One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

We used to do this more often - but to kind of bring it back - what is everyone working on this weekend?

I’m working on some new API endpoints for the awesome new devRant web version that @trogus made that we’re releasing soon.

Share your weekend project!

It happened to one of my friend at work place.

So my friend is a UI developer and was working on a super critical project with very tight deadline. He was waiting for design team to give him mocks and web api team for giving Apis, so he can start his work. Now there are 4 days left for deadline and none of the parties are ready with their work, and my friend is sitting idle. Management is getting anxious day by day. So one program management lady called him the weak link in the standup meeting and started putting blame on him for the delay in the project. Guy tried to explain that it's not his fault and he is stuck. But that lady was not in a mood to listen.

Now come the next day, in morning he got the design ready and complete Apis from other teams. That day he missed the standup meeting, worked whole night and completed the work with two days remaining for deadline. He went to standup meeting after completing the work, and when the turn came for him to give his status, he started with "the weak link has finished the work". There was a pin drop silent in the room. He continued to give his update like this for next couple of days. And finally that lady was forced to apologize in meeting room by him.

When you see a web service API accepting a SQL query in one of its JSON fields and the evil starts growing within you..

DROP ALL DATABASES

Just because you can!

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

I made a web app that utilizes the GeoLocation API, that is used by search and rescue services in a couple of countries, to located missing and/or injured people “in the wild”. Over a few years, hundreds of people has been found due to this tool, some of them would probably not have survived without it! Made the first prototype myself, then two other devs joined in.

Open source and SaaS is offered free of charge to the rescue services. :)

Just found this gem on Twitters API...
When your app gets too excited they return status code 420 to tell you to chill! 😂😂😂

Fyi : For the non web-devs out there 420 is an invalid http code.

WordPress needs no introduction, it powers a significant portion of the web while having some of the most nightmare inducing code i have seen in all my years as a developer.

Just look at the API, i mean what the actual fuck is that?

get_fucked();

So we hired a junior engineer. 1 year of experience, this is his second job.

First task: Send some data to a web service using its REST API. Let me know when you've finished.

Two hours later I go to check on him.
- "I'm trying to decode this weird format the server uses"
He was writing a JSON parser in Python from scratch.

:/

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

FUCK!!! FUCK IT ALL. FUCK YOU AND YOUR CRAPPY BULLSHT UNDOCUMENTED AND OUTDATED API.

YOUR DATABASE SERVER BACK-END HAS TO BE THE ONE MANAGING THE DISPLAY DATA FOR ITS WEB AND MOBILE CLIENTS. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND, DAMN IT.

I'M NOT GONNA SIT HERE ALL DAY HARD-CODING ALL YOUR SERVER'S INADEQUACY.

MAKES ME WONDER DO YOU EVER USE DESIGN PATTERNS OR APPLY DESIGN PRINCIPLES? DRY AT LEAST? DON'T FUCKING REPEAT YOURSELF, DAMN IT.

I CAN'T WAIT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE FOR GOOD.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

We've built a web app and now a client wants a VPN acces to the database of web app. When asked why, they said they want to occasionally pull some data out. 😱

We said no, and this is what they wrote:
"We’ve got live VPN access to every other web database we work with – why is this different?"

Well because maybe we know that we can build you an export of whatever you want, prepare you API calls for getting data to your CRM, but hell I'm not giving you access to the production DB.

web sound evolution

There is this service that I want to use (wont name it for privacy/legal reasons) and I have created a trial account which gives me a limited access to their apis. However the usage is where things are interesting.
The api access is restricted to some 1000 calls per trial account. But also they have a explorer option which lets to have the functionality as a web app like a dashboard and the explorer usage has unlimited access.

Now since I didnt want to exhaust my api limit, I let my service call the explorer apis instead. Is this ethically wrong or it is the fault of the service providers that they have such a big gaping hole in their licensing?

At my old job, me and a colleague were tasked with designing a new backup system. It had integrations for database systems, remote file storage and other goodies.
Once we were done, we ran our tests, and sure enough. The files and folder from A were in fact present at B and properly encrypted. So we deployed it.
The next day, after the backup routine had run over night, I got to work and noone was able to log in. They were all puzzled.
I accessed a root account to find the issue. Apparantly, we had made a mistake!
All files on A were present at B... But they were no longer present at A.
We had issued 'move' instead of 'copy' on all the backups. So all of peoples files and even the shared drives have had everything moved to remote storage :D
We spent 4 hours getting everything back in place, starting with the files of the people who were in the office that day.
Boss took it pretty well at least, but not my proudest moment.

*Stay tuned for the story of how I accidentally leaked our Amazon Web Services API key on stack overflow*

/facepalm

i'm seriously over mobile devs not understanding what backend architecture looks like.

the "we don't need a backend, we just need an API." statement drives me up the fucking walls. stop it, you should know better.

sincerely -
your friendly neighborhood web developer.

What's the point of using a framework if you don't use any of its features!? What the heck, I have to fix this damn web frontend that is so broken in many ways.

Instead of using an authentication middleware, every single view has the same block of code to check if a user is authenticated. Instead of templates, they used static HTML/JavaScript files and they passed data to pages through cookies.

The "REST" API is so messed up, nothing is resource-oriented, HTTP methods are chosen randomly as well as status codes. They are returning "412 Precondition Failed" instead of a plain simple "401 Unauthorized" when you're not authenticated! What the hell, did they even bother to check what 412 is about when they copied and pasted it from a crappy website!? I would never come up with 412, not even in my scariest nightmare.

What kind of drugs were they using when they wrote such code? Oh dear, I need a vacation...

Web api response with a 200 status code

{
error: ".......",
errorCode: "..."
}

Grinds my gears

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.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

full stack web development in 2017: mvvm model, api for backend, parsing on frontend

me: <?php echo "<div>hello".$name."</div>" ?>

PM: hows the android app going?
Android Dev: gradle downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: anyway how is the iOS app going?
iOS Dev: cocoapods downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: ... i guess the only thing running now is the web admin right?
Laravel/VueJS Dev: composer nodejs/npm/yarn downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: team lets retest the api endponts
Team: Postman downloading... blocked by network admin.
Team: -_- Insomnia REST Client downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: code study?
Team: even visual studio code/android studio/xcode is blocked. :(

.... sad dev life

anyone here with the same problem?

Does anyone have a good and free translator api I could use? I’m doing small school project and I just wanted to create text translator app. I tried yandex already, and ibm sucks since it doesn’t allow ajax request

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

Starting a third year computer science course. Lesson 1 of web API production. Git. Lecturer tells us to do a different branch for every commit so it's easy to roll back.

Nice.

Does anyone know a free hosting that support .net core web api without credit card? It’s just for a school project. IBM Bluemix only supports normal web app and azure needs credit card

Stupid bluemix console, build a translator web apps which processed by translator api services. When I pushed it, error occurred *panic begins*. Then I decided to create a default netcore template and push it. It worked. Push the former one again and it worked.

Stupid server honestly

A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

That awkward moment when your Girl needs you not as a friend but as a web dev because of a javascript bug in an online job portal that won't let you send your application because the hidden field auto fill crashes due to exhausted free requests to the Google maps API...

I think I ranted about this before but fuck it.

The love/hate relation I have with security in programming is funny. I am working as a cyber security engineer currently but I do loads of programming as well. Security is the most important factor for me while programming and I'd rather ship an application with less features than with more possibly vulnerable features.

But, sometimes I find it rather annoying when I want to write a new application (a web application where 90 percent of the application is the REST API), writing security checks takes up most of the time.

I'm working on a new (quick/fun) application right now and I've been at this for.... 3 hours I think and the first very simple functionality has finally been built, which took like 10 minutes. The rest of the 3 hours has been securing the application! And yes, I'm using a framework (my own) which has already loads of security features built-in but I need more and more specific security with this API.

Well, let's continue with securing this fucker!

Web Developer with no common sense: “I’m going to query the currency calculator API for each of the 1000 records to convert.”.

Web Developer with common sense: “I’m going to query the currency rates API and use the calculation to convert each of the 1000 records.”

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

I need to make a confession about my terribly unprofessional project I made. Around two years ago I got thrown for the first time into back end development - I had to work on the project alone. As a very smart man I basically exposed our SMTP server as a nice and very flexible API.

Fortunately it was, by the design, a very short-lived project, taken down from the web completely and for good after around 2 months. I'm still happy I had more luck than brains and nobody used our server as a spam sending service in our name and I have learned a valuable and relatively cheap lesson in security this way.

I spent about 5 hours rewriting an in company C# toolbox because I thought it's connection to a Web API was broken. 5 FUCKING HOURS.

Only to then see I was using port 80 for HTTPS...

Argh! What are HTTP status codes for if you're not using them in your API implementation?!

Fucking morons!

Last week my company thought it would be a great idea to introduce a new sh*tty internal web portal that gives federated access to aws (instead of using our own accounts to assume dev roles like we used to do).

This broke a lot of sh*t that simply used to ask for an MFA token and used our practically permissionless accounts to assume a proper dev role. An MFA token that we'd enter directly into the terminal/tool. It was very seamless. But nooooooo we now have to go a webpage, login with sso (which also requires mfa), click "generate credentials," copy-paste those into terminal/creds file and _then_ continue our aws cli call. Every. Single. Day.

BUT TODAY I HAD ENOUGH.

I spent the entire day rewriting the auth part of our tools so they would basically read the cookie that's set by the web portal, and use it to call the internal api that generates the credentials, and just automatically save those. Now all we need to do is log into the portal, then return to the tool and voilà, the tool's also got access! Sure, it's not as passive as just entering an MFA token directly, but it's as passive as it gets. Still annoyed by this sh*tty and unnecessary portal, but I learned a thing or two about cookies.

“sEniOr tEcHniCiaN”: “I don’t know what Blazor is. I write my projects in ASP.NET. You should just use ASP.NET”

Me: …”Blazor *is* ASP. This project is running on ASP.NET 6.”

“seNioR tEchNiCiaN”: “As previously stated, I don’t use Blazor. I don’t care what version it is.”

Yes, this is a real exchange from my ongoing problems with this idiot.
His attitude is what ticks me off the most.
He doesn’t know what CORS is.
He doesn’t understand that “ASP.NET” covers Blazor, Razor Pages, the old MVC stuff, web APIs, and more.
He doesn’t understand the difference between a web request being initiated from the browser via Fetch and a web request being initiated from the server. (“My ASP site is shown in the browser, so requests to the third party API aren’t originating from the server.”)

And yet has the arrogance to repeatedly talk down to me while I try to explain basic concepts to him in the least condescending way possible.

After going around and around in circles with him, he finally admitted to me that “he doesn’t actually know what the CORS configuration looks like or how to modify it, to be honest.”

I just wanna go home.

We got DDoS attacked by some spam bot crawler thing.

Higher ups called a meeting so that one of our seniors could present ways to mitigate these attacks.

- If a custom, "obscure" header is missing (from api endpoints), send back a basic HTTP challenge. Deny all credentials.

- Some basic implementation of rate limiting on the web server

We can't implement DDoS protection at the network level because "we don't even have the new load balancer yet and we've been waiting on that for what... Two years now?" (See: spineless managers don't make the lazy network guys do anything)

So now we implement security through obscurity and DDoS protection... Using the very same machines that are supposed to be protected from DDoS attacks.

OK heavy rant on 'modern' software development coming! --> don't take it to seriously though :-)

Electron... why does that shit exist? It is like stacking all the worst technologies available to mankind into an enormous pile of crap and polishing that turd to look like something wonderful. It is big, slow and overall AWFUL!

An example? ... Microsoft Teams :-( it burns your PC like fire and makes it squeal for mercy.

When a library/framework becomes the ultimate evolution of abstraction layer upon abstraction layer and it simply should stop to exist and a reset button needs to be pressed.

I would love to see some research on the real world environmental impact that all those shitty slow and bloated web technologies have.

Solution:

Software energy label!

C, C++ and Rust e.t.c. and all accompanying efficient UI libraries should be the only languages/implementations allowed to get a A, B and C label.

Python (without C libraries like Numpy), JavaScript and all those other slow interpreted scripting/Web API nonsense should get a D, E or F label by default.

Have fun!

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

Just output the web api response like this:

echo "{"
echo " \"key\" = ["
for i in `seq 1 $arrCount`; do
if [ $i -ne 0 ]; then
echo ","
fi
echo "{ \"key1\" = \"${key1[$i]}\","
echo " \"key2\" = \"${key2[$i]}\" }"
done
echo "]}"

Create an web application(a product of our company). Manager insisted on using X third party API instead of Y third party API.

Now the app is complete.
*Very slow, Shitty User Experience *

I feel shameful for creating such a disaster and also wasted 3 sprints on it. But couldn't do anything because I don't have an authority to take decision which API or technology stack I should use.

Business head and manager had a meeting. Now they want to use Y third party API.

So they called me for discussion, lets me know we will now use Y third party API and it should be completed within a week because we just need to change the API calls in code that's all, despite of knowing all the core logic is built around those API.

Don't know how to react to this :( Want to hit my head on a wall

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

I'm in the process of moving a web store to Shopify.

Today I was writing the product migration script and noticed about 10% of the products were missing their images after being imported, however no errors were returned from Shopify's API.

After 20 minutes of debugging I finally realized that some idiot uploaded some images in PNG format but changed the filename to a .jpg extension since our old CMS required a JPEG extension.

>be my team
>developing a mobile app
>I'm responsible for developing a "RESTful" API to interface communications between the app and the database
>there's also an "admin" web application which the client themselves will use to manage some shit in the database
>I've developed the API, it works with the mobile app
>instead of just making it simply a front-end app that makes requests to the API like the mobile app does, the guy responsible for the admin app completely ignores my API and implements his own with a certain messy dollar symbol language and a certain bloated piece of server software, accessing the same database directly, and does some operations in his own special way that will break what I've implemented
>now data inserted via admin app is inaccessible to the server API, and I'm expected to "fix" my code so it's consistent with this guy's shit, but the only way to do it is introducing interdependency between the actual API and the admin app's back end

Fuck my life, now I'm the one responsible for the app being broken because no way the guy who's used to kludging unmaintainable shit together fast would ever fuck anything up

I've created a small smart home web app 2 or 3 years ago.
Features:
- Change DECT heating controller settings
- Philips Hue control
- Wunderlist integration
- Send a cooking recipe to the web app (from a large recipe site, with a greasymonkey script)

I've mounted an old Android tablet to a kitchen cupboard where the web app runs in kiosk mode in fullscreen (you can swipe between the different panels).

The web app is build with .NET Core Web-API, Vue.js and MariaDB. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Last year I've discovered openHAB with HABPanel...

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

So I've started learning Rust and I must say it feels great! But some parts of the language, like enums, are quite different than what I'm used to.
As a proof of concept I've reimplemented a small API (an Azure Function App) in Rust with Actix Web and it's FAST AS FUCK BOIII.
The response is served about 5x as quckly and the memory footprint shrinked from some 90 MB to around 5 MB.
In my small scale usecase it's not a huge difference, but I think it can be massive at large scales...
What is your experience with Rust (at scale)?

I wish I could quickly reimplement the whole fucking CMS Of Doom™ in Rust... but no time and resources :(

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

In the process of moving our web store to Shopify (yuck!) and we are first creating 150000 fake orders through the API so that as we import our real orders, the numbers match.

I'm disturbed by the fact there is no better way to achieve this and after speaking with support they said our best bet would be asking about it on the forums.

You know something is ABSOLUTELY NOT RIGHT when you see this code.

Even more when you notice the parameter is not being used at all!

Holy crap, it is a web api deployed in production. Imagine it being called!

Dear "Create a web API with ASP.NET Core" official MS tutorial:

you betrayed me. I came to you like an innocent child and you fucked me over, you abused my trust, forcing me to follow insane instructions leading to no result other than the loss of my childhood and my day.

I feel like a child raped by some perv-priest or monster father.

I had a soul ready for a space walk,
and now I have just a hole full of your cock

I am working on a project that integrated with Microsoft Dynamics. The D365 team changes the data and API too often. I keep munging the data over and over so that it fits view models.

Yesterday I had a technical discussion with someone that the company installed to coordinate building technical solutions that get shared between projects. This is a problem across all of our Dynamics projects and is a technical one than needs coordinated approach.

The management heard that I am “doing repeated work because the data isn’t stable.” So they decided that it must be a problem with the project manager. The executive decides to use it as a reason to fire him. Which shows me that I can’t talk to even a technical person without risk of project chaos.

After the conversation but before the firing I get an offer letter from another company. I plan on taking it to get away from this crazy company. The project is going to lose their key web developer and also the project manager.

This executive seems to love firing project managers. My other project is on its third PM. My trust for the upper management is basically gone. I can’t even discuss the technical hurdles with a technical person without someone getting fired. I’m so ready to be out of this zoo.

The only downside of leaving is that I won’t have as many stories to tell on devRant.

True story, honest to god.
Developed a state or the art SOA web app. Front end communicates with backend through API.
Client meeting, this guy looks me right in the eyes and blurts out : « why does the submit button get disabled after first click ? Clicking it a few times gets my request high priority »
I folded back my laptop and left the meeting without saying a word. Pretty sure I’m getting fired tomorrow.

I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.

And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.

I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.

After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.

I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?

I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.

Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.

Oh well 🤷

Haven't had such joy as with developing the devrant client in a while. (when things work of course haha)

The js plugin system works now with barely any time added to just loading the rants and in proper order too! (thanks asyncjs) now just need to add a way for the user to download and manage external ones.

The screenshot shows the test plugin linkify, which fetches from the API if there's any links and linkifies them even on the feed (which devrant web doesn't do and always annoyed me) - though since html gets stripped by handlebars I'll have to find a way for them to properly render with other tags to still be stripped (maybe handlebars has that inbuilt already? didn't check yet), plugins currently have access to all values the template would get too, so one could fuck around with e.g. the usernames too lol.

btw: the app is fully responsive even on desktop, which will be handy for me personally, iirc all the other clients I've tried always had some sort of size limit, without which it'd also better fit all our i3 archers out there.

Leaking an API access token to the web client... oh no no noooo...

TL;DR;

I was asked to give estimation on an app, that:
1. No one has a clue what it does, even though there is v1 on the store with almost 10% of functionality working
2. No one has a clue what should be in the new rewritten version
3. We are already behind schedule and I have no clue why, I've just been told that
4. They need UI flow that shows how the app will work with static data and when API's are ready (because ya know, writing code is easier than creating wireframes and modifying them accordingly) I will then need to link app with API as if it is as simple as drinking a cup of water, especially that: 1. What is water? 2. Do I have a cup or is it given, and 3. Relax bro, drinking water is like eating a burger, piece of cake!

I'm not sure what to do, not enough that it's React Native but also spaghetti requirements that no one was able to answer my simple question: What is the app responsible of?

P.S.: Some say I must rewrite the old app ONLY, no new features, others say: Turn the new web portal into mobile app, I say: WTF is going one?

Started a new gig doing APIs and deployment pipelines. After a few weeks a new boss came on the scene and decided I'm now a web dev, and the API and pipelines are going to be scrapped, and replaced by something with less availability and scalability.

Anyone looking for a good back-end dev?

😵‍💫

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

"One misstep from developers at Starbucks left exposed an API key that could be used by an attacker to access internal systems and manipulate the list of authorized users," according to the report of Bleeping Computer.

Vulnerability hunter Vinoth Kumar reported and later Starbucks responded it as "significant information disclosure" and qualified for a bug bounty. Along with identifying the GitHub repository and specifying the file hosting the API key, Kumar also provided proof-of-concept (PoC) code demonstrating what an attacker could do with the key. Apart from listing systems and users, adversaries could also take control of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, execute commands on systems and add or remove users with access to the internal systems.

The company paid Kumar a $4,000 bounty for the disclosure, which is the maximum reward for critical vulnerabilities.

Android dev job question:

"Describe the activity lifecycle and write an application that does x,y,z in accordance with it"

Fullstack dev job question:

"Write some code that interacts with our API and does x,y,z, put the data into our database and build a web interface"

Java backend dev interview :
"BUILD AN ELEVATOR ALGORITHM WITH LESS THAN o(nlog(n)), FIND NEIGHBORS IN A BINARY TREE, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN INTERFACE AND ABSTRACT CLASS?"

Why?

No-code web design tools are made for the sole purpose of lacking features in order to torture a developer after marketing or sales requests something that the tool cannot do, or can but requires a very roundabout way of doing things. Extra points for things that have a JS API instead of letting you inject the damn thing.

A friend came to me whether i want to do a project on c++(someone asked him to find a c++ guy).
Me needing money didn’t refuse. Even though i am a Java developer with 0 skills on c++, but wanted to give it a try.
So project started, and it was about a plugin for rhinoceros app(3d graphics app).
The plugin was simple, had some views and some services to upload a file into s3 and some api calls, not something complex..
So i ended up working on the project together with my friend(web dev).
So long story short, we had a lot of issues, but considering we both had no knowledge on c++, we were really lucky to finish the product almost on time(3 days after).
Did no memory management even though i’ve read that we have to do that by our selfs and that c++ doesn’t have garbage collector.
But the plugin worked great even without garbage collector.
Had a lot issues with string manipulation, which almost drive me crazy.

PS: did a post here before taking the project, to ask whether it is a good idea to take the project or not, had some positive and some negative replies, but i deleted the post since i thought i was breaking the NDA i signed 😂😂

PS2: just finished OCAJP 8 last week with a great score😃

Some thoughts about time relations in app dev:

10% - minimal ui & coding main functions
10% - testing
10% - writing web api just for fun
70% - try to "design" an ui

Am I the only one having problems with ui?? 🤔

!rant

I've had a personal project (commercial idea) I've been meaning to get started on for a while, and today I started...

Kudos to the team at Microsoft, they've really gotten .net core and asp.net core to a fantastic place.

And the team at JetBrains have done an amazing job on Rider.

I've been able to get a docker container running SQL Server on linux, as well as Web API projects for an API and an identity server all running with local HTTPS and communicating quite happily, with barely an issue in sight.

Bodes well for the future I hope.

Now I just have to commit to the project and actually finish it 😂

Azure portal is all I hate about Windows in a single, convenient, accessible web page.

Worst part being there are some parts of my work requiring me to deal with it on a daily basis as there is no PowerShell equivalent command, nor any API I could use, to perform some tasks.

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

I started programming when I was 14, because I was deeply enrooted in MMORPG hacking communities. It gave me an escape from real life, and I felt empowered by the skill to create something from nothing. My first language was Lazarus FPC, followed by VB.NET, C#, C++ ( managed and unmanaged non CLR ). As time went on, I found more ways to turn my "hacks" into software, and finally I began selling subscriptions which required me writing an authentication system.

After weeks of research, I began writing my own REST API in PHP using MySQL as my database. At this point I had an IPB forum up and running for a year, but with my newly acquired knowledge I was able to couple my API with my forum software. To properly distribute my API i had to learn NGINX to route my API to a subdomain.

Soon after I began writing my own portal for my authentication system, at which point I had become entirely enveloped in Web Development. I was 17 when I dropped my forum, I'm now 21 and freelancing web app consulting, day job as a QA automation developer.

A friend has a small business and asked me if I could make him a small program. So why not, experience for me and I can help a friend out. (This started in ~mid 2016)

Started out as a WPF desktop application with many weird bugs and slow interface, into crashing the database on AWS (could not connect, could not get a backup). It was just hell and I kind of gave up on fixing it.

I always talked to him and said "yeah, I will do something better soon", but I was procrastinating and kept pushing it away from me. Then one day I said "f*ck it - lets go" and started coding on 2.0:

- WebApp with a complete new architecture (which I learned in the past few months)
- User authentication (JWT)
- ASP.NET Core Backend for web api
- Angular 4 Frontend w/ bootstrap
- Coded in like a week with 3-5 hours each day

Deployed around 6 months ago and he never had a complain. When I visited him I asked "how is your application doing?" - "great. it just works!".

My once most hated project turned into the most successful project in just a few months.

Received feedback on a task I made for a job interview (I didn't get a technical interview).

The task was easy with nothing special about it that made me think if that's what the job is like, I don't want to work there. It was a simple web page with search functionality. I did the task anyway.

The feedback I got was useless. It said that I made a complex and an over-engineered solution.
What I made, mind you, was a one endpoint API and a single Vue.js component instead of using jQuery to update the results. That's it. OVER-ENGINEERED!

Complete waste of time.

I had a wonderful run-in with corporate security at a credit card processing company last year (I won't name them this time).
I was asked design an application that allowed users in a secure room to receive instructions for putting gift cards into envelopes, print labels and send the envelopes to the post. There were all sorts of rules about what combinations of cards could go in which envelopes etc etc, but that wasn't the hard part.
These folks had a dedicated label printer for printing the address labels, in their secure room.
The address data was in a database in the server room.
On separate networks.
And there was absolutely no way that the corporate security folks would let an application that had access to a printer that was on a different network also have access to the address data.
So I took a look at the legacy application to see what they did, to hopefully use as a precedent.
They had an unsecured web page (no, not an API, a web page) that listed the addresses to be printed. And a Windows application running on the users' PC that was quietly scraping that page to print the labels.
Luckily, it ceased to be an issue for me, as the whole IT department suddenly got outsourced to India, so it became some Indian's problem to solve.

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

The company that I work for has recently recruited a team for Web Development, so they don't have to pay a monthly fee to the previous team who designed their website.

They have over 3000+ products in the old website, and no logical way to import them to the new website. The old team was asking for 300$ to give them an API which would return the product details in an XML format.

Obviously, paying that amount of money wasn't logical for a dying website, so the manager decided to hire someone to manually copy the content from the old admin panel to the new one, that is until I stopped him.

My solution? Write a simple web scraper to login to the old panel and collect data. Boom! 300$ saved from going to waste.

Now, the old team found about this and as much as my manager was happy, they were quite angry. So they implanted a Google reCaptcha to prevent my bot from scraping the old panel.

I spent about 20 minutes, and found out once you're logged in to the old panel, the session is saved in a cookie and you are no longer greeted by a Captcha.

So I re-written a small portion of my bot, and Boom! Instant karma from manager. We finished publishing the new site, and notified the old team, only to see the precious look on their face. Poor guy, he thought I was a wizard or something 😂😂

That's what you get for overcharging people!

TL;DR: Company's old website team wanted to overcharge us writing an API to fetch 3000+ records.
Written a basic web scraper to do the same job in less than an hour.

So, the other day, I was working on a Angular Web app which included the YouTube Api. In the event listener, I wrote that when a video ended, a next one would start (from our database).
Guess what. It didn't work.
Then, I wrote a console.log();
It freaking worked! Then, I removed the console.log. It didn't. I tested cases for like half an hour and it still baffles me, why the hell would an output change everything?
devGod works on mysterious ways...

Why not release the devrant (mobile+web) client on github (and maybe gitlab for people that would actually contribute but are special about the usage of github) so people could contribute to it, leading to faster progress? I thought about it now for a bit and couldn't see any problems with that, since the current apk can be anyway unpacked via freely available tools (appcelerator doesn't make it too hard either anyway 😕) and the website/api isn't any secret either (see the 4000 clients getting patched together out of zombie like api calls)

JSF: Yeah, we make it so can focus on what's important and you never have to write HTML or CSS like those lowly web developers.

Also JSF: You can't nest <h:form> components because nested forms are invalid HTML. Oh, that breaks the composite component you were trying to use? Ha, fuck off.

Primefaces: You know how you can just provide an ID and OverlayPanel will open on its own? Well, for a Dialog, the API is completely different. Here's a glob of JavaScript in an onclick event.

I swear this entire thing was regurgitated by a murder of seagulls.

I am learning java at school and my teacher asked me to make a work on JTA (java transaction API). There's not a lot of tutos on it on the web so I say to myself "go on, give it a try, you'll only learn by trying."
I finally find how to make the @TransactionType, where to put the @Stateless, my test works, nice. Finally I want to try a case where it shouldn't work, just to be sure the rollback works well. The test goes and... NullPointerException. Wtf ! Normally, my catch is supposed to, well, catch the error !

And finally, I was just stupid. My catch worked great. But I put a "throw e" inside.

Now I wanna hides under blankets, cry, eat cake and never see my coworkers again.

when youre working on a API and every testCase is all green plus manual testing thru Postman extension is all good..

then makes a web app use that API, authorization works as intended but the token is immedially invalid...

just..how..

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

Web programming is great. Except, you know, WHEN THE TEST SERVER WITH THE API YOU'RE INTERFACING WITH ISN'T WORKING CORRECTLY!!! WORSE STILL WHEN YOU DON'T OWN THE FUCKER AND CAN'T RESTART IT!!! I hate my life sometimes.

OK semi rant... Would like suggestions

Boss wants me to figure out someway to find the maximum load/users our servers/API/database can handle before it freezes or crashes **under normal usage**.

HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WITH 1 PC? The question seems to me to mean how big a DDoS can it handle?

I'm not sure if this is vague requirements, don't know what they're talking about, or they think I can shit gold... for nothing... or I'm missing something (I'm thinking how many concurrent requests and a single Neville melee even with 4 CPUs)

"Oh just doing up some cloud servers"

Uh well I'm a developer, I've never used Chef or Puppet and or cloud sucks, it's like a web GUI, not only do I have to create the instances manually and would have to upload the testing programs to each manually... And set up the envs needed to run it.

Docker you say? There's no Docker here... Prebuilt VM images? Not supported.

And it's due in 2 weeks...

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

How is coupling backend + frontend as a single nextjs app a good idea? What the fuck is this?

What if you have to create new replica sets of a backend because of high load pressure? What about load balancers?? What if i want my backend to be a microservice? How do i unit test the backend if its cluttered with frontend? WTF IS THIS

WHY DID NEXTJS THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY DO SO MANY DEVS LOVE THIS IDEA AND GLORIFY NEXTJS?

Nextjs seems like the type of framework that was built by a frontend web developer who just refuses to learn backend technology at all costs.

---

its been a few hours and the concept of nextjs is bending my mind rn. I thought nextjs is just another frontend framework. A react killer. Only to find out its both a backend + frontend framework.

Cluttering backend stuff into frontend is gonna get messy no matter how much you try to modularize the code. Am i lost or am i right???

---

Scratching my head over nextjs. Looks like a great framework for small-mid project but definitely not large project. The more shit the project needs the more messy shit become. Angular has modularized all of this in separate folders -- components services guards interceptors (now new stuff coming called Signals) etc. All of it is separated in individual folders and kept frontend-only. Simple enough. No backend clutter

---

Can i even use nextjs strictly as a frontend framework while it uses my custom backend built in java spring boot? For example use nextjs /api/ folder to handle custom routes built outside of nextjs framework?

Am i insane here

I just learned the concept of this thing called REST API and now here's GraphQL showing up on me face. Mother fucking web development hell. BRB. KMS

It is time for my own dumbass's favorite pastime: not letting go on retro tech.

I am gonna build a small and complete RESTful web API with Vbscript and Classic ASP with errrthing thrown in this mfker including JWT authentication and i am gonna see how the idea of an ORM goes. I know that COM interop was a thing, dunno if it still is.

I am fucking bored. The graduate degree is killing me and I need a distraction.

Thinking about being a purist and keeping the COM libraries to be made with VB.NET :P

Fuck yeah for being a masochistic retard.

I legit love vb net tho

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

FUCKING HELL.

It's already enough that this FUCKING API I have to work with is a mess of JSON and XML responses mixed together.
With mixed german and english keys and attributes all sprinkled over it.
And API access locked to Austria only for some reason.

And then they even manage to fuck up the little bit of JSON they use.

It's just a fucking array of strings (where one could easily use integers).

They can stick this fucking steaming pile of shit that they call API up their PHP infested assholes.

I hate web development sometimes.

Just succesfully converted my entire app from using web scraping data fetching to direct API by reverse-engineering their android app to get to their private API

App is running much faster and more stable now, feels good

When you finally have some servers racked and configured in VMware to build a lab environment for the team....

But to access VMware you need to run citrix receiver from a mac to launch Chrome on Windows to access the VMware ESX Web UI but only on the HTML5 version as Flash doesn't work....

Now to spin up virtual machines that you can only upload via ova images but not locally cos that tries to show you the Windows citrix local files....

Do I even dare ask if I can access this via API so I can actually provision this with Ansible like I want too?!

so…

let's make a translation website game thing

ooh! web hosting! check black friday deal!
buys website + hosting
~$100

oooh, let's check out google's translation api

>0.00001$ wtf no i aint paying that shitz or i wouldnt been a h4x3r

how can i work around this?
i know! ill make an iframe and input text as if i were a user

firefox: fuq u bish google isnt allowing framing for its translations

well gonna find another work around tommorow

maybe share the link too :)

Let's say you're working on a web application, and you notice that one of the pages is not displaying the correct data. You investigate further and realize that the data is being retrieved from an API endpoint, but for some reason, the API is returning the wrong data.

You start looking into the code that calls the API and notice that it's passing in the correct parameters, so you dig deeper into the API code itself. After hours of poring over the code, you finally discover that the bug is caused by a typo in the database query that the API is using to retrieve the data.

You fix the typo and think the problem is solved, but then you realize that the data is still not displaying correctly on the page. After even more investigation, you discover that the bug is actually being caused by a caching issue on the client side.

At this point, you're feeling incredibly frustrated and overwhelmed. You've spent hours trying to track down this bug, and it feels like every time you think you've found the root cause, another issue pops up. This is just one example of the many challenges that developers face on a daily basis.

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

It's a really interesting discussion, when your boss tells you that it's a perfectly fine idea to directly use a Firebase DB from an Angular web app by storing the Admin Auth Token in a variable in JS.
Thank the spaghetti monster, I was able to argue against it and use the already partially implemented RESTful API with the already used auth.
He basically wanted to save time and omit extra login routes.

It's OK to save time and not implement $randomFeatures.
BUT DON'T FUCKING TRY TO SAVE TIME ON SECURITY!

If it wasn't for me, this web app would turn into a bigger gaping (security) asshole than Sasha Grey's...

so I installed nginx on my server this week. I feel like a giddy kid now installing one self hosted app after another. REVERSE PROXY ALL THE THINGS!

Right now I have reviewboard and drone (drone.io) installed. Any of you guys have suggestions for other cool stuff to try out? Mostly interested in something with a web API that can do fun stuff :)

Client wants some CMS text to be automatically translated. So I checked and Google seems to have a solution for that. I thought to to be as simpel as doing a request and parsing the response. That's how API's work, right?

No. First I must create an account, that account must have a credit card, then I need to setup credentials, the default ones working with path variables, an API key... etc etc etc.

I feel so stupid for just not understanding their docs. I'm just a dude that installs a CMS and makes pretty CSS for it. I've worked with REST APIs before (Mollie, Carerix) but none of them ever demanded the level of knowledge and setup the Google Translate API demands.

Am I just a bad developer or is this shit just too complex for your average web developer?

Converting 1.5 million lined web app to a rest API....realizing it would be so much easier to just re-develop the web application....at least we're finally starting to move away from coldfusion and heading to node!

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

i wrote a website, a server in go, a small os in c, a game in js, a game and server and web scraper and other desktop apps in java, mobile apps with flutter, a website with php also, implemented aes in go, wrote a parser in java. done sysadmin stuff on my vps and pihole/openvpn/nextcloud on my rpi. learn about c vulnerabilities and used metasploit. attempted to write an interpreted language. did some led displays with arduino. currently learning tensorflow.

i have never...
- written a driver
- made a game with a game engine
- created a file encoding
- implemented an oauth2 server
- made an api
- worked with vr

what am i missing? i want to be a very well rounded dev.

On the most serious of notes, and i need yall to think hard about this.

What makes you a good developer whether Backend or Frontend or Web or mobile.

What qualities actually make you a good developer?

I mean, we all use google, github, stack overflow etc. So what makes Programmer A better than Programmer B.

and in a more practical sense, ive been coding for two years now and i have deployed an API written in node and an instagram automation tool in PHP (which is down now due to lack of funds), i lack frontend knowldge (but i want to make up for that) and i have projects that when i finish, with my connections can and will blow up in terms of income. now you on the other hand, what makes you better than me?

and lastly, how much code do you have to change from an existing project, lets say from github for you to comfortably say, yes this is mine.

-Rant-
How do you (not) secure your Rest based web service?
1. Chain it to shady organic authentication system built by a hoard of monkeys high on Tequila.
2. have secret keys that get copy pasted into config flat files, and index them on your code search engine.
3. make the onboarding extremely platform specific that you need 500 environment variables, 50 scripts, 5 fancy device presses and a tap dance to make a GET call to the service.
4. fish through 500 rotating log files that the authentication system generates for each API call made.
5. Leave traces all over the host so if you have to start over, you should sudo rm -rf / and set fire to your computer.

So we were making android application for our college festival.. we decided to use Firebase as our primary service for "everything". Decided to use Firestore as database as it wouldn't require much web API call, and mainly as it had a free plan.

We thought that we would never hit the limits of free plan... Needless to say, we started hitting the daily limits about a week before the fest. And it became more of an issue a few days before the fest when we started to hit the limits within 4 hours of the day!!!

But we were lucky enough that the app sustained on the day of festival, lucky enough!!

I'm trying to build VoIP into my browser-based game, and holy shit are sound processing people bad at explaining stuff.
Every stackoverflow answer has badly named variables, noone names the algorithms they're using (which makes research near impossible), and literally every single Web Audio API pipeline I have seen so far contains at least one unexplained effect with no parameters, but it's a different effect each time.
One guy had implemented some kind of smoothing for catching up with the stream after interruptions (where the playback speed is proportional to how far we're behind the intended latency), without ever mentioning it anywhere. And this is meant to be a basic example!

Alright wish me luck boys and girls, actually started development on my first 'proper' application, building an sms client using the push bullet API for elementary OS...

First time using Vala, first time building something that isn't game or web related in a real world environment...

a friend of mine has applied at a company who have sent them this task* to complete before the job interview.
They gave about 10 days to complete this.
*I rewrote it

Personally I think this is super overblown and way too much to complete as a test before the first interview.
They expect the applicant to configure an SQL database, a backend with a custom API and a UI.
It's like a fullstack prototype software, not a task.
Im not in web development and I wouldn't feel confident learning these technologies in my free time in just a few days.

I said that this felt like some HR manager writing up the test or that they want the applicant to create a prototype for free.
Am I being too extreme here? To me it feels overkill, what do you all think? Is this common?

Oh and I should mention, this is for an internship position for a bachelors student.

I feel bad for bitching a lot on this site, so I'm going to try something positive for a change.

I got finished building this basic database web application that I ported from a Java EE based API to the Spring/Hibernate API. Took me about 3 weeks of work to do it. There's a new feature to search the database that I added just today. Had to do some debugging on it but it works fine.

Back in May I had never written a line of Java code or setup a LAMP stack, to doing stuff like this. This stuff gives me the strength I need to keep going. Someday I'm going to get a job as a junior dev.

Company hires an intern with Java experience to "help" with the back end of a simple project. Waste the next week trying to teach them what a RESTful web API is. Intern doesn't come back.

Forgive me for I have sinned.
I doubted software from India could be as bad as you always hear ... I was proven wrong ... now I have to take the consequences ... an untested, Indian Web-API

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

What is it with non-technical managers, especially those in sales, thinking that the solution to all problems is to "just pick up the phone and ring them?" This was *always* his opinion, whether the web service we were using wasn't accepting a valid request (apparently this was best "explained over the phone", I kid you not - have you ever tried speaking JSON?!) or whether we just needed a simple request going in to increase the API limit. I mean I could send an email or log a ticket in a few minutes tops, but you want me to spend 2 hours on hold to a support department only to be told "ah we don't take those requests over the phone, here's the URL, log a ticket."

Then it's always a case of "I don't understand why they're like that, all the guys I speak to are happy to help on the phone". Yeah, beacuse you're in sales & marketing you muppet. Blathering on to each other so you can stroke the egos of yourselves and your companies is kinda in the job description.

Grr. This was all a while ago, but I thought of it just now and the pure concept just annoyed me, so here it is. I really hope he's not doing the same thing to guys under him now (but let's be honest, he probably is.)

ytcfg is not defined.
Latest bullshit I have to deal with.

See my awesome WhatsApp API using web automation.

I'm selling it though.

I am developing a REST api for my android app using laravel.I want to implement web to mobile chat like Facebook's messenger.Any suggestions?

I'm developing a web app, which is purely based on some commercial .NET driven API. The documentation is a 12 page MS Word file with incorrect parameters and non-existing endpoints. I think there's also a cronjob which purposely crashes their server every 15minutes. I just love getting client emails saying I need to fix my app and get my shit together.

I'm working on a Web API for retrieving informarion of some sort (can't speak as it is a work in progress😝).
Before starting to work on this project all the experience I had was Desktop (C#, VB) and some SQL but now I'm learning so much more: REST, Asp.net core, nosql, GraphQL and more.
Even if I can't finish this project, still what I'm learning is even more valuable

hmmmmmm let me see.

Web based? lets do web based.

Do something simple like a basic crud app on web api format:
Do it with full authorization and authentication.
Start hard. Do it with pure golang using NOTHING but the std libraries.
Now, do it in a magic mvc framework like Rails or Laravel
Now do it on dotnet core
Now do it in django rest.

Watch the differences in all of them, sell your soul to something and now do it in Clojure. If you do it on a Scheme dialect or on Common Lisp my CMS admin will suck your whatever you have. Dude seems to be pretty good at it, we are trying to keep him from pulling tricks on the street but he insists.

Then add a React client with Typescript to get them basic ass endpoints to display nicely.

It should give you a fuckload of perspective amongst the different tools and way we do things and might make you appreciate the differences in paradigms required(pro points for doing modular in c# dotnetcore using different classlibs for the major points of the application using some crazy pattern like the mediator pattern)

I would hire a mfker that throws all this shit at me on a portfolio on the spot.

Had to fix all bugs of my colleague this night because our client was not happy.
Before he joined us he worked as a database admin and now he wants to learn web dev and coding. But he did so bad mistakes like endless loops or requesting api 5 times.
In so tired now, happy when its christmas

when you cant be arsed to do icons so you just use emojis for button icons.

btn.textContent = "🗑️"

because icon sets now have their own apis (like what ever happened to icon fonts?), and documents explaining what scripts and commands to run to *install fucking plugins* on software written to *supplement* doc servers. plugins and software whos host site returns an SSL error. nice.

to use web icons. downloaded only on request. from other sites.

seems kind of eh, tower-of-baylon to me. like a bird landing on the electrical lines near your house might cause a blip and break one or two icons on your slick 2020 web app.

idk just seems unnecessary, like if you're small, your gonna want to embed your fonts on the webpage instead of overcooking things and hosting *a fucking server* just to serve an api for fucking *icons*. and if you're large you're gonna reduce those requests anyway

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

Don't you just love thise dev days that just flay by, looked at the clock now and its just after 5pm,been coding pretty much all day.

Was reading up on progressive Web apps last night and just as a quick test made my own website one, so this morning through I would take the next step.

Few months ago I had made an events list app for android, also just for fun, but I point blank refuse to take it to ios as I see no reason to spend nearly 6 weeks salary on a Mac book because they a bunch of dicks, not to mention the $100 you need to pay each year just for them to annoy you.

Anyway, so after a quick update to my api, no thanks to Gitlab. I put together a fully offline capable pwa in react. So awesome how simply it really was, it's basically done, just needs some polish.

It's my first rant. So please ++1 me.

Now my rant:

In this semester I had a subject about system architecture. In this class, we must learn Java script, C# (and ASP.NET framework ), PHP (and Zend Framework 2), but in the classes is taught only UML and patterns. In the moodle of the subject we don't have any information about any of the languages and if we ask the teachers they don't know anything.
And we need in 4 weeks do a work with a widget in javascript, 2 Asp.net mvc, 1 asp.net web api. All with authentication.

So we are all fucked

Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".

What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?

React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.

All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.

Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?

I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.

8 months ago, me and my teammate developed an API and a web application for one of our client. The API was supposed to be consumed by mobile app which another team was working upon. Now my suggestion for the mobile team was to use something like ionic or react-native. This was purely to keep technical debt on lower side since hybrid apps don't deviate too far for both Android and iOS platforms. But mobile team went with the native apps and developed two separate apps which both have some differences.

The client didn't even use the iOS app since past 6 months. Now all of a sudden she reported several bugs and the person managing the mobile devs put that all on us. I tested some of the bugs and seems like the same feature is working on Android but not on iOS.
Came to know later that the iOS developer who was working on the app had resigned and left the company exactly 6 months ago. Right after the apps first launch. And since then mobile team hasn't put any replacement person for the project. That fucker was trying to buy some time by putting it all on us.
And now here I am, experimenting again with Flutter. So far it seems quite decent.

Here is a personal project I've been working on lately. It's not public, but just wanted to share. It's a custom chatbot I created using a LAMP stack. Its built on top of a framework called Program-O to handle the knowledgebase storage and processing along with some basic NLP. I added the web speech api functionality myself so it supports recognition as well as speech synthesis. Anyways, pretty proud of this one.

The dangers of PHP eval()

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will need therapy after this. I swear.

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

So my boss wants me to develop a complete business management solution + mobile app. (It’s a startup project based company). She doesn’t want to use dubsado / asana / etc and wants me to take the best of all and custom build it for her.
Now I was a mobile app developer. Native iOS and android + recently learnt flutter. No backend or web or api skill.
But screw it, I wanted to learn laravel since a long time anyway so that I could be an independent developer.
So I have agreed and started it...
Bitten more than I can chew? Time will tell...what do you think?

I've been creating a new website layout for a small theatre group. I am like how it's coming together :)

It is designed with user interaction in mind because the layout they are using now is... Well, thrown together. It uses images as buttons and I had a few friends of mine ask "Where do I get tickets" and it is not updated regularly.

I plan to automate a few things like for shows, if the show date has passed, it will remove itself from the home page. I also plan to web scrape, if the site permits, some information to be displayed on the show page.

I got to lots to do before I can show them what I've made.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

I'm trying to convert a legacy .NET Framework web api to .NET Core, the project and its supporting libraries are in awful conditions and to make things worse at a certain point someone has the genius idea of introducing Uncle Bob's "Clean" Architecture into a part of it so stuff which could simply look like this

public string doStuff(string input){
// Do the stuff
return output;
}

becomes a convoluted mess like this

public class StuffDoerRequest {
public string Input{get;set;}
}

public class StuffDoerResponse {
public string Output{get;set;}
}

public interface IStuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request);
}

public class StuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request) {
// Do the stuff
return new StuffDoerResponse() {
Output = actualFuckingOutput;
}
}
}

Edit: sorry for the lack of indentation, apparently DevRant trims leading whitespace

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
.
web development.

Does anyone know selenium?
Is it recommendable and trustful?

I want to create some java-app that login into different Websites with my accounts and collect data.

> unemployed (took a break)
> not gonna go back to the old company
> applied to another job, awaiting a response
> canceled Netflix
> Meanwhile doing small projects for myself, teaching like PWA and Web Notification API, focusing on javascript
> doing small time work (providing WordPress websites), not really proud of it, but only that works here for a small time

Web developers, please recommend a tech stack. I have work experience in Laravel, Angular and Node Express. Personal small experience only for Vue and React.

Frontend: Angular, React or Vue?

Backend: Node Adonis JS or PHP Laravel?

CSS framework: Angular Material(angular), Material-UI, Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap?

This is for a personal project API based. What frontend backend tech stack are you using right now? Thanks!

There's a production site with api call limits. We experienced waaaaay more visitors than usual and I forgot to increase the api call limit, so new users weren't able to do anything. FML again, update emails sent out.

I think I may be someone's wk101soon given how things are going for me.

So I get shipped over to the new offices to do some work. Initially, I was supposed to be updating SQL stored procedures.

That I can handle, well my task is now to build the skeleton project for a web API in core 2.0 using domain driven design and onion architecture which the rest of the team will use.

Okay, I don't have any experience in any of that at all. And god bless the team lead explaining some stuff to me. But it's going to take more than a 20-minute chat here and there for this stuff to sink in.

And being told just to build it how you think it should be isn't great advice when I'm trying to figure out how the systems work.

Every other API project I look at is structured completely different from one another so looking for patterns has failed.

I'm fucking stressed out every bit of information I'm getting on whats potentially happening with my job im getting second hand from people. Because I can't access my emails while off-site something I'm repeatedly flagging.

Every job advert is painstakingly making it clear how out of date my skill set is (or lack of). Evidently, I've been way too lax, and this has been a kick in the bollocks I'm not likely to forget.

If we're being evaluated on performance to see who they'll keep, then I've failed at the first hurdle.

Life lesson for those in education, don't be this knob head here and get comfortable when you land a job. Just knowing about the tech that's commonly used in your field does jack all study it.

Not a structured/meaningful rant and shits probably not as bad as I see it. I've only chewed through one fingernail after all.

Let's see what's on the menu today:

* Web Application Catastrophe Special *

Includes, but not limited to:
- Orphaned server processes in the configuration management cluster
- Microservice back-end architecture with no API documentation
- Poorly implemented cache microservice with no documentation
- Stale data causing everything to be shown as down in production, despite everything running fine

Cost: 1 developer's sanity

Wow. All these weekly rants work so well with my current project lol.
A 4-5 year old iOS project, written in Objective-C with some jQuery thrown in to keep things interesting. Its the kind of codebase where you look at some code and think "what the....how....you know what nevermind". Everything has CoreData mangled into it somewhere which causes all kinds of issues. got search results from a web API? better save those to CoreData. Why? Who knows...

I am currently playing around with hosting an API on Heruko but I also hear a lot of buzz around serverless APIs...
What do you guys recommend? Or do you recommend another host for playing around and maybe getting more serious in the future?

Does anyone know where are the *official* devrant api docs? Tried web searching but could not find them.

Cure for Imposter Syndrome:

Go try to find a freelancer for a project, for something like "adding OAuth to existing .net web API 2 and angular.ja project" and many many developers respond. You will be shocked at how little they know, they say they understand the job but are clearly incompetent.

Best job security ever. Also, just suck it up and do it yourself 😆