinct of them, it would also have been from the clone, that's why that had to.
Again I would like to hear what you all would do :)
Maybe if this one does okay I will post more stories11 -
I met someone who worked at google. She gave me a lot of asvice and made me feel like i knew shit...
We were on a discussion and she made fun of me saying thats i livwd under a rock because i didnt know that youtube was owned by google.
And then she shut me down because i asked her about her opinion about Microsoft and git and told me she didnt know wjat git was.....
Im confused because i was okay not knowing something becausei see myself as learner. Yet she laughed at me. Which i can accept because its okay to laufh about people.
But she shut down the git discussion like a bitch “i don't know what it is and i dont want to speak a out it” in front of her friends.
While i would normaly take a dump on that person's front step, i am living in my partners city where everybody knows Each other.
Regardless, im a bit drunk and shes a ducktwit. I had a great night but ahe made me feel like shit coz she acts like she knows all this shit and im realising that she os just full of shit.6 -
Best team experience?
Well, first I'd like to mention that after some more experience in the field since, I realize that this company had some pretty terrible management infrastructure...
Nonetheless, I think my best team experience had to have been during my first programming job because my project manager... WAS A FREAKING DEVELOPER! It wasn't his job to be a developer obviously, but we were a small team essentially developing waterfall style, and he had to pick up the slack now and then for certain issues. The man was a genius and everyone appreciated him because you could talk to him about anything dev related and he would get it. The rest of my team was also very chill too, so it was all in all just a fun experience, stressful as it may have been at times.
I have not since had such a diversified project manager 😟 but then again, not the PM's job to touch code...2 -
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.
But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.
There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!! -
TL;DR My parents should have known that I was made for computers
Note: I am pretty young. Most of you were probably at least as old as I am now when it happened.
My parents told me about the first time I used a PC. They left me and my older siblings home alone with a movie on and returned later than they wanted to. We were still watching the movie, and when they asked how that was possible we told them that I restarted the DVD twice. I had never touched a computer before.
The first thing I actually remember is me playing Age of Empires II on a PC our family got for free somewhere. Although AoE3 was already out by that time, it ran slow af, but it was the most fun I had in my life up to that point. I was and still am pretty bad in both AoE3 and AoE2, but that was the first step into my preference for RTS games. -
I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:
"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since! -
Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...
Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.
Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.
So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...
Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.
Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)
One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.
They still use the old shit for billing.
Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"
No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...
Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.
tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity2 -
8 years ago,
I studied in a small school and every year we had computer classes, but most of the times, it gets cancelled or we just sit and browse and sometimes few of us don't even get a computer.
In that time, the only reason I was attached with the computer was due to games.
Our curriculum mentioned HTML, CSS, Access and Excel, which none of the teachers taught us for past 2 years. I wanted to learn all does, but gave up since no one cared about it.(please note that time, I didn't know even to use YouTube or W3schools to learn stuffs)
Then, a new student joined in our class and also a new computer ma'am joined our school. Both of them turned out to be really fun when it comes to learning computers.
She was active during last sessions and teach us HTML, CSS. I even started writing blogs which she taught. The most surprising part was she was super frank. She went beyond her duty, and taught me what Facebook is, how to use it, and opened an account for me which I am still using it, and she sent a friend request to herself. (In lab, past teachers would shout to students trying to open fb. All of them were super strict.)
She was kind and friendly, and during theory classes, the new student in our class would answer every single question. Then, somehow we both started sharing sits in computer class, and he will tell me answers and we both raise hands to answer the question. My teacher will also keep asking interesting questions which made me more inclined to computer science.
My story isn't related to learning a programming language or an algorithm, but it was the wave that brought me closer towards CS and after 2 years, I joined CS in University and till now, haven't look back and always thanked both of them, my respected ma'am and my dear friend, who inspired me and brought out my curiosity towards computers.
Note: My friend is doing Medical currently and when I teased him that I did CS and now, I know more than you and this time, I am gonna whisper in your ears if someone asks any question, to which he replied, I accept I am doing Medical, but I still love computers and know a hell lot about it.
My teacher got married and she also got a cute baby. We talk occasionally in fb and she is going great too.
I hope to meet both of them someday soon. -
Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.
I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.
Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.
Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.
Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!
Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?
Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.
tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.13 -
Positive story ahead.
Had to try and make a new system on my own in a company with no tech staff. I was scared shitless of the responsibility. About a year later we got 2 new devs and people are somehow paying for our very flawed and incomplete mvp.
It's fulfilling and fun. Taking something from zero and suddenly having an actual application with customers.
The other 2 engineers are fun and we talk shit while coding and teaching each other. We also study new tech every day to keep getting better.
I'm even getting some stocks soon.
Long road ahead but honestly, life's good. -
So on a PowerBuilder app I worked on last year (I know right...), suddenly the business users were reporting that they couldn't edit some of their prices! When they clicked save, the screen would refresh and lose their work.
We had recently upgraded the system to allow them to enter hundreds of prices at a time, much more than there had ever been. But that code wasn't anywhere near this part!
Tracking this down was really fun... By great fortune, I discovered the row the users were editing was the 99th row in the DataWindow. As it turned out, in the distant past (this is PowerBuilder, after all) the returns code "99" had been used as a flag to mean "cancel/refresh the screen".
I of course offered to "fix it right", but the powers that be wanted it fixed cheaply, so we just changed the flag to "9999". 😬1 -
We were documenting a feature which has system wide affect. We’ll be delivering it to customer on Monday.
So we’ve asked the colleague who worked on it about how it works and asked few follow up questions that arise during the documenting. All were good.
Comes Friday when I had a question as some things didn’t add up and I checked the source. To my surprise the very core operation colleague explained us works in exact opposite way. I kid you not in %50 percent of the documentation we ramble about why it was implemented this way since it is faster/safer best practices bla bla.
Moreover we’ve already had some exchange with the customer and we informed(misinformed) them about this core operation...
Also changing the behavior will reduce the overall speed as it will cause extra branchings. Other option is to rewrite the documentation and inform(re-convince) the customer. If it was me I wouldn’t trust us anymore but we’ll see.
I really don’t know what to say about this fucker why would you say something if you’re not sure of it or why the fuck you didn’t confirm in the last 3 weeks....
Anyway we have a meeting on Monday morning to discuss how to proceed, that’s gonna be fun!1 -
When I was in my final year of B.Tech.
There we had to do one major project so me and my friend both decided to build QUERA project for college. So as planned we informed to our superior and we got clean chit.
But later on we didn't know what to do??
That time my friend also didn't have programming awareness so days were going on. And the final month came and till then no progress.
My F was suggesting for purchase.
I was little bit worried too.
Then I had decided to build.
So me alone started building without any copying of templates from web(Actually at that time I didn't know that we can copy templates from web) so stupidly I was building templates using HTML and CSS. Parallely I was doing with php and phpmyadmin(SQL queries).
Seriously it was in PHP.
So this was running for approximately 14 days.
And believe me in that 14 days I was just doing project with all this stuff (obviously eating & 5 hrs sleep).
So, here the fun came
I was near to completion of my project but on last day I was not feeling well so I went to medical for some tablets.
And you know what, I was applying CSS in my mind on that tablet cover which was in rectangular shape.
Literally I was applying :D
Finally, I submitted project and got A+ for that.
Happy ending!1 -
About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.
When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.
My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"
Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.
Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.
The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.
Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now. -
Earlier this year, we built a custom gift box builder for a local popcorn company. I had decided to use vue.js for the interface which was really fun to learn.
I hadn't used any reactive frameworks like vue before this project, but I was surprised how easy it was to use, and it was so satisfying watching the frontend change just by modifying the data. I was able to easily add little transition animations when the states changed which was really fun too (something that would be really tedious otherwise).
That's was probably the most fun I've had on a project in a while. -
Making a Snake game. Let me explain.. I had just "finished"(We all know there is no finishing side projects) my first big, at least for me, project. An io game called torpedoed.fun [http://torpedoed.fun]. And yes, it is a desktop only, and also yes, it is not that fun of a game. Torpedoed.fun taught me a lot about developing such as how to debug effectively, backend communication, how to host a website, planning, and much more. After learning all this from torpedoed.fun, I decided to start a new project, a simple clone of the classic Snake game. I, to my surprise, was able to immediately think of several ways of implementing various parts of the game. I developed the entire game in the span of a few hours with hardly any problems! This experience of developing without constantly debugging every line of code felt amazing. If I wasn't addicted to programming before that Snake game, I was afterwards!
-
This is one from when I was in school, so I wasn't a dev but it made me feel like a CS student badass.
A class mate and I were having a discussion about his study habits. Basically he was freaking about the mount of studying he was going to have to do for this class:
Me: dude, you need to relax. You'll do fine.
Classmate: no, have you seen the amount of work that is on the syllabus? The size of the book?
Me: wait you bought the book? Also we took this same professor for several classes. His syllabuses are always huge. What did you get in the prereq to this class?
CM: an A.
Me: there you go.
CM: but I had to study all the time. I had no free time.
Me: really? I had an insane amount of free time.
CM: what did you get?
Me: B+.
CM: See but I did better than you.
Me: yeah . . . but I had fun last year.
Professor: you know, it's hard to tell who is the better student. The one that had no fun, but got an A. Or the one that had a lot of fun and got a B.
Other Classmates: probably the guy that got the B.
Hurray for peer and professor validated laziness. -
Worst thing? Absuse LINQ and not in a fun sexy way.
Entity framework > check.
LINQ query > check.
Standard IEnunerable magic > check
The developer had decided that it would be a good idea to thread the enumerable all over the place and collapse it anytime they wanted access to the data.
I know it’s a rookie mistake a lot of people make, but it was some pretty core data that ended up being used all over the place, so it was a nightmare to correct and it really impacted performance.
Needless to say they felt very silly when we explained how LINQ was deferred. -
*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
Bittrex is "amazing"...
I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!
0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!
1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...
2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>
3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!
4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.2 -
We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.
Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.
The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.
We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.
Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster. -
Long long time ago when recharge coupons we a thing, I used to try out more codes in the series and waste my time. After failing a lot over this, I started trying out different USSD codes to see what other stuff is out there. This got me to stumble upon facebook and twitter on USSD. I'm not sure now but, twitter was probably *515# from my carrier.
Facebook. I remember chatting for quite a long period using this. Very slow and limited yet, fun. The USSD message expires within ~60secs. so you have to type the chat message before that or you lose everything you typed. The phone was no smartphone that would allow me to copy the text from the USSD input. On top of that panic, was a character limit to these messages. I remember hitting send while being midway through a message just so I don't lose what I typed, on a T-9 keyboard. Still miss those!
The person on the other side would receive a half message due to this, and would start replying without any patience, to which I panicked as now there's a new thing to respond to, and a half message which I'm waiting to complete.
Later over the weekend when I was allowed to visit the cyber cafe for an hour or two with 15-30 INR, reading the chat threads, being able to use the five sticker packs:) and thus continuing on a computer was fun. But, as the time at the cafe expires, I had to immediately shut off my session or I'd be charged more. Thus, I was left in the middle of a conversation again, and had to continue over USSD.
Using social media without any internet like this was quite fun in a weird way. If I get a new message, I'd get a USSD alert, and then an sms if I didn't reply in some 10-15mins!
This had all the features like like and comment. Friend requests too. For the posts in a "timeline" which was new and fancy in those days, all you see is the caption of a post which also gets truncated quite a bit as USSD also has to show it's options like:
1. Like
2. Comment
3. Next Post
4. Main Menu
This was around '13 or '14 I guess. After which I later got my first computer- a laptop. Anyways, the tactile feel of pressing the buttons on a T-9 keypad is nostalgic to me. 😅 And if you were a pro at texting, u must hv used shrtcts lyk dis too w/ emojis lyk :-) <3 -
Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:
So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.
Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.
Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.
Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂 -
Fuck, I'll always be a noob. Knowing next to nothing about software development, hacking, exploits - just anything.
Felt a bit proud to had reached the level "hacker" on hack the box. Was fun solving stego, crypto and reversing challenges, diving into assembly the first time. Felt cool stepping through a disassemblied executable with radare, and understanding what a NOP slide is...
However all the illusion crumbled down, when I watched this CCC talk on OpenBSD security, where the speaker was underwhelmed with one of OpenBSD mitigations, where they tried to disallow them: "NOP slides?! Srly? No one is using that anymore. Just look at current exploits."
I felt so stupid, which I probably am. Will never catch up with those guys.
But whatever. In the end we all know nothing. We have no clue, but some are more apt in disguising it behind big speech.
(really like this German song: https://youtube.com/watch/...
Those lines always give me a chuckle:
"Man has no idea.
The house has no idea.
The tree has no idea.
The fawn has no idea.
The squid has no idea.
The tapir knows, but doesn't tell us.")3 -
I usually find Fridays really exciting 'cause they mean the end of a long week of work and a nice weekend where I can just relax and chill or do whatever the fuck I want, And also because nothing really major happens regarding work happens on Fridays.
Till this Friday, my boss who I really respect and who I find a nice boss to work for starting complaining about the speed of an app we developed and comparing its speed with 2 other versions of that were built using different stack, different architecture and another environments. I explained that it's absurd to compare these and expect the same performance from 3 differents implementations.
He was not convinced and I just kept my mouth shut 'cause I don't want to explode in anger. Because of all Friday night sucked, felt all depressed, wanted to distract myself by watching a movie, but I didn't find anything that I liked, I remembered that a new episode of this series I watching will be coming out that night, when I went to my usual streaming website I didn't find it, and discovered that it'll be coming out on March 1st 😣.
I had no video games to play, didn't feel like coding. By then i realised that tonight will be another nigh where I would be crying myself to sleep... which happened.
I woke up this morning with a resolution that I will go out and do something fun.
Little did I know, my depression was still there, now it's 8pm, I spent the whole day in bed. I wish I had someone to talk to, I friends are all busy living and I didn't want to disturb them.
I have another chance to save this weekend by doing something on Sunday, otherwise next week will be a hard one with my current mental state.
Excuse any typos in my rant. I have no energy left.4 -
Sometime in the mid to late 1980's my brother and I cut our teeth on a Commodore 64 with Basic. We had the tape drive, 1541 Disk Drives, and the main unit and a lot of C64 centric magazines my dad subscribed to. Each one of the magazines had a snippet of code in a series so that once you had 6 volumes of the magazine, you had a full free game that you got to write by yourself. We decided to write a Hangman game. Since we were the programmers, we already knew all the possible words stored in the wordlist, so it got old quick. One thing that hasn't changed is that my brother had the tenacity and mettle for the intensive logic based parts of the code and I was in it for the colors and graphics. Although we went through some awkward years and many different styles and trends, both of us graduated with computer science degrees at Arkansas State University. Funny thing is, I kept making graphics, CSS, UI, front end, and pretty stuff, and he's still the guy behind the scenes on the heavy lifting and logical stuff. Not that either of us are slacks on the opposite ends of our skilsets, but it's fun to have someone that compliments your work with a deeper understanding. I guess for me it was 2009 when I turned on the full time DEV switch after we published our first website together. It's been through many iterations and is unfortunately a Wordpress site now, but we've been selling BBQ sauce online since 2009 at http://jimquessenberry.com. This wasn't my first website, but it's the first one that's seen moderate success that someone else didn't pay the bill for. I guess you could say that our Commodore 64 Hangman game, and our VBASIC game The Big Giant Head for 386 finally ended up as a polished website for selling our Dad's world class products.1
-
In highschool we went through something like a malware/phishing prevention course.
It was pretty cool tbh, we spend the whole hour in a virtual environment where you'd see common malware and phishing attempts, but the really fun you could also "hack" other students.
Hacking them means you could cause some things to happen on their "PC". One of those was showing in a captcha on their screen and they had to type a the string of your choosing, before they could access the rest of the "virtual computer" again.
You can probably guess where this is going.
I was the first who had the idea to mix big i and small L and tested it on our teacher, who was also part of this environment and screenshared to the projector.
Thanks to sitting next projection I could see the pixels and I can confirm: same character, Pixel perfect!
I will forever cherish the memory of my the teacher begging me to undo the "hack" and the chaos that followed amongst my peers 😈
Also one of the excersizes was stupid. Click on a phishing mail and enter your credentials in the form. I asked the teacher WTF kind of credentials they even want me to enter to microsooft.cum and they just said "the credentials obviously" so I think they got their karma🖕 -
Just want to put it out here... reading this will waste ur time. :(
Having a serious crush on co-worker. I tried not to have a crush on him initially because he’s a colleague and he seems to be much older(max 10 yrs I guess). Age isn’t an issue but ppl say it’s not good to like someone from work.
But then he kept on glancing at me and caught him turning back to look into my cubicle at several occasions. Saw him looking at my direction across the room, hall, turning back to look when he was waiting at lobby, and all the way from smoking corner as well. Could be possible that he just happened to be looking in my direction several times.
Now, haven’t seen him since early feb because of the quarantine. Luckily, I chanced upon his number when everyone in the dept was put into the same chat channel for the Covid19 news. I had this urge to ask what was it all about because we’ve been told to wfh till further notice. Who knows what could happen to us during these period.
So tried to be brave and asked abt why he was looking into my cubicles several times, without coming out weird (I hope). His reply was “dont know”. I don’t know what to make of it. Could have been anything else but how could someone just reply don’t know.
Then came yesterday, my friend was telling me about her experience on tinder. Apparently she’s been using it for fun and she got funny texts from the guys there. So I decided to give it a try. Man, it was so fun swiping left all the way (cuz they couldnt be compared with work crush) till I swiped right for this older guy. We matched!
He was the first one to match, probably abt 5-10mins after I’ve finished setting up profile and all that. It was totally a new experience for me. I forgot abt my work crush in that moment. He had this minimalistic vibe. Didn’t smile much in his photos, gave me calm feeling and looked so cool. He put “Everything is good in moderation” in the bio. He’s the only one comparable for that work crush. Not sure who’s supposed to start saying hi. My friends said wait for the guy, so I waited.
Got a few other matches after him but didn’t like them as much as him. I finally decided to say hi. No respond till today. Given that he put Doctor for his occupation, I assumed he’d be busy. So I waited. Then sent another in late afternoon asking if he plays LoL often (he’s wearing LoL land yard in one of the photos). No reply.
I started to feel weird because this is supposed to be light and fun because who takes things seriously on tinder, right. They’re there to flirt and kill the boredom especially because of the lockdown. And I started to have serious feelings for this one guy whom didn’t even bother to reply. So decided to delete tinder for good. Sent him one final msg that I really wanted to get to know him and I thought he’s a really cool handsome dude. But now that I’ve deleted my acc, he wouldn’t even see my msg anymore.
His profile name is Randolf. I want to get to know him in real life. But is it illegal? :(
Thank u for read this far. I just didn’t know where to put all those feelings. And sorry for wasting your time with nonsense.17 -
Wouldn't say our teamwork failed we just sucked that day.
I had a ticket to fix a SQL sp and then correct some data afterwards. As this was the typical "urgent fix need now" we went through a different process for fixing it.
Me: Just sent you some scripts can you check them over before we apply it to uat?
Boss: let's go through it together.
5 mins later
Boss: looks fine I'll apply the scripts.
2 minutes later
Me: did you apply the scripts to uat?
Boss: No I applied them to live.
Me: oh ... oh no.
At this point I realized I was missing a critical where clause so yup my update was applied against all of the data.
Boss: oh
Yup he just spotted my error.
Helpdesk phones start ringing
Boss: you pick it up it's your code
Me: hey you applied its your problem now.
One db restore and several incident meetings later we fixed it. Twas a fun day.1 -
It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.
We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.
We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.
Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.
So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.
In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.
Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...
Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.
It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.6 -
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 -
Being in a university that has an eSports Academy is less exciting when you're part of the team maintaining it weekly... Well, at least the part where we had to set up a local cache server with docker & nginx was fun
-
Don't you just love customers?
It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually
They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours
So it was made
A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses
Sounded like logical so it was made
Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain
I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted
So they got what they wanted
A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality
Again our management said, yes
We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image
Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it
(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)
So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)
But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination
But I digress...
A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...
I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK1 -
A conversation between an offshore developer and his manager at a fortune 500:
I'm a software developer and the company I work for is a vendor for $manager's and $offshore_dev's company. They provide endless hours of entertainment/terror. Recently, we've been trying to convince them that they need to stop sending sensitive information plaintext over HTTP and set up TLS/HTTPS which has led to tons of fun conversations such as this one they had during a conference call:
* $manager: "Did $offshore_dev implement TLS1.2?"
* $offshore_dev: "Yes, we enabled a parameter in the code to enable TLS1.2 in the code but according to $me's email, this requires HTTPS in order to work."
* $manager: "No this works, we're using TLS in $other_application right now."
* $offshore_dev: "Well, $manager, it's implemented but it currently doesn't encrypt anything as such."
* $manager: "Okay, HTTPS is in the roadmap in the next quarter, we can move forward without this for now."4 -
It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.
Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.4 -
!rant
Met up with a good friend today we go off roaring all the time since we both own hooked up Jeep wranglers. Well we got together and after a fun day of crawling (no coding 😞) lol, We went to eat and I pulled up devRant and kind of mentioned how much I loved this little app and stuff and why it was about. Well turns out that I’ve been friends with this guy for sometime and we never talked profession. This guy is the Vice President to a large scale software development company here in my state!
I was dumbfounded ! Lol all this time this dude has been in the same field and I had no clue.
(I don’t get out much) 😅6 -
!dev (maybe slightly)
I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):
Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.
So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...6 -
After reaching the pinnacle of my latent burnout and mental overload lately I quit and managed to get paid leave for the rest of the notice period through hr as I told them I'm not able to work for them anymore and else had to go on sick leave. My brain just had to have a clean cut and blocked me from
getting into their overcomplex and shitty, unplanned projects as I see no value in doing anything for them anymore. I gave them all my access keys and a small handover, but it was clear that they would run into problems without me, cause I've been doing like 5 jobs there due to developer shortage. Now I still get requests from my manager even though I had an operation and spent last week in the hospital and am still recovering for the next two weeks. He's still trying to build pressure as if it was my fault that we never got time to document stuff properly and automate things that have to be automated. He ignored every recommendation I made in past to ensure that things keep running when I leave, as I always knew that I wouldn't do this shit for long. It was always more important to please bosses ever-changing requests and stupid whims as fast as possible at the cost of quality, pressuring us into putting projects live at 80% to meet random deadlines we had no say on. What a fucking asshole trying to put the responsibility on me now. Not my problem anymore. Have fun finding someone else taking over that shithole of an underengineered software-architecture. I'm out!1 -
!rant
Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)
Glad I decided to go and try it out.
Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.
So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.2 -
So I am a marvel fan and have an Espruino Pico, after scavenging left over parts from a home renovation project I realised I had all the bits to built a replica iron man arc reactor chest piece.
I figured it'd be a fun little electronics project, so I have thick copper wire that needs shaping.
I have my pliers, gloves and a gas stove. My lodgers walk into the kitchen...
Them: "What the hell are you doing?!"
Me: "We don't have a forge." -
So someone complained to my bosses boss about some internal page where I collected some of our own funny git commit messages, because they were not "meaningful", and I had to take down said page.
Fuck that narrow-minded seriousness, why be so German? If we have to debug multi-threaded C++ programs, we need that bit of fun and sarcasm to stay sane. But probably that someone is a member of some of these "professional" Agile teams that waste a day a week with fucking retros, sprint planning or other mind-crippling meta stuff, then evaluating frameworks and tools, while we are doing motherfucking programing. -
I don't want to use Visual Basic!
I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?
The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.
He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!
Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!24 -
So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.
Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.
Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.
We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.
The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.
So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.
Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.
Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.
Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.
Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.
The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>— -
I'm so fucking non-agry right now and really feel like posting the following:
What do you fucks do when not waiting for Windows updates to finish, compiling Linux kernels or waiting for job interviews? What do you guys/ladies do for fun? What would you do if you didn't have to work in this, at times, horseshit tech industry?
I like exploring cities and villages by foot or bike with a backpack full of beer. My wife and I have explored more than 200 places across 3 continents, from London to Chernobyl to out of the way Cambodian towns and 20 hour drunken Paris hikes. We drink in parks like hobos and try to strike up conversations with everyone we meet, especially other foreigners/immigrants.
I also love Formula 1 and try to watch a race at least once a year (went to Monza last year).
If I had many bucks and a smarter/sharper brain I would get a pilot's license...but alas..
I also love playing colorful little kids games on my 3DS.
So yeah, curious what you guys do for fun? Any dreams for the future?
Answering this question is compulsory!12 -
Had some fun with textgenrnn (Tensorflow text generating thingy on Github). So I created a tiny dataset with some example c# code and let it train for a while.
Sorry people, but I ruined our jobs. We don't need to write code anymore.
Update: image was unreadable due to compression. Let me find an alternative.7 -
So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.
Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!
So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.
That was such a fun Friday afternoon. -
How often do we come across IT managers who don't plan their work properly?
I teach software development and programming at a vocational school. Our IT manager said that we got a certain budget influx and that he can procure new computers for our teaching facilities. I happily agreed and hinted that i would really like some new hardware with proper graphics cards so i could do a few small projects with Unreal engine, Unity3d or use adobe products without hardware lag. The new computers arrived about a week ago and then the "fun" started.
He had ordered some PCs with proper graphics cards and processing power and talked about putting them to up in my classroom, so wheres the "fun" i meantioned? He only ordered half a classroom worth of them - i guess the budget didn't allow for more. A week later i was supposed to move to a new room and was waiting for my new computers to be installed and yet the IT manager said that my computers would be moved along with me. I was appalled - what had happened to the new PCs he promised?
Turns out he had put em up in another building without notice, a teacher there wanted to do an extracurricular movie making activity (that included a bit of video editing at some point). That classroom is always in use so me getting more than 1-2 hours a week in there is nigh impossible.
In the end i got no new computers, hardware or software.... he didnt even bother to switch out the 2 "temporary" laptops i had in my classroom since 2 years ago due to a small shortage back then and even these have an old image that didnt include a third of the software i normally use.
PS. He had about another 2-3 classrooms worth of new PCs but those were promised to the other IT teachers back then....2 -
We're rebuilding out company's platform from the bottom up, and throughout this process I've learned a lot. However, the stuff I've done lately has fascinated me the most. We're implementing OpenOffice for converting files to PDF. Since I started with this task I've had to implement secure running of OpenOffice by sandboxing and queues, but by far the coolest thing was what I did today. I was trying to implement IPC, and damn was it fun. I actually ended up writing a full parser for raw byte streams, since we had to include some special information. It was fun 😁
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So I had a manager who just up and quit with barely any warning. We were shocked! Turns out the guy had been shielding us from all kinds of crazy office politics that we were totally unprepared to deal with after he departed... We managed in the end, but it was not fun.1
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The university I used to study CSE, they had some OLD computers with Windows XP in them. Also, all those computers had TWO user accounts. One with the admin access and another one with normal access. Until this, it was fine.
But the browsers installed there were so old, even normal website struggles to load properly. and so many outdated apps, kept bugging us for update, but every time we click on UPDATE, they ask for the admin password, which we didn't have. So, most of the students were frustrated about this, but nobody took any action! :/
So, I hacked one of the computers' admin password. the password was "BRIGHT". I'm like, these people are never gonna set different passwords in different computers and remember them for eternity. Definitely all passwords have to be the same, and they were! Which saved my time.
So, I shared the password with everyone in my class and now they can install any apps they want. Which made me so happy!
But You know, words travel fast! Just one day after the hacking incident, the Seniors ( & the juniors ) came to me with their laptops to find their forgotten password, which made me earn some money & eat some delicious foods, also got to meet some beautiful girls of our campus ^_^
& I used to go to other classes to hack those Admin passwords for fun ^_^ But I never told them the password until they pay me or feed me something delicious! ^_^
I miss those good old days! ^_^6 -
So we released to production today (Friday), not my decision.
All pages work fine expect for the one page which I added a new feature.
It worked fine in Chrome and Edge. But after release a customer who requested the feature said it doesn't work for him. Screenshot showed he was using IE.
Horror time.. it was evident that it has to be the changes to the JavaScript I did, but why does the whole page doesn't work.
So I started debugging. Nothing works on that page in IE11, it doesn't even load the fucking script file. Then I dared to change mode to IE10, it actually gave me an error in my script file. The bad IE has actually picked a mistake that other browsers didn't.
So, the mistake is fun part too.
I had the following jQuery (or Jake Weary) call
$.getJSON(
'/url',
{
argA: a, argB, b, argC:c
},
function (){
// did something
}
);
In second argument, I accidentally typed comma instead of colon. Chrome and Edge ran the script perfectly passing all the arguments.IE 11 failed to load script without giving any error and only IE 10 gave an error of expecting a colon.
I do not know which browser to blame.
PS I didn't try in Firefox, safari, etc.2 -
Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:
So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.
So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)
So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.
So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!
I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights. -
We just had the introduction lesson about Emails. I think our teacher had fun sending fake mails from his computer over the server under our name.2
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Took a day off and came back to find my team and I were moved from frontend to backend (which I always wanted to be).
Manager says we get to learn Java, Mongodb and even Hadoop.
I am so so excited.
But the only little hold back is, there is limited support for Java in sublime text and I should instead use eclipse. I had dozens of shortcuts customised with all those beautiful themes in sublime, but eclipse takes the fun out of coding(no offense to eclipse lovers).5 -
I had a dream freelance job recently. It was a lot of a fun and I really wanted to continue to work there.
However it started to become apparent my manager was a mess. He would often turn up hungover and couldn’t follow conversation. When asked about docs he said he wouldn’t keep any documentation “so no one could take over”. The whole attitude and professionalism was awful.
Some days on release he (and another member of the team) would turn up to work four hours late as they’d been out the night before. I would absorb all of the impact. Technically I felt he was quite significantly junior than myself. Management saw, directors saw, no one did anything.
To cut a long story short - I raised it with HR, I was told unless I raised an “official grievance” nothing would be done. I asked if I could move - I was met with a shrug “we don’t know”
I eventually reached a point where I felt my only real power is to walk away.
I now have no confidence in HR at all. I don’t think I’ll ever involve or raise anything with them again. 😔6 -
Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.
What is a game?
I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.
both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).
a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.
theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.
now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.
Now what is a toy?
There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.
An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.
"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.
Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.
But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?
Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.
Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.
Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.
This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.
But what makes a good game?
A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.
In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.11 -
Had a fun adventure this morning. Had to deliver some bags to some houses. Entered the addresses in Google Maps. Off we go. First house, no problem. Second house, and Google is taking me on a weird route, through some parking lots and stuff. Finally, it wants me to turn onto a bike trail. WTF? My Google maps is set for bike routes. Went a lot faster when I set it to car. No wonder there were so many bikes and the road seemed so narrow.1
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My computer started crashing two days ago. Logs say its the audio driver. Now I wanted to start the diagnosis just for fun. Guess what? The conclusion of it was: You have a low volume level, we will increase it by 20%p... GOD DAMN. YOU HAD ONE JOB TO DETECT THE DRIVER IS OBVIOUSLY CORRUPTED (Reason: Unknown)1
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The universe has taken a cactus.
It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.
After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.
Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.
Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...
There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.
Guess what happened..... Naaaa?
*drum roll*
For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.
:thumbsup:
That's not cactus level yet.
Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.
So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...
Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).
I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.
Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…
Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...
I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.
It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.
I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.
After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...
We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).
This day was a marvelous shit show.
I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.1 -
At work, we have a lot of daytime spenders (they just hang around so they do not sit at home all day).
I'm the only one in the entire company with somewhat decent programming experience (and I have to admit that I'm still pretty bad at it).
A few (4) of them have been assigned to one of the biggest projects (potentially even bigger than the one I work on daily) the company has ever had.
here is the fun part:
- 2 of them only just started coding and have no clue what they are doing at all (they heavily struggle with HTML).
- 1 of them overengineers everything (in a bad way) because she doesn't know how to do it somewhat properly.
- 1 of them doesn't even code (only sitting there giving ideas n stuff... basically the "client").
As a bonus point:
- None of them knows how to database
- None of them knows how to back-end
- None of them knows how to design
This is going to be fun, especially since I'm going to refuse to have my hands in there even the slighest outside of recommending stuff (like using a framework, certain libraries etc.) :^)2 -
Somehow I always feel like shit after a party. But not because of the alcohol. I'm not even drinking that much anymore. And it's not because of the party either. I mean it was fun, I got to talk for quite some time with long time friends, we all had a blast... For some reason I'm just sad. Actually not sad. I don't know how to describe it. Like I want to walk down the yellow lit streets of a city at night, alone with a beer in my hand. That sort of feeling. Being alone in an empty city just walking doing the streets. Maybe doing something stupid. I don't know 😔
just thought I'd share 😔5 -
Every meeting that contains one or more of the following points:
- "I don't think it belongs in the meeting, but"
- "Didn't get the meeting notes"
- "When's the food coming?"
- "I know we've said no technical discussion, but..."
- "Why is he so strict, this is no fun meeting at all :("
- "I think it's unfair to include risk assessment, you blame US before XY is finished"
- "The admins / the Team XY / ZX didn't talk with us, so we don't talk with him / her / them..."
- "Why are we here?"
- "Why is it so bad when production is down?"
- "I didn't know we do security / audit checks... Why hasn't anyone told us?"
- "Not happening. I'm against it"
- "I don't want to work with XY - he doesn't do it like I want it"
...
I could add thousand more things here.
I had countless meetings where I really thought that I was an alien who got broadcasted in a comedy reality TV soap...9 -
Sooo... The ways my coworker fucks me:
Last week I have been working on setting up aWireGuard VPN server... Been trying for 4 FUCKING DAYS, the easiest VPN that has ever existed, 2 commands and that's it, I wasn't able to reach it, I checked every forum, tested every possible solution without success, checking ubuntu firewall but it was inactive... Nothing that should cause this. Why? 2 weeks ago we had a security breach and my coworker added a firewall from the cloud console with basic rules allowing only 3 ports, the port I was communicating with was blocked. He didn't bother to mention that he added an external firewall. And the junior me, not wanting to be a pain in the ass, and since that security breach wasn't my responsibility to fix, I didn't ask too many questions, just read the emails going back and forth and "learning" how to deal with that. Kill me please. Next mont a new guy is joining, we had a "quick meeting" of 30 minutes and he managed to make it 2 hours meeting. So a partner who lacks communication and a partner who talks a lot... Will be fun. And I probably should change my username... Is that even possible? @root?10 -
Actually every project we learns something. Consider like, In very recent one project,
First time used bunch of bean classes with layered structure and JS mixture. Had fun and given me confidence for interview. Happy ;) -
Happened a few ago when I started taking SQL classes in school. We had our theory exam with one question asking us to display the date of the following day. And since I knew dick about working with date, I decided to make the computer sleep for 86400 seconds and print current date (which was like the only command I knew about dates).I feel really stupid thinking about that now.. but it was fun :P3
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One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.
Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.
Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.
Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.
Some things he mentioned,
1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.
2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.
3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.
4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.
5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.
6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.
My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.
These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.
Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.
One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.
I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.2 -
I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.
We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...
The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)
Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.
Small is the important word here....
Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.
Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.
The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.
The problem wasn't printing.
The problem was time and size.
To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.
To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.
It was my longest working day: 18 hours.
In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.
After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.
"bunny" was the fun part.
Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.
So...
Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.
Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.
This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.
So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.
Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.
It worked.
People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.
And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)1 -
LinkedIn: Exploiting social psychology for fun and profit.
I was reading an excellent post by Kage about linkedin (you can find it and more here - https://devrant.com/users/Kage) a little while ago and it occurred to me the unique historic moment we are in. Never before have we been so connected in history. Never before have we had so great an opportunity to communicate with strangers (perhaps except for sketchy candy vans on college campuses, and tie dye wearing guys distributing slips of paper at concerts). And yet today, we are more atomized than ever before. In this unprecedented era of free information, and free communication, how can we make the most of our opportunities?
The great thing about linkedin is all the fawning morons who self select for it. They're on it. They're active, so you know they're either desperate attention hungry cock goblins,
self aggrandizing dicknosed cretins, desperate yeasty little strumpets, or a managerie of other forgetable fucking pawns,
willingly posting up their entire lives to be harvested and sold so someone can make 15 cents on a 2% higher ad conversion ratio for fucking cilas or beetus meds.
So what is a psychopathic autist asshole to do?
Ruthlessly exploit them by feeding them upvotes, hows-it-going-guys, and other little jolts of virtualized feel-good-chemical bullshit.
Remember the quickest way to network is for people to like you. And the quickest way to make people like you is either agree with them on everything, or be absolutely upfront with everything you disagree on.
Well, they'll love you, or hate you. But at least you'll be living rent free in their head. And that means they'll remember you when you call looking to network or get a referal.
Of course, in principle, this extends to any social media site. Why not facebook? Why not fucking *myspace*? Why not write a script in selenium to browse twitter all day, liking pictures of lattes and dogs posted by the lonely and social-approval-hungry devs working at places like google, twitter, faceborg, etc?
You could even extend this to non-job prospects. Want a quick fuck? Why, just script a swipe-right hack on tinder, or attach a big motherfucking robot arm to your phone, tapping and swiping for hours. Want to make a buck? Want not harvest data on ebay or amazon all god damn day and then run arbitration for 'wanted' classifieds on craiglist?
Why not automate all the things?
The world is at your fingertips, and you the power to automate it, while all the wall lickers and finger painters live oblivious to the opportunity they are surrounded with and blessed with daily.
Surely now that you know, it is your obligation, nay, your DUTY to show the way.
Now you are learned. Now you are prepared. Go forth and stroke the egos of disposable morons to bilk for future social favors while automating the world in ways never intended.3 -
I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...
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We had late night work... So our seniors thought of going out for drinks and asked us to join!!
We beeing the interns, bill was all on them ;)
Had fun...2 -
!rant
So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.
But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.
Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!
Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.
Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.
So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.
Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.
So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.
So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.
Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad. -
I had a dream about the end of the world. Corona won. Almost nothing works, almost all the people are dead. But we are, with those who are still alive, chilling and having fun looking at destroyed, burning Golden Gate.7
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Don't refractor for fun!
An anecdote from my previous company. A developer had written a shitty java console app for fetching stock prices. About 3000 LOC. just one java GOD class. So, when me and my friend looked at it, we were amazed how that code works with all that if conditions spanning 100LOC. so. My dear friend underestimated the complexity. Since it just fetches stock price and puts in database right. I can write it in few days and much better one. So, he started writing code in an OO way. Three days later I see he still working on it. Having a glimpse at code. The app is now Object oriented shitty and ugly.
Guess what new code never goes in prod too.
Learning
Don't underestimate complexity of app.
Be empathic about fellow developer. Don't think he has written a shitty code. Think why he had to do so.
Don't work on refractors if there is no one to guide you.3 -
Browsing through an old project of mine which let you make 3D scans of a person with a Kinect and easily add it to a game.
I worked on it during my minor in Japan. It's such a clusterfuck of code and different pieces of software glued together. But man, I had _so_ much fun making it. Funny enough it brings back great memories of the time I spent there.
I'm amazed I was able to finish it in time, or at least something that resembles "finished". Literally the day before I went on a three week round trip I had to demo it. And it worked reasonably well. I'm so glad the professor didn't screw me over on that one. Then again the other person working on a project there only made a simple raspberry pi space invaders. Haha. What a lazy cunt. We were literally told we could do _anything_ we found interesting.
I don't blame him though, he wanted to spend (and did spend) most of his time partying and socializing while he was there. Good for him :)
I should post this baby up on Github, even though it's a shit stain of a project. I want to improve on it when I have time. Who knows, someone might actually view/use it once. That would make me so happy, even if he doesn't do anything with it.1 -
Whenever i get bored at work i try to motivate myself, because i notice that as soon as i am less interested, i loose focus and make mistakes.
Therefore i try to keep motivation up. One thing that helps is actually TDD, because you are able to have several small subgoals, which each leave you with a feeling of achievement, when a test you wrote passed, kinda like achievements in games.
When the task itself is so boring that even TDD doesn‘t help, i try to have fun while painfully working through it. Like have a coffee break every now and then or rant with a coworker about the task.
One time a coworker and me had to create a demo in Unity and we hated the task, because it was exactly this brainless and cumbersome clicking in the Unity3D UI which felt awful to us (we are embedded developers and we find comfort in the terminal 😄)
The only thing that got us through the task was ranting at Unity and periodically goofing around in the engine and adding weird behavior to objects. -
Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D
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One evening I put on my Quest2 and have some fun with the Climb2. I fell off the cliff a few times. Next morning my 5yo wakes up with shitty mood and tells me he had a dream how he was on a hill and fell off. It wasva bad dream.
A few days later I was watching The Troll on Netflix. I like this king of genre so I was enjoying it. Next morning my kiddo wakes up all excited with 'daddy daddy, I've had a dream of a mountain!'. 'Did you fall off this one too' - I rush to ask. He says: 'no, but the mountain stood up and it was like a man!'
he's been asleep both times. I was with my headphones during the movie and on 1bar of volume during the climb. He's never seen neither the game nor the movie [or any troll, for that matter]. And I'm not making this up.
How... How the hell did he do that. Do we after all float in some wibbly-wobbly ether we can communicate through?4 -
We had a planning meeting and it was mentioned that a specific story is too big and needs subtasks.
A team leader took responsibility to do that and guess what? The person just created two or three subtasks without any f*** content.
Yes, just a generic title and have fun figuring out the responsibility of each subtask.1 -
Today we had an hour long meeting on gitflow. The senior developer who felt compelled to arrange this meeting, during his demo couldn't figure out how to merge a hot-fix. "But you guys know what I'm talking about, right?" *Forehead=>Brick-wall*
If I wanted to lose brain cells I'd just start doing drugs, at least it would be more fun.1 -
We had one group project where we made game. We had like 3 developers, one guy to do some artwork and one to do most of the project management. And at that point in the project I had done most of the work so far (but not because the others didnt do anything, I just had fun coding).
One day said artwork guy managed to accidentily revert 100 of my commits without even opening a single code file. He didn't know git and issued random commands. I wouldn't know how to fuck up a repository like that even if I wanted to. Usually I am rather calm but at that point I was a little bit pissed.4 -
It was my Java teacher's last semester before he bailed to a different school.
All the machines had different versions of needed software or just didn't have them at all. He would try to teach like we all had it and we should just take notes because installing would take too long.
He would rapid fire different technologies and then drop them lie flies, so we learned nothing about any of them.
At the end of the semester, almost nothing had been graded (my roommate never even knew his final grade, last he saw it was a '*')
He assigned the final exam project on Thursday afternoon of the last week of school, and it required every technology he thought he used in the course.
I came out with a D, somehow, couldn't ask why because he left already. A lot of people had D's or worse, but it was what they needed in order to move on or graduate or whatever so there wasn't enough of a group to get it corrected by student affairs.
Fun times.1 -
My best teacher was with me for C++ in high school and in college. He had the most relaxed, laid back style while managing to both make the lessons fun.
Perhaps my favorite lesson was around C++ and Pointers. Lessons generally we mixed with long ramblings about the military and live coding examples. He was talking about object references and Navy ships when he told a student to "give me the USS Wisconsin". Perplexed, my classmate said he wasn't sure he could do that without a lot of help. So this teacher drew an arrow on a piece of paper, showed it to the class and then found the general direction he wanted it to aim for and taped it to a pole next to the stage. He called that a Pointer to a USS Wisconsin and then asked the student to give him the USS Wisconsin again.
I understand pointers today because of that lesson.2 -
We received legacy project for support and fixing.. it had few issues:
1. There was a controller called MainController. This guy was the soul of the project 10k+ lines, heavily dependent on the data from the database.
2. We didnt get the data. Just the database structure (we couldnt run the app at all)
3. At the very end of that controller there was a "simple" eval($_SESSION['somevariable'])
4. We had no documentation and had to guess how it works...
Someone really had fun screwing up this project. Needless to say we got rid of it quickly. :) -
I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.
I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.
All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.
The story goes like this:
I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.
The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.
I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.
Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.
We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.
We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!
Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.
I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.
Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.
I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.3 -
So we need a plumber, but first, show me some plumbing that you had do just for fun
-if every job would be like a developer -
We had this teacher in uni that was teaching several lectures and one of them being mobile computing ( actual name, but it was just android dev).
So on the first lecture he started to add a single button on the screen and trying to add an onClick functionality. But once he started to write the code he got errors (didn't include Button) and said to everyone:
"Ok, this is normal and now when I click on IDEs save button this will go away" ofc it didn't go aways.
So after 5 minutes of trying to write the full code from head he just opened another project and copied the code he need and tried to run the app (it crashed).
So after about 2/3 of a lecture I stopped laughing and went over to his desk and just hit alt+enter to import the lib and built the project without errors :D
Never went back to those lectures but I passed the class with highest grade by just demonstrating an app I built for fun without any proof that it is actually mine. -
So, myself an a friend are working on a project together. I leave for a weekend trip, I come back and find out the changelog is out of date like... six versions. I’m the type of person that likes to keep things like this. I had to manually go to the commit history and check when the package.json version was bumbed.
Yesterday, he updated it twice and pushed the versions to server, without updating the changelog. Turns out we accidentally skipped a version and decided to combine the two.
Now I have to find the dates each version was published since I like to do that too. Great fun. -
they say i was a natural at programming. i like it, i understand problems easily and im able to find a solution for it. but so was math, and chemistry. basically anything that has problem solving so i wasn't into programming that much.
until i joined my first competition. man that was an eye opener. we had a deadlock tie with the other team, and there was this one problem that was a tie breaker. sure enough we both was able to solve it. but the judges ruled in our favor because of one thing, i used recursion! man that was fun. the looks on their faces.
and i was hooked on that euphoric feeling. that was my drug. now , a decade or so later, im still addicted to that drug -
Last year my class had a group project, we had to make a site to allow users to book to their favourite clinic, it was in php, I dislike php, if it were for me, I would have developed the backend in python, but I was the only one to know how to do it in my class...
I asked if they cyphered the passwords, they laughed at me, then the presentation day arrived...
The moron who started to make fun of me said "The password is cyphered, it's super secure", then he showed the db, every password but one was clear, the one I put in my form was hashed, the others were readable by anyone, when I saw the teacher's face I started laughing so hard lol1 -
So, in my second semester of CS I had a class about OS and the way they work. The professor made us do presentations every two weeks (we were basically giving the class...).
For full points we had to have the presentation, an example (video or pictures), and an activity.
My team was one of the last presentations of the first round (iirc there were 5 rounds). I was in charge of the activity, so I decided to create a program to make it fun (and leaned a new language in the way). Thanks to this the professor gave us extra credit because we were the first team that ever did that.
My classmates decided that it was a good idea to follow my idea and a couple of teams started to code their activities too. At the end of the semester almost every team had a program as their activity...
But the professor didn't gave them extra credit because it wasn't a novelty anymore. :D
In another round, my team got as a topic encryption. By the time I was already a Linux user and I knew a thing or two about encryption, so I decided to do the example in real time showing how to encrypt and decrypt using command line. Once again we received extra credit because of it. :D
At the end of the semester the professor offered me a job as a developer, but I couldn't take it since I moved out of the country the next month :( -
I worked at my previous job about 8 years (hired out of school) and wasn't actively looking for a new one; I had a lot of freedom and liked my boss and colleagues, but the pay was mediocre and I was under a lot of pressure because I was the sole architect, engineer, and programmer for a good number of important applications.
Anyway, my brother-in-law told me that his employer was looking for a developer and that previous candidates fell through, and that the pay was a lot more and they're good about raises (which was like pulling teeth at my then-current job) so I applied and went for an interview.
They basically gave me an offer on the spot and wanted me to start in 2 weeks. I told them that it would be hard since I'd basically be cutting my boss's Achilles by leaving so soon and suddenly (just hiring someone would take at least a month, not counting getting applicants), but they were adamant, as the position had been vacant for a few months at that point. I got them to agree to 3 weeks and pulled the trigger, but offered to help out in my old position for a few months cause we had a big project in progress I was leading.
So the new job is great: it's a much younger office and I'm having more fun and there's a lot less pressure. Meanwhile, at the old job, the project I was leading got scrapped and the asked me to do other odds and ends until, after screwing something up I basically told them I'm done. They got a new guy quickly due to a lucky turn of events, but he couldn't pick up where I left off on a lot of projects: they're going to rewrite one because of it. My one colleague still likes to point out that I left without them having knowledge of my code (besides that I always said I'd answer questions, plus it's been 6 months now and my code is all on a TFS instance they all have access to).
I still feel a bit guilty even though I have no reason to. -
This is a true story when I was working as a application technician a couple of years ago!
Before I started working there, they had a couple of incidents with ppl with less knowledge accidently deleted stuffs in prod databases, and only a handfull of ppl get the full access to them. I started working in this team, and one day I was asked to run a snippet in one of the prod databases from a co-worker with less privilege.
Loged in, run the snippet and the server STALLED for a couple of minutes! When the snippet was finished I looked at the screen and saw the output "1724217 rows deleted". The fun part here, was that we went to a coffee break right after this, and after a couple of minutes we started to hear ppl mumbling that the network was slow as f*ck, servers didn't respond etc etc.
Well, I responded that I got a snippet that deleted 1724217 row in a table and we ran back to our computers and started to work backwards to solve this.
The best part in this story is that:
* Was not my fault! Even thou I was the one that executed it.
* The tables was deleted from a live prod server that was not heavily used!
* I asked for a life line for us in this team, that we needed a prevented output so we can "match" the actual output after we ran it in prod from the ones from the developers!
Even thou it was not my fault, this is the worst mess up I have done working in IT over 10 years. O_o8 -
you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?
noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few
but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.
example.
if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.
and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.
if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.
i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.
there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?
the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.
and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.
everything is so backwards in this country.
people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'
or
'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'
or
'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'
its pretty gross as are these people
well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people
took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.
still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?
I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.
I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.
i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.
and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.
there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.
starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.
everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.
the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.
so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.
years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.
don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.
I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.
oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.8 -
Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.
So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.
I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).
2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.
Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.
Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.
I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*
So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).
Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.
Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.
Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla
---
Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*
--
Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.
Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.2 -
Hey Android Studio when I put you to bed you was happy and we had so much fun! Why in the morning when I open my project you complain about build issues? What changed?...
Oh, I get it GRADLE is messing you up again! FMDL2 -
Given an opportunity to develop an application for R&D. What do we do as a team? Let build it exactly the same way our current stack is built. (This app won't actually be used for anything useful, just an exercise for a fun R&D task)
It still amazes me with the number of developers that literally have the mindset, let's just do what we know & don't want to learn anything new.
Let's showcase new technologies? No. Let's create a serverless application? No. Let's create some microservices? No. Let's wrap the application in a Docker container so we can easily spin it up? No. Let's have multiple services that sit behind an API gateway? No. Let's for fucks sake at try a different design pattern? Why would we do that? Can we do anything differently? No.
No innovation, nothing - it just blows my mind. Everyone seems to think that the way the stack is built is how every application is. Sorry but a huge monolithic application that can't scale isn't how the other half live...
I don't know why the lack of wanting to try something new bothers be so much, but it does.
Had a real opportunity to showcase some cool tech, design patterns, new services in the cloud. Show not only other devs but upper management that there are alternative ways to develop. It's not like anything that I put together was "new or shiny" - I just wanted to do anything... Anything that isn't how currently do things.
Full disclosure, I'm not a great Dev - I'm pretty dam average but I'm always willing to try new techniques or approaches.9 -
Fun story
tl;dr; analog FTW!
so we've just had a nice game. A few teams internationally gathered together in the aws gameDay. We had aws accounts set up [one per team] and our goal was to maintain our t2.Micros to deal with incoming load. The higher the latency - the less points we get, the more 5xx - the more points we lose. The more infra we have, the more points we pay for it.
So we are quite new in aws, most of us know aws only in theory. And that's the best part!
So at first we had some steady, mild load incoming. But then bursts came up and we went offline. It's obvious we needed an lb w/ autoscaling. Lb was allright, we did set it up and got back online. We also created an autoscaling group and set it up.
Now what we couldn't figure out is how the f* do we make that group scale automatically, as a response to traffic! So we did what every sane person would do - we monitored LB's stats and changed autoscaling group's config manually 😁
needless to say we won the game w/ 23k points. 2nd place had 9k.
That was fun!3 -
Had virus cause growth thing on my uvula. Dentist saw it got bigger. So we got another doctor to remove it. He suggested we just take the whole uvula out. He said, "You won't miss it." He had it done as well. They want to biopsy to make sure I don't have "the cancer". Not too worried. Been taking things to prevent that. Mostly good general health foods. Good vitamins and anti-oxidants.
So it took like a month to actually line up the time to do it. I was thinking this would take a while. It took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to burn it off. They used a cauterizer thing to cut it off. The whole time I couldn't breath out my nose because my mouth was wide open. I was breathing out seared flesh smoke during this time out of my mouth. Burnt me doesn't taste all that good.
I didn't gag nor puke. The doctor said he was good at dodging just in case. I have a feeling he would be fun to have drinks with.
So he said my uvula was large at the base. So it would take more than a week to heal. He gave me script for meds. I appreciate that because it kinda hurts. It feels like there is that large burn at the back of my throat. Because, there is a large burn at the back of my throat. I told them I came to the doctors office and lost weight. Got the nurse to snort.
I hope this turns out like getting my teeth pulled. Needed meds for right after and not again later. We shall see. It feels like a really bad sore throat. It kinda IS a really bad sore throat. Go figure.4 -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
buying a car is such an exhausting and depressing experience. i feel like being less of a man and somewhat blind right now.
I, a 24 year old guy, have never driven a car. afaik, we were poor, my city's public infrastructure is very good and cheap, and my family majorly never needed it.
6 years ago, i got my first 2 wheeler. i still didn't needed it but dad did, and so i learnt it a bit, was somewhat comfortable driving it on my own, gave a driving test, failed, nd forgot about it ( coz again, still not needed much). to this day this bit is true about me.
at that time my father had bought a few scooters before, so he had some experience, and we ended up buying a new one. currently that fella sits outside our home and my father uses it for supplies.
coming to 2023, i was/am thinking of buying a car. why? coz (1) car trips while sitting in the backseat have been super fun (2) people with cars tend to reach anywhere independently, and help others easily (3) my few friends have one and they are super smug about it and (4) i am starting a wfo job which requires 2 days of wfo and is 60km away from home (although train route with 3 interchanges is less time taking)
but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WHEN YOU *THINK* ABOUT BUYING A CAR!?
1. buy first or learn to drive first or get a driving license first?
getting a learner's permit is like filling a form; driving schools require no documents but money, and car sellers also do not want any complicated documents. so first step is easy for all.
HOWEVER, driving schools teach the very basics and are controlling your car for 90 % of the time. you can't learn without having your own car, but at the same time you can't buy new car just to *learn*, you will end up denting it.
2. the confusion around how to buy a car?
there are so many fucking parameters.
money being tha major 1 : old cars are coming from $800-$12000 new cars start at $8000 . my current budget is aroud 3-4k as I want to learn on it first with an expected usage of <1000 km per month
brand : there are literally 1000+ models whose base varients start at 8-9k and whose used version is available in my range. i have no idea how to choose.
year : in our country, a petrol car's registration expires in 15 years. cars from 2009 to 2012 are coming in my range but they are gonna expire in 1-4 year . not sure if its a deal breaker, as i plan to buy a new car later, but people are warning me about usage.
km driven : not 1 person is there who i talked to and told me to trust the kms on odometer. most of the cars i saw show 30-60,000kms driven but i am expecting them to be 5-7x more
cng/petrol : cng is cheaper, while petrol is better for engine life, from what i heard. I was inclined towards cng, but everyone i discussed adviced against this as those cars tend to have been driven for very long due to mileage efficiency.
engine power, cc, power steering, body... there are so many stuff that neither i know about and nor am i considering, which makes me more sad and scared of these deals. i have never bought anything without a proper research.
overall its the first time when i am feeling so much dependent on others and being an inefficient and inexperienced adult . my family once bought a used car 10 years ago, which was a total sham and got us to spend so much on it that we had to sell it for scrap in 3 months. It was a painful and nightmarish experience. i don't want that.7 -
The taboo of not finishing.
(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)
It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.
But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.
But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?
Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.
But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.
In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.
Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.
But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.
But, let's go back to programming.
Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.
That is understandable.
But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?
What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?
Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).
Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?
First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.
What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.
I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.
And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.
If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.
In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.
Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.
And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.2 -
This was a project for school, we had to simulate an app that traced bus routes over a map.
All the teams but mine do it in Java (desktop app), we took another approach and did it on Android with the Maps API.
I had fun coding a parser, this parser job was to read a file and load the bus routes and draw them on the map.
It was structured like:
NAME
COLOR
<lat, long>
<lat, long>
The fun part was coding and telling my teammates "chill out, it will work", so we finished, built and run and... done! First code working smooth AF.
I know it's a simple parser and a simple app, but it was a nice feeling not having to debug the app.1 -
In my school we had a CS lab and we were supposed to do lab assignments.
I had a book which gave a basic introduction on event driven programming, and introduced me to two new functions which I couldn't have ever known(I got internet in 2013) if I had gone with just the curriculum, kbhit() and gotoxy(). With this new knowledge I created my first 2d game. And that feeling of creating something no one expects and something fun, which also gets you attention of the whole room(Nothing like that was ever created in that lab, it was a shitty school), made me realize that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. 😃 -
In school we had to make a very basic program to calculate some stuff of triangles, based on the three points of it..
Somehow i got completely into it and made "some stuff" to everything possible, w/ a stylable canvas where shit was drawn to.
Actually that turned out to be very fun.🤓 -
Well I used to play games at my Father’s computer, it was an old FPS online game really fun, I played it like everyday when I was 6 yo. Two years later the computer broke and we had to buy a new one, so my father insisted that we buy two computers, one for him to work and one for my own computer and assembled it myself. I thought myself to do it by a book and took me like 2 weeks to figure it out and assemble the whole thing. I love every minute of it.1
-
In our class we have one subject where we take notes on one shared Google docs document. To be honest, this may be the worst "teamwork" that I every had to deal with.
• Simply copying the stuff from the blackboard:
• Missing context
• document consists of keywords and occasional sentences
• These fucking deep nested lists
• No quality control whatsoever
--> nobody fucking cares
• What, nobody made notes for this point?
• Any attempt to speak up result in me being scolded
• Be me, the only one not shopping on amazon instead of taking notes
• Wtf does this mean, where's the context
• one line of code without needed context code
No quality, no Motivation, no better alternatives, no fun. -
I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!
5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.
4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.
3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.
2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.
1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)
This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.
Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.
Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.
Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.
Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.
Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay -
Amother one:
Seconf CS101 class. We had to write a program that multiplies two parameters in a method.
I asked the tutor for help because it was my forst timr ever writimg code.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? THIS IS BASIC STUFF YOU SHOULD ALREAEDY KNOW IN YOUR SLEEP. ANYMORE QUESTIONS? "
Went to the prpfessor and told him what kind of assholes are working for him. Found out that the tutpr is not tutoring anyone amymore because the found someone who is not an asshole.
College is fun.1 -
Not a dev question but a cultural question for any of the German devs I’ve seen post here.
My American daughter is living in Germany on an exchange student program. She’s frustrated right now because her host dad and host brother are being really rude and impatient with her over her difficulties with speaking the language. She currently writes it better than she speaks but that and her efforts to keep trying don’t seem to matter to them. This conflict spills over into other social interactions. They constantly berate and make fun of her over everything. The host mom and host sister are nicer and more patient. But they also have to put up with this boorish behavior from the males.
On a train ride home, my daughter was sexually propositioned no less than three times in one hour by three different men. And at festivals she went to where there was lots of drinking, it was even worse.
A German exchange student we once had living with us here in the US regularly broke program rules, slept around, and even downloaded child porn on our network (highly illegal and alarming). My wife was the coordinator for many years to govern the students who came here from many countries and we struggle to think of any but one or two German boys who acted like gentlemen toward ladies.
So is it just a “German guy” thing and commonly accepted in the culture? Or is this type of behavior generally frowned upon and these guys are just in a minority of jerks that we keep having the bad luck of running into?
I know the same question can be and is often asked about American men, too. But I’m more interested in knowing how Germans view Germans who act this way.6 -
My first job was through a technology "Graduate Training Program" at a large bank. We were sold on the job being told that there would be a month of corporate training before getting to work. You know, stuff like presentation skills and Myers Briggs and actual useful stuff. And yeah, they did have that for like two days of the month.
The rest was the most bullshit work to basically kiss-ass to upper management. Having to analyze their commercials and explain how amazing they were and why (they sucked). Explaining a portion of the business to upper management.. you know- the business they knew because they are executives in it- but it had to be "fun". We were stuck making board games and rap songs to these things to make an ass of ourselves in front of executives.
Then after that I was stuck working on VB6 programming with a Cobol mainframe backend. So fucking awful. -
DevRant is fun for me these days, more now than ever.
People create bot accounts, post content off of ChatGPT/post OG rants which we all shit on, except one guy. You know who that is.
Some try to force their projects on us, while being homophobic, racist and 10 other things. One of them grew on me, ngl.
Some are talking about me everyday but too scared to tag me, cuz they know I will blast their ass, and have, in the past.
Some people I had beef with, one of them is now a friend of mine. The others, not so much.
Finally.6 -
Its been a month since i opened Android studio, and am feeling so weird doing the things now i do.
I had been learning and developing apps for almost an year( not exactly any big apps, but kinda in a learning phase, making prototypes, learning about the internal workings, reading blogs/articles,etc ) . Although i did got a few internships and earned some money, i didn't felt any good calling myself an Android developer with insufficient skills.
Frustrated, i just thought of taking a break, as my college was also giving a pressure of its own. Meanwhile i got a python data analytics scholarship from some 1 day competition at clg., So last September and October have pretty much gone into that. Python being an old friend seems like a pretty fun thing to do, and am totally into it (for now)
But java seems to let go of my hands even faster. Even though i used to waste much of my time reading how stuff works or checking out ui/animations , i did coded some stuff and made cool prototypes. i had a feeling that one day this all learning will be over and i will be able to code apps with ease... But now, it feels am going back to stage Zero. I feel as if i can't even write a hello world app.
I hope my poor little codebase is documented well enough to accept me back.
Don't leave me, java . We are on a break :'''( -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
Reply to my 2018 version: https://devrant.com/rants/1346392/...
Dear holodreamer ( version 2018 ),
I'm just glad that I'm still alive now. You won't believe how terrible 2020 is at the moment! Anyways, a lot has happened since you wrote me and I'm gonna reply it all to you.
Thanks for noticing. I really like my hairstyle now and my insecurity of going bald have gone. I couldn't be more happy.
Unfortunately, I'm not financially independent yet. Thanks to the crypto crash, the crypto ban in the country and some bad calls on my end. :/. But the good news is that we are back on the crypto market as the ban has been lifted recently. I don't have enough crypto to buy a lambo or go to the moon, but I have something that I could give to my grand kids. At this point, I don't really care anymore how much the value it is going to be, I have come to learn to think them of as a souvenir.
Your prediction of me preparing to move out of country seems to have come true. Honestly, I had given up that dream, but thanks to one of my best friend for reigniting those dreams - I may be moving somewhere really better by next year. I hope that I get this financial independence thing figured out before I move there. I don't wanna live there paycheck to paycheck.
Fortunately, I'm not getting any pressure to get married yet. I think I'm heading the way to a better life filled with some travel and adventures. I had a great opportunity to attend Google I/O 2020, but it got cancelled. Hopefully, covid19 will be over in few months.
Yea, I remember her. I got really carried away to the point that things she said started to hurt my heart. But eventually we had some argument and we stopped talking last September and I cut all contacts with her on the new years. If it makes you feel any better, last time i checked, she looks quite plumpy and totally different.
Thankfully, I'm not that lonely to need a chat bot. But I found some good online friends. They are fun to talk to.
No, AI didn't replace developers yet. Calm down! Javascript seems to be the most popular programming language now. But I hear there is a new contender to JavaScript that could change everything. It's called WebAssembly. Maybe in few years, we will see the decline of JavaScript.
Thinking about you, I feel some guilt for wasting your potential. I could have done much better if I was little more careful and responsible with you. I don't wanna make 2022 version of me feel bad for me.
Regards,
holodreamer ( version 2020 )1 -
Previous job I worked, we had a system for taking bookings. I may have made a slight miscalculation in implementing the payment api. Which resulted in people being double charged, undercharged etc. Tbh the payment gateway was ancient and we had to grapple with their SOAP API not fun. But just shows we all made mistakes, suppose it's how you deal with them, when they crop up that defines us as devs.
-
Built the most generic file importer.
So a customer had his SAP system giving us some 5 million barcodes in a csv which we needed to parse. But as there could be different file types and I thought the handling would always include the same steps I made them configurable through function pointers. - Did not want to make it as spooky as the rest of the code base where the function pointers were buried deep in some shared memory configs, which might even change at run time, but rather I statically used the member functions of my class. Just to poke fun on the ugly C++ syntax of member function pointers. I still shudder at the thought some poor soul now has to maintain that code.
(For the actual parsing I actually used a one liner in awk which was churning through the records in one minute which was faster than the SAP guys seemed to be accustomed to.) -
[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.
Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.
People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.
People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).
I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.
THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.
But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.
Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.
They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.
Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.
This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).
We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.
People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.
And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.
There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.
I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.
It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.
Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job11 -
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 -
today has been one of the worst day of my life
- the parking situation went out of hand : i bought a new car 2 days ago, nd since last 2 days i have been just taking it out to practice for 1 hr in morning with the trainer. today one of our pesky neighbour took this opportunity and parked in our spot. i had to call my friend in the early morning to get it parked in a place far away from home . my new car is parked in an unsafe place , just because the neighbour wants to make me mad 😭
- office announced that since cto is coming, you must do wfo fod next 2 days. our office is tuesday nd Thursday, now i will have to go on friday too. plus our team lead is coming, so next weekend is going to be 4days wfo. they are giving random surprises, why not just tell us that its full wfo?
- one of our neighbour's bike got stolen in plain sight. our road is usually having a lot of people going around whole day, as its opposite to park. nd those neighbours have a hon ground floor, so they are almost always outside. we have installed a camera just 2 days ago, nd that caught the incident live. i am 100% sure that if my car had been parked here today, then it would have been my car 😭😭😭
- we friends went for a night stroll in my car. the car was mine, but my friend was driving it as he's experienced. we stopped at a food joint. i took the key from him for sometime because i was having fun playing with it . then when we were heading out, our key was gone!
i almost had a mini heart attack. my friends were not messing up with me. fortunately the restaurant had cameras , so we requested for cctv footage. in the footage we found that i accidentally put the key in the restaurant menu. and that fucking guy had taken away the menu!!!
imagine if he had given that menu to someone else 😭😭😭. our car would have been gone in a moment, as we were not even seeing the car from the window. imagine if the restaurant didn't had the fucking cameras 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
life fucks super bad in a moment of truth10 -
A friend of mine studies mathematics and he told me about a project he has to do and we worked on it together a bit: Numerically calculate the arctan.
He dug out a nice series by (the one and only) Euler and we started massaging the thing to get it into a bit of a nicer form (there were (n!)^2 and other shenanigans) and we eventually succeeded after some stupid simple errors and arrived at a quite simple recursive progression. After that he also found a formula to transform a given value into the region where our formula actually mimics the arctan and we proceeded to proof this formula. The programming was straight forward and now we only have to find the radius of convergence which I suspect is pi^2 (but no proof).
I had a lot of fun doing this, fiddling around with the formulas and then programming it to see it actually becoming real.3 -
This year we went to ChaosStack with my friends. It was fine, nothing special, we sucked, but we had fun.
However, last year I applied with a different team. We had a hard time deciding the technologies to do the selection task with, as we couldn't find a language that all three of us would know. We finally agreed on C++, which wasn't exactly the best tool for the job (calling rest apis) but at least we all knew it a little. We divided the work, agreed on texting one another if we can't solve something, and I thought we were done.
Fast forward 3 days before the deadline, I text them when we could meet to connect the things.
No response.
Next morning I learned that they left to a maths camp (that's been held on those exact days for the past 10 years) and wouldn't come back until after the competition. -
I feel a little sorry for all illustrators and gig-creators of visual things out there. And yet I feel uplifted in spirit at the same time with the new era of midjourney that has just started.
It’s incredible!
Maybe you don’t understand if you are not in software.
It’s a giant leap of such magnitude that it is impossible to comprehend the entire scope of this revolution…
Small gig:ers get their money from very small and small businesses who can’t afford anything else. They are expert digital artists. The excel in being productive and can conceptualize a thought or idea in hours…
These hours have now been removed. Not all. But some. For the entire industry, this is billions of dollars I am sure.
So, they need to adapt to this new realm that we are entering.
It’s just… I mean, I can’t even realize it myself and I have played with prompting now for weeks and months… And it’s just 2023. /imagine what will be possible in 2030. 2050. If we survive.
I created a man (a hedge-fund manager) out of thin air. He stands in the super-market, looking tired, it’s evening… He has had a long day at the office…
And-he-does-not-exist.
And it took me five minutes. A rendering of such sort would probably take at least a day for an expert illustrator in photoshop or whatever.
Now, everyone will use this. You got this everywhere very, very soon. Including the gig expert illustrators! The thing is… I can’t draw a straight line but with text I can conjure up pretty much anything.
It’s magic.
That is what it is. I know it isn’t but it feels like it. For people without software skills it must feel even more like an illusion…
Need twelve icons of bumblebees illustrations to be used as icons on your new web site (as images)? Takes five minutes. An hour at most until you are satiesfied. In specific color ranges? You got it…
That shit cost like $99 bucks before if you needed to own them. And it took a week.
A revolution!
What fantastic times we live in!
And sad times and great opportunities for all visual artists out there.
(I am not at all worried for the dev industry. This will be SO fun!)5 -
I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.
Okay, great, so what?
The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.
I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.3 -
Someone mentioned antivirus and custom code... it reminded me of when Symantec Endpoint Protection received an update and some of our production servers had our custom apps quarantined. We had about four servers that had most of our custom apps removed. When it happened I thought someone was monkeying with the servers (they were our task servers used for task and service jobs). It took me about an hour to realize what happened then another hour to get the SEP admins to disable it until we could get another patch. Fun day.
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People who have seem my rants know am a calm person.. But watch out for what's coming next:
AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH !FUCK YOU STUPID CHEAP PHONE!!
was coming home after tiring college exam, thankfully got my spirits uplifted coz of my crush's message...
So , we were chatting, i was having fun flirting with my little cuteness nd was telling her some tale about how me nd friends were partying some day....
She was so into it and was getting into her naughty mode when suddenly this asshole went off... Had got 15% notification just a second ago, thought "yeah i have some time to connect" but this shit went out from 15 to 1 in a matter of seconds!!!?!, nd that too without notifs.
Fuck man, i lost such a nice moment today X(
(Ps: am using this shit micromax phn just because my old phn is at service center) -
I regret being mean.
Growing up, I went to International school. Everything was taught in English. I transferred from a Russian school after studying for 6 years. It felt like a heaven although my dad was busting his ass off to pay my tuition.
We had many students from many countries. 2 students from North Korea. I use to make fun of them but now I think I should have nicer. I miss my school and that time. We to sneak to auditorium, hide there from teachers. We use to play "zombie", in pitch black, 1 becomes a zombie and others hide and run from the zombie. We use to play the piano and beautiful music there. The playful and joyful time where everything seemed possible and we had bright futures ahead of us, I miss that.
I want to become more loving and kind person.
https://youtube.com/watch/...10 -
Found a little magazine when I was 12 which talked about HTML.
Then later, a friend talked about VBS and VB.NET and I just started making prank shit in that...
Then later back to making websites and basically just grew from there really...
Only followed a formal education on programming once... Which I got kicked out off because I ended my first year with a splendid 2 (that 1 point for adequate attendance).
The fun part? I failed because I was too good :^)
All my grades where a 1 or a 2 because my code was made using tools and libraries that they didn't want me to touch or even know about until 3rd of 4th year...
So yea, I failed everything with the reason being: "Not according to the exercise".
Another fun part: We had to make a personal blog in the 1st year using the techniques we had learned.
Sites were published on a *public* server...
Someone hacked all sites... except mine :^) -
!dev
I just woke up from a fun adrenaline packed film dream.
It started like an movie, leaning a bit into the funny side, but also a bit serious.
We were 3 guys going top speed on the highway, dodging traffic, trying to prevent a bomb from detonating on the other side of the city.
We were all famous actors, but the only one I remember was Jackie Chan. I remember thinking why would they cast Jackie Chan and give him so few lines.
I wished I remember more about this part. The only thing I remember is that when we get to the end of the island, we’re in the wrong place: we’re at a huge OBGYN center.
My sidekicks are bothering the desk women, eating all of the “waiting candy”. I feel bad and offer to pay those, which they pretend to not care about but then end up charging me down to the penny. Cunts.
The sidekicks leave and (without explanation because dreams) disappear of the story.
Defeated, I go outside and start walking.
And I don’t remember exactly what the fuck happened in between, but somehow I’m now in the house of a cartel druglord and he’s pissed and I need to run now.
So I do. I remembered that there was a very thick forest east to the house. So I go there.
And what follows is a very intense montage of me escaping.
At some point that forest ended, so I continue through some high weed, and then another forest, and so on. While I had to pass through parts with no vegetation, I had to avoid these as much as possible.
I saw dozens of types of trees and shrubs.
Then I started seeing families, kids, playing, relaxing on what seemed a Sunday afternoon.
The adventure was so fun, the landscape was so beautiful I felt happy and thought “this is how it feels to be alive”. And I actually felt happy in real life as well.
At some point the vegetation I encounter decreased, and I have to go through more urbanized areas, with more people.
“Uh oh” I think, “I hope no one snitches me”. But miraculously, no one does.
Throughout all the journey I had glimpses of the drug lord nearby presence.
His face on the distance, the sound of his car engine.
But now he was closer than ever. And I’m closer to this house which is the escape point (can’t really remember why).
So I reach for the handle and fade to white, and fade back again, it’s me, older, and I’m not in an escaping mood.
My wife is waiting, our car is outside (on the non drug lord side).
And guess what, we were waiting for our daughter, who comes with a smile and a child on her hands.
So apparently, my daughter married someone from the drug lord villa that almost murders me.
Reading this sounds like a bad script, but that’s what I dreamed today.1 -
Im helping my brother build a pc, and i try to make him try a linux distro before he purchase windows, simply because i regret not doing so.
Now i got some thoughts going tho.. We both have/will have Ryzen 5 CPU and GTX 1060/70/80. Will there be any compatibility issues with some linux distros with that?
Iirc Nvidia cards had some minor issues on linux.
My brother will mainly use it for gaming on a serious level, and i use it for development and gaming for fun.
Also any distros you can recommend? I had a peek at Manjaro, it looked cool.11 -
Need some advice here.
I am into the third month at my new job in a new country. My new workplace and I are all basically Chinese (Ching chong ling long). Tentatively, we should have no problem getting along right?
Till now, I had not discovered a common topic that we can engage in. All conversation between me and them were short-lived. I go my way and as do they. However, I still like to have some decent conversation or human interaction. I felt socially dead and excluded. Seeing them having fun together and not being able to be included, felt...dread.
I had been feeling lonely in this new country for quite awhile. It makes me question why I came here in the first place and comtemplate about returning to where I came from.
If you had this kind of situation before or if this is you, what would you do?4 -
Another student rant..
So I have a midterm exam tomorrow. It's a software engineering course. We're being forced to basically memorize a ton of shit about stuff like requirements engineering, activity diagrams and interaction models...
I have never been this bored in my life. Especially while studying something computer science related.
We are also developing a project for the course and that is a ton a fun and I'm learning a lot. But still, this isn't how I want to spend my weekend.
How did you go through the times where you had to learn a lot of bullshit that you didn't excited about? You did go through this shit right?3 -
I had some fun times in college.
Me: This book is too outdated, we need updated information for the video capture card presentation. I'd do it but this time I'm busy.
Teammate: I'll do it.
Me: oh wow really? Thanks!
Next week...
Teammate: here, take a look. I updated the information
Me: Yeah, I can see that all of those 10+ year old models have some fresh google search information in them. Thanks. -
I got invited to a quinceanera by someone that happened to be on the same night as homecoming. They did all the traditional stuff. They had some sparkling cider that may or may not have been spiked and I had a lot of it. I learned after that it might have been spiked. It was right before homecoming started when the traditional stuff was over and it would've just been kinda boring dancing for the next FOUR HOURS. My date and I decided we didn't want to stay for that long so we went to homecoming instead. It has better dancing and a mosh pit which is way more fun than just slow dancing. We met up with a group of friends there and had a ton of fun. Homecoming only went till 10 where the quince would've gone till midnight. Our group went out for ice cream and I got home at 11. It's almost midnight now. High school is awesome, ain't it?
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I learned to program in community college where they had us learn C# but I honestly didn't catch the programming bug until we had to do assembly language. I just found it fun to break what I needed to do into 's,mall steps and at the end I get to see the result of all that Work!