Buzzword dictionary to deal with annoying clients:

AI—regression
Big data—data
Blockchain—database
Algorithm—automated decision-making
Cloud—Internet
Crypto—cryptocurrency
Dark web—Onion service
Data science—statistics done by nonstatisticians
Disruption—competition
Viral—popular
IoT—malware-ready device

My first project and the reason I learnt to code. I was a manager at a supermarket and wanted a discount card for the old people so just wouldnt have to walk to the tills.

First I wrote hello world, then a calculator and then a loyalty card system for my store. It was wildly successful and the fact my scrap code even ran is a miracle. Shortly after launching it in my store I met a like minded investor with an actual dev team hooked it up to a web service and I spent the next 3 years rolling it out nationally to 480 stores. It's still running today.

Me: "I'm a programmer"

Others: talks about linux
Others: search algorithms!
Others: service infrastructure
Others: memory optimization
Others: encryption

Me: "I'm a front end web developer"

Others: complex services
Others: strong user form validation
Others: lazy loading
Others: SEO

Me: "fucking, I make shit look pretty alright"

Client: Sorry to bother you, but our developer team can not connect to your Web Service, can you help us?

Me: Of course, if you want, i can give you the code for that, i only need to know in what language are they developing.

Client: Sometimes they develop in spanish and sometimes on english...

Maybe i didn't ask the right question.

Sorry for my English.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

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!

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.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.

I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.

While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.

* Meeting starts *

* Ice broken and down to business *

"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."

* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *

Holy shit!!!

* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *

Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."

*Our team walks out*

GM: "Good job guys"

ME:

HBO, the network that owns Game of Thrones, one of the highest grossing and most popular shows, still use Flash for their web streaming service.

I cry in dothraki

These fresh new college grads...calling themselves Full Stack Developers...
Ask them to consume a web service and I get a blank look...ask them to create a REST service and they are like WTF are you talking...
Has it come to the point that people just keep throwing around terms without understanding the inherent philosophy or idea behind them or is it like it's just to show that they are the "COOL" kids...with no actual idea of what the fuck they are doing ???

In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!

We recently signed a huge deal with a big, very known vendor. I asked if they had a web interface to the software. Of course, they said, and gave us a link. I clicked the link and was asked to install java. Turns out the web version is just the desktop version wrapped in a Java applet. The applet didn't do well with openjdk, so they asked me to file a support ticket. They gave me another link. The service desk required shockwave flash.

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.

:/

Q: Your data migration service from old site to new site cost money.
A: Yes, I have to copy data from old database and import to the new one.

Q: Can I just provide you content separately so you don’t need to do that?
A: Yes, but I will have to charge you for copying and pasting your 100 pages of content manually.

Q: Can it come with part of the web development service and not as an additional service?
A: Yes, but the price for web development service will have to be increased to combine the two. If you don’t want to pay for it, I can just set up a few sample pages with the layout and you can handle your own content entry. Does that work for you?

Q: Well, but then I will have to spend extra time to work on it.
A: Yes you will. (At this point I think she starts to understand the concept of Time = Money...)

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Do you really expect that I can debug in a few minutes, a part of the software that I didn't build and have never seen before and have no knowledge of the external, third-party web service that code is reaching out to?

Dude, flippin' chill, take a walk, grab a drink, pop some popcorn and give me some time to figure out what the hell this code is doing so I can properly debug it!

You know what it turned out to be? Wrong test data used for the 3rd party service. So in essence... Nothing was wrong! Frickity frack!

Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.

Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.

If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.

Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."

Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).

Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).

Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.

Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”

FRACK!

Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”

Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.

The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.

This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.

FRACKing female dog!

Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.

Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).

People and their petty office politics piss me off.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

That awkward moment when I was able to run three docker containers on a 512MB server:
1. DotNet core web service
2. MySQL
3. OpenVPN

BUT I cannot run:
1. NodeJs web service
2. MongoDB container

Spent two hours configuring the damn server to get hit by this T_T

I know you guys probably have seen the worst of the worst...

But have you seen a js used to generate xml and send it to backend as json then parse it to xml? No template literals btw so there’s a lot of multiline with lots of + here and there

Or using sql to request web service?

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

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?

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).

When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).

I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

My customer service girl just told me that she gonna charge $20 to a client. The client bought one of our web development packages and requested us to create LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Instagram account so he can put those on his restaurant website.

Don't be surprised if I became millionaire around 2020.

// $20 can give us like 5 KFC meals here.

If you're an aspiring web dev, get comfortable using the command line.

Amazing how many new starters can't restart a service or tail an error log.

I'm not saying it to be a dick, it's just 101 stuff that'll save you loads of time.

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

Supervisor: so you're going to write a perl script that will compile a jar that will be used to invoke a web service
Me: okay. What does the web service do?...
Supervisor: I'm not sure how it works. It'll just return a success or error code
Me: so I'm just going to invoke a black box?
Supervisor: that's a good way to think of it
Me: so how does the qa process work with this black box/how can we debug?
Supervisor: we don't have qa for it and we can't debug

What the fuck?!?!? You expect me to call a literal fucking black fucking box?!?! This isn't lambda calc you jabroni.

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

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

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

REALLY?! YOU DIDN'T THINK?

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

For some reason my manager freaked out after her non developer husband told her that each of the web pages for our main service would take months to build. Shit man its just static content with some animations here and there. It is a total of 15 pages and this dude estimated that I (as in yours truly) would only be able to do 2 per month. Bato stfu. Stick to banking (hopefully your time estimates don't suck ass there) and let me woo your woman with my frontend godspeed.

So what did I do?

Simple, asked her to show me one of the design models she already created on photoshop. Saved that thing to my computer and coded it at home. In 2 hours (It was originally one but my dumbass gor tab trigger happy with rm rf autocomplete so I had to do it again...fking dumb) and showed it to her this morning.

Eat a dick dude. The woman is already going apeshit over all the other shit we have to do plus working on her masters and attentind 100+ pointless meetings a day whilst still being able to be the best fucking manager I've ever had. I really don't need her freaking the fuck out over your dumbfuck estimates. Why in the wholy fucking world she listened to your dumbass is beyond me, probably stress made her freak out.

Its cool b.....I got it under control.

Fucking chill woman damn.

**drops mic

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.

Worked with a European consulting company to integrate some shared business data (aka. calling a service).
VP of IT called an emergency meeting (IT managers, network admins) deeply concerned about the performance of the international web site since adding our services.
VP: “The partner’s site is much slower than ours. Only common piece that could cause that is your service.”
Me: “Um, their site is vastly different than ours. I don’t think we can compare their performance to ours.”
VP: “Performance is #1! I need your service fixed ASAP!”
Me: “OK, but what exactly is slow? How did you measure their site? The servers are in Germany”
VP: “I measured performance from my house last night.”
Me: “Did you use an application?”
VP: “<laughs> oh no, I was at home. When I opened the page, I counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, then the page displayed.”
Me: “Wow…um…OK…uh…how long does our page take to load?”
VP: “Two Mississippi’s”
Me: “Um…wow…OK…wow…uh, no, we don’t measure performance like that, but I’ll work with our partners and develop a performance benchmark to determine if the shared service is behaving differently.”
VP: “Whatever it is, the service is slow. Bill, what do you think is slowing down the service?”
NetworkAdmin-Bill: “The Atlantic Ocean?”
VP got up and left the meeting.

A service that emails your weekly web history to your employer on GSuite or Outlook.

I was told by my manager that I (the guy hired to be the lead developer on this project) was not a developer I was a designer and that writing php instead of using a knockoff version of dreamweever to drag and drop all of the items was an "unsecure and unsafe practice". He screamed at me for another 30 mins over this and then sent me on my way and laid me off a week and a half later after I finished the project because "we can't afford you" I was doing ITS, network and service installs, security, and web development for $10.00 an hour. #stupidboss

Today we had our "web technology" University exam. One question was to write a sample html program for our university's website.

I swear I could've built a fully functioning website on MVC and hosted it on some cloud service in far less time than that I spent scribbling 5 pages of writing HTML/CSS/JS so that I can "pass the exam". But nooooo. Our university syllabus takes IE and Java servlets as standard and apparently you get bonus marks if you could implement IE's Active-X on paper.

So much for the future web development

[Begin Rant] When you show your senior manager your REST Web Service and he says "Oh no nooo... I don't wanna see no code"... Me: Code?? That ain't code you fat silly fucker it's the command line output data which I spent a week parsing, batch processing, and storing into the database! [End Rant] :[

Our team was having a problem with very slow response times from a 3rd party web service they were contacting to get some device stats. No issues on the other end, but it had already been weeks. They ask me to take a look at it.

I take a few days, do a couple of benchmarks and tests and I isolate the section of code responsible. Turns out, the method they were calling would timeout if the device was offline. We ask the vendor, and they confirm this. They tell us to call methodX to check if it was up.

After having done that, lookup now only took seconds. They were annoyed that it wasn't documented but was just glad it was fixed.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

*Working on a project with boss, I am working on a mobile app, he is working on web service app.

Me: this service takes user id as parameter to get all account details (all other web services are like that)

Boss: yes, I use the id to filter the data.

Me: but by this, everyone has the id can do anything ! why we do not use session token?

Boss: this is a detail, it is not important !

Me:...

*7 years of experience my ass

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Manager: You want a promotion? To senior? Ha. Well, build this web app from scratch, quickly, while still doing all your other duties, and maybe someone will notice and maybe they’ll think about giving you a promotion! It’ll give you great visibility within the company.

Your first project is adding SSO using this third party. It should take you a week.

Third party implementation details: extremely verbose, and assumes that you know how it works already and have most of it set up. 👌🏻

Alternative: missing half the details, and vastly different implementation from the above

Alternative: missing 80%; a patch for an unknown version of some other implementation, also vastly different.

FFS.
Okay, I roll my own auth, but need creds and a remote account added with the redirects and such, and ask security. “I’m building a new rails app and need to set up an SSO integration to allow employees to log in. I need <details> from <service>.” etc. easy request; what could go wrong?

Security: what’s a SSO integration do you need to log in maybe you don’t remember your email I can help you with that but what’s an integration what’s a client do you mean a merchant why do merchants need this

Security: oh are you talking about an integration I got confused because you said not SSO earlier let me do that for you I’ve never done it before hang on is this a web app

Security: okay I made the SSO app here you go let me share it hang on <sends …SSL certificate authority?>

Boss: so what’s taking so long? You should be about done now that you’ve had a day and a half to work on this.

Abajdgakshdg.

Fucking room temperature IQ “enterprise security admin.”
Fucking overworked.
Fucking overstressed.

I threw my work laptop across the room and stepped on it on my way out the door.
Fuck this shit.

Boss : Did you finish the service app?
Me: Nope, sir you told us to complete the immediate relief website.
Boss: Ok. Did u complete that?
Me: Nope, when it was half you told us to complete the clients web app?
Boss: Oh god. So is that over?
Me: Unfortunately, no sir a month more and we can present the project estimation report if we are free😁😉

The website of the italian post service is "closed" between 23:45 and 00:15, everyday.
I don't know if something like this happens in other countries...

And do you know when I really need to access it?
ALWAYS IN THESE 30 MINUTES, not the others 1.410 of the day!

P.S.
What do you think, what could be a valid reason to "close" a web service?
I thought about backup, but other services don't have this problem.

Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

So ..i just got a raise. A substantial one(about 30k more) but......

The cms coordinator is now going to make way more than i do....but not only that he is making way more than my lead developer and my lead developer's salary is now the same as mine.

The man has 12 years of service to this institution. He IS the web software department and if any day him and I decide to cross our arms and not do shit the whole school collapses...both fucking campuses.

Continuing...the cms coordinator doesn't even have the same education that we do. The lead developer has 4 associates degrees and I have a B.S in c.s, the CMS dude has 1 in computer tech or some shit like that.
And he is making about 9k more than us.

I...know it sounds small, and it is, but the principle itself is fucking painful considering that they mentioned job responsibilities was a major contributing factor in said paycheck and we have fucking murdered ourselves working extra every fucking day. Going above and beyond this shit just to have a dude that adds images to a cms make more than we do.

Fucking bullshit.

-GDPR
-News letter
-Ads blocker blocker
-Ads popup insite
-Ads popin in video
-Ads popin podcast
-Ads in mail
-Ads in software
-Ads in any android application
-Ads in windows
-Ads in ads
-Auto scrolling
-Slideshow
-Scroll position reset on back button
-Aria-label aria-labelledby aria-role aria-aria of game of thrones
-Order in dom for a11y different of the display order -Button :hover, :focus-visible, :focus-within :fuck-this
- SVG abandoned ware
- I make you a illustrators X version that not work with yours, i use figma. I use affinity, i use akira. I use photoshop, i use word. I use powerpoint, i use publisher, i use paint, i use all Asss (application as a service) on the web and to see what i make you need to pay you an account
-We all make frontend backend... No linter or something... Why we have always 848274 change in git ....
We not host anymore we use 62616 different cloud services to try all the fucking company everywhere
-Make a Drupal CMS to a client that's are to idiots to use it and call you each time they have something to modify

And goes on

Web tooday is fucking crap shit
People realize that you cannot make money anymore with informative website. Then everybody try to squish people at the last drop... Because of selfishness.

I'm so fucking done with net neutrality. the only ones who want it are verion, comcast, and other big isps.

fuck them.

this is fucking merica. nobody wants it, and this is a government designed for the people. I guess it only works in theory.

the talk about this has been fucking exhausting. how much clearer could it be?

how does it keep coming up? so much of the economy is online. why would congress want this? this should be a fucking fundamental right. no bs, just fast speeds everywhere. i hate all the isps thinking that because the world is so reliant on the internet, they control everything.

isps are a service. that's it.

they're not a profiler or advertiser, just a service.

and if that changes, I'll buy a bunch of flash drives and go offline.

bottom line, we should have privacy, neutrality, and a safe web. fuck those greedy bastards.

I recently started my professional journey as a developer and I stumbled upon a very strange git repo configuration..

Background: The projects consist on a web app and a lot of backend services in C# (1 service on each project).

The project manager decided to configure the the git repo as a single repo with all of the different projects for the services and the project of the webapp. All in one. Everytime you update something the merge results absurd and this happened…

Still dealing with the web department and their finger pointing after several thousand errors logged.

SeniorWebDev: “Looks like there were 250 database timeout errors at 11:02AM. DBAs might want to take a look.”

I look at the actual exceptions being logged (bulk of the over 1,600 logged errors)..

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Then I looked the email timestamp…11:00AM. We received the email notification *before* the database timeout errors occurred.

I gather some facts…when the exceptions started, when they ended, and used the stack trace to find the code not checking for null (maybe 10 minutes of junior dev detective work). Send the data to the ‘powers that be’ and carried on with my daily tasks.
I attached what I found (not the actual code, it was changed to protect the innocent)
Couple of hours later another WebDev replied…

WebDev: “These errors look like a database connectivity issue between the web site and the saleitem data service. Appears the logging framework doesn’t allow us to log any information about the database connection.”

FRACK!!...that Fracking lying piece of frack! Our team is responsible for the logging framework. I was typing up my response (having to calm down) then about a minute later the head DBA replies …

DBA: “Do you have any evidence of this? Our logs show no connectivity issues. The logging framework does have the ability to log an extensive amount of data regarding the database transaction. Database name, server, login, command text, and parameter values. Everything we need to troubleshoot. This is the link to the documentation …. If you implement the one line of code to gather the data, it will go a long way in helping us debug performance and connectivity issue. Thank you.”

DBA sends me a skype message “You’re welcome :)”

Ahh..nice to see someone else fed up with their lying bull...stuff.

A few web service related searches and Google thinks you're a bot 😂

//rant

So I'm a BI consultant, been doing this for about 6 years now, and I'm pretty good at the data stuffs. Now I had to complete a project for a client where we call a web service and it had to be done in .NET. I wrote a console app in C# that called the WS, dumped the data then a stored proc processed the staging tables into final tables that our visualization tool can consume.

It works, it's done.

Mind you I'm not a pure .NET developer.

And now that it's completed and working this fucking .NET dude that works for my client is basically giving me an attitude talking about "why wasn't it done as a Windows service? Blah, blah" Like WTF!!??? I get that he's the C# BSD but like chill bruh!!

It's annoying as fuck having to work on projects that are not your area of EXPERTISE and then be ridiculed by other elitist assholes about it.

Doesn't happen much, but fuck it's something I hate about dev. FYI, if it was the opposite I would just be asking questions for understanding, not being a sarcastic prick.

//rant done

FUCK! The fucking previous dev on this project who set up the fucking web service that he knew would be shared among multiple platforms set it up to use an audio format that's only supported on one platform. Now I'm faced with either doing some fucking JS black magic to decode the fucking base64 audio, convert it to another audio format, and then possibly re-encode it or attempting to re-write the fucking web service and already in production app! Fucking hell!

Another Developer: bro, shit hit the fan. The x web service is throwing some error. Can you take a look please. I want to go home. I'm tired.
Me: Yea sure bro no worries.
Another Developer: I go pee, after that I will delegate the ticket to you.
(Another Developer goes to the washroom)
Me: (04:59 PM) Oh time to pack-up and get the fuck out of here
Me: (05:08 PM) Receive a message on Viber from Another Developer. It reads "Fuck you, I'm going to rub my balls on your desk"

Any enterprise web service which ignores http standards. If you have a Fucking error return 500 not 200 with an error string you f--k

This is a public service announcement with a threat at the end of it:

"Do not, I repeat, do NOT attempt to write web applications, or any particular sort of application that works with a relational database (damn near more than half of applications) without a PROPER grasp and knowledge of SQL.
I do not want to see you reaching out for an ORM either, no, you need to learn to properly design a database or to properly interact with them AT most before you even attempt using an ORM OR designing an application from the beginning, shit will only hurt you in the long term I promise, learning SQL can go a looooong fucking way and most DBA's I know make way tf more than people think they make, it might even be an interesting career choice"

If you do not follow the above advise, and I see your ass reaching for building a web application without the above knowledge I will be under your bed at night, putting oil in my hairy body before I jump into bed to you and leave you confused for the rest of your life.

Build to learn, YES, but for the love of Chamberlain and Boyce PLEASE do not neglect SQL. I have seen such neglect REACH production and I am currently wishing I had these mfkers close to me.

I'm implementing some Italian web servicies.

The server response is "INDISPONIBILITÀ TEMPORANEA" (temporarily not available).

I'm Italian, but I'm not used with localized error messages. When I read this message I tought to a server in a toilet.

!rant

Goodbye Java I will not miss you at all! I swear ...

I do like it when making web services (especially that I can use Java8) but for Android you have been a torture. Hello sweet Kotlin! I shall embrace you and treat you like my newly born baby!!

Story is:
Working on a new project where I need to talk to a web service (also made by me).
Started writing in Java, all is cool and unit tests pass.
Downloaded Android Studio 3 Beta 1 and converted my Java code to Kotlin, That AsyncTask did not look nice in kotlin, converted it to async & await feature and I must admit lots of code removed, no more need to create a new fucking AsyncTask every time the app sneezes for data!

I feel like I'm working with C# but with difference in syntax.
My life is now complete :)

Hello fellow coders can you help me here plz.

I'm really confused whether to buy MACBOOK PRO 13 INCH or SURFACE PRO 4. Both of i5/8gbRam/256ssd specs. Price almost same in India.

My main use is programming ( web apps/ open source) + portability.

Factors I like in macbook pro:
1) unix based
2) best service here in India ( heard from answers on Quora )
3) DURABILITY ( heard from answers on Quora ) ( will last for many years without any glitch).

Factors I like in Surface pro 4:
1) its ultraportability
2) pen & touch
3) better typing experience ( since I code/blog for long hours)
4) native bash support
5) sexier than MBP :P

I really like SP4 over MBP but I'm worried about its durability and service(in India).

What are your thoughts on this guyz?

Social Captain (a service to increase a user's Instagram followers) has exposed thousands of Instagram account passwords. The company says it helps thousands of users to grow their Instagram follower counts by connecting their accounts to its platform. Users are asked to enter their Instagram username and password into the platform to get started.

According to TechCrunch : Social Captain was storing the passwords of linked Instagram accounts in unencrypted plaintext. Any user who viewed the web page source code on their Social Captain profile page could see their Instagram username and password in plain text, as they had connected their account to the platform. A website bug allowed anyone access to any Social Captain user's profile without having to log in ; simply plugging in a user's unique account ID into the company's web address would grant access to their Social Captain account and their Instagram login credentials. Because the user account IDs were for the most part sequential, it was possible to access any user's account and view their Instagram password and other account information easily. The security researcher who reported the vulnerability provided a spreadsheet of about 10,000 scraped user accounts to TechCrunch.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

A centralised "music on hold" system. Powered by a PHP web service, and a raspberry pi in each clients office(s) to handle the "player". Essentially a distributed DJ system.

I was using the app Jobr to apply for random positions. It’s like tinder — only you swipe to send your resume.

A week or so later I got an email from a company locally that wanted to set up an interview. I honestly thought it was a scam! I didn’t even remember applying for the job.

Long story short, they’re mostly desktop developers, and I’m the first front end web guy. I was initially hired to help with UI stuff but on the last project I was developing Service Workers. So I guess I just get invested and give my fullest.

Now myself and one of the other programmers are working on the 3rd gen of our software, built with Vue.js and rest APIs.

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

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

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

We had a school project where we where supposed to implement a software with a heavy client in C# and web services for it in C#, but the web services HAD TO COMMUNICATE WITH SMTP AND IMAP. And do that in 8 days.

We were 6 in the team. 4 had no idea what a web service is, and I and the designated project lead were the only ones knowing what to do. The lead had paperwork to do for the project, so I had to do everything but the UI alone. So 1 guy did the UI, 3 were... Playing Minecraft... The lead was doing paperwork and ranting about how noisy idiots these guys were... And I was sick as hell and could not eat anything, I was vomiting all day in between which moment I managed to make half of the functionalities of the project, despite having to go to the hospital and have to continue working despite the medical request not to work.

So the day before the presentation I had half of the functionalities done and I had to explain them yet another time what web services are so they can answer the questions and cover for themselves.

On the day of the presentation it went kinda fine. It was not finished but it worked like asked.

We were asked for peer evaluation and I gave A to the lead and the UI guy and B to the 3 other lazy asses.

Shortly after I am called by the tutor in the office : "What happened on this project? Were you not working at all? Apart for the lead who gave you an A, every one gave you a D (lowest grade). I demand for explanations"

I said never mind and got back to studying. I got a B, all the rest of the group an A.

!rant

I've seen some rants about people complaining about websites using the 'www' subdomain, so I'd like to take this opportunity to try to explain my opinion about why sites might use it.

I use to feel the same way about not having the www subdomain. It felt like an outdated standard that serves no purpose. But I have changed my option...

Sometimes certain servers have other services running other than just the website, such as ssh, ftp, sql, etc., running on different ports. What if you want to use a web proxy and caching service similar to cloudflare or a cdn? We'll you can't, because they won't allow traffic to flow through to your other ports.

That's where the www subdomain comes in. Enable your caching and cdn on your www subdomain, and slap a 301 redirect from your primary domain on port 80 or 443 to the www subdomain. This still allows you to access your other services via the domain name while still gaining the benefits of using a cdn.

Now I know you could use an 'ftp' subdomain or the like, but to each their own in that regard.

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."

!dev but tech related...

Got a device configured in a location that is fairly far away from me. It operates only through a cloud service specifically for these devices, with one of the most unreliable web interfaces and smartphone apps I have ever used.

I email my issues to the tech support who don't seem to understand the problems and can't fathom the difference between "reset settings" and "restart device".

Eventually they need to log in to my account to find out whats wrong. I explicitly state that under no circumstances should any settings be changed.

Today I find that the device has been removed from the cloud account. I physically must be near it to register it on the account again. Tech support don't seem to know what happened and the best explanation is that it is "a glitch". They have no way to add it back themselves. I have to travel to the device.

Funny how this happened after I let them access the account...

I love software. Seriously, I love it. /s

Transmission is given a bad torrent (which, given that it's a torrent service, you'd expect it handles quite robustly) and completely fucks up. Like, really badly. It doesn't respond to RPC anymore, systemd has to resort to sending it a SIGKILL to get it off the process tree, and the web interface.. yeah. Nothing.

It doesn't log by default, so fine I'll add that to the systemd unit and restart it with debugging options enabled.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec

Turns out that /var/log/transmission.log can't be written to by my Transmission user. Well shit. Change that to /home/condor/transmission.log.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec
# systemctl restart transmission-daemon

*blood starts to reach its boiling point*

Still logs in the wrong fucking location. Systemd, I told you to log over there. I did everything I could to make you steaming pile of shit reload that fucking config. What's the fucking problem!?

*about 15 minutes of fighting systemd*
Finally! It spits out a log in the right location! Thank you Transmission and systemd for finally doing your fucking jobs. So a bad torrent it is, hmm...

*removes torrent from .config/transmission/torrents*
Transmission: *still fucking shits itself on that ostensibly removed torrent*

That's it. BEGONE!!!

Oh and don't get me started on the fact that apparently a service needs some 400MB of memory. Channeling your inner Chrome Transmission?

The largest ISP in my country, a government backed service, hijacks URLs randomly and injects pop up into web browser!

Imagine if getting hijacked during an online transaction... Glad it never happened yet.

But Fuck them for doing this.

Proudest bug squash experience?

Fixed a N+1 pattern bug on our web site. Wasn't a deeply technical problem, but I was proud to shove the fix up the arse of the developer who blamed me (and even got a VP involved) for the web site crashes (the N+1 involved his code calling a service I wrote) and none of the half-dozen other devs found it.
I really wanted to make a t-shirt with his initial 'blame' email outlining all the 'technical problems' with my service, and the fix was literally moving the service call outside 5 (yes 5) level deep for..each loops.

I just officially graduated from a web dev program and it feels...

Very underwhelming.

Learned ES6, React, Webpack, service workers, offline databases, accessibility, (...bla bla bla)

And my knowledge with data structures and algorithms isn't even that great yet.

I look at the stuff I still don't know and wonder if I'll ever be comfortable with my level of expertise.

Ok, so we have the Spotify Agile Model now (tribes, squads, chapters, etc). I have seen it implemented in a few large companies, and they seem to be doing ok.

It's just... doesn't anyone worry about the product that came out of this great way of working?

Spotify is great as a service, but it has to have one of the worst usability/success ratios of any modern mobile / web app. You can almost feel the various squads doing their own thing, not thinking about the whole experience.

Doesn't the product count when considering using someone's way of working? Is the Spotify Agile Model the project management equivalent of Twitter's Bootstrap?

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

When you were clever and improved the data quality of the address database by using your companies web service in a batch job for 10M records just to find out that each call costs 10 cents...

Going back home for the holidays means becoming tech support for pretty much the whole family, unluckly.

As soon as I enter my grandparent's home, my grandpa says "Could you print some emails?". I open his laptop, and I start sweating as soon as I see the Windows XP logo popping up. He (obviously) doesn't remember his password, and the only way to access his (mostly defunct) web mail service is Outlook 2003. For some reason, the web mail provider's POP3 server dies, and i spend half an hour trying to explain it. I ended up leaving with him saying "Why are you even going to a computer engineering university."

Ah, family.

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!!

On the one hand I really wish there was a good open-source self-hosted file sharing and collaboration service which made use of modern web technologies to provide most of its features inline as well and not just through APIs consumed by client applications.

On the other hand, I tried writing a WebDAV server once, and I fully empathize with the people who have to deal with this madness.

I actually only started programming a little less than two years ago. I entered my freshman year of college as a mathematics major, but as time went on I ended up enjoying coding in C++ much more than trying to work out partial equations.

I have since become fascinated with many aspects of computer science, mainly web development and systems programming (I discovered Linux and the command line only a year ago and I'm practically in love). I've since been working for a couple fairly new startups with duties from developing a mobile native app in AngularJS/Ionic to migrating content to new servers and developing custom themes on WordPress. I have deep, deep aspirations of eventually being employed by Google as a Senior Software Dev (although I'd definitely prefer working for a company that would allow 100% remote work 😁). I've even finally began developing my own projects, ranging from a URL shortening service to a basic online encyclopedia.

I wanna spend the rest of my life doing this shit. Hell, I hope I die at my computer.

//rant

So i ordered myself a web server and am trying to get access to phpmyadmin.
I got generated username and password for the phpmyadmin login.
So i created mysql databases and database users, outside the interface, but that's fucking it, i need to create tables as well, can't do that without the interface, cuz NO ACCESS!

Fucking piece of shit service provider, they had one thing to do and they can't even fucking do it right. How dare they call themselves web hosts at all...

It's probably a badly configured config file but i can't access the file myself to start sorting this shit out, so i got to wait at least 12 hours till work hours to be able to contact with them and sort this shit out.

-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.

Any recommendations for a decent free web host service?

I'm using plain html with no databases.

My current host seems to be having issues with ftp.

I received a few XSD schemas from service provider, this have literally: Table1, Table2, etc... Table21. and without any documentation.

Should I insult provider devs on email?

"Our Data Service comes PRE-P0WN'D"

Those SHIT-FOR-BRAINS data service providers GLOAT that their data can be natively integrated into most BI platforms, no code required.
How? Because they will EXPOSE THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING ON THE INTERNET.
LITERALLY.
UNAUTHENTICATED URL WITH THE ENTIRE DATASET.
STATIC. WON'T EVER FUCKING CHANGE.
NO VPN REQUIRED. NO AUTHENTICATION HEADERS. NO IN-TRANSIT ENCRYPTION.

"It is safe! No one will know the secret token that is a parameter in the url"
BLOODY BYTE BUTTS, BATMAN! IT IS A FUCKING UNAUTHENTICATED URL THAT DOES NOT REQUIRES RENEWAL NOR A VPN, IT WILL LEAK EVENTUALLY!

That is the single fucking worst SELF-P0WN I have ever seen.
Now I know why there are fucking toddlers "hacking" large scale databases all over the globe.
Because there are plenty of data service providers that are FUCKING N00BS.

YAAAY,
finished my first small project today!
It was the final project of my semester in coding and because coding isn't the main focus of my studies there's not much expected from us - new Date, sorting a list and using local storage were among the more 'complicated' things we learned...
So most of my mates just develop/design a small portfolio website or something but my team (2 others and me) wanted to do a little more so we built a progressive web app, complete with service worker for offline functionality and so on, that can take pictures using your camera, save them to IndexedDB, display only the images the currently logged in user actually took and much more... and today is the day all bugs (that we found...) are finally ironed out!
Now I know that still is just the very beginning but now I want to learn mooooore!
Am happy, had to rant. :D

Managment decided to rewrite one of ours web service(that is currently written in java by interns) in delphi.

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.)

Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.

FML.

Fucking registered on two web sites to only know that they don't provide free service 🤬🤬🤬

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

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 )

GOD why am I CONTINUALLY RESUBSCRIBED to garbo random newsletters!

we need to start a new internet altogether

and I know what's happening, these idiotic "tech influencers" pay some shady service to "bOosT YoUr FoLloWiNg bY 100X!!!" and they're blatantly just breaking the law, breaking GDPR, etc. etc., its bots all the way down, cant wait for clowns with 2 braincells to use a chatGPT integration with the web, content will just get SO much better fuck

In honor of Experian's "Dark Web" scanning "service."

Previous company turned from Web Dev E-Mail Marketing into a Service company with more than 50% phone support so I left.
New company, Product focused on web and mobile. 2 months in: Well yeah guys, new strategy. We'll stop feature dev on the web and go into maintenance mode.

That's just great. Thank you very much.

Now I'm too lazy to go through hiring again and just feed my inner rage.

It's hard to keep it in sometimes =__=

Hackathon sponsored by Microsoft and there you are with your dumb team implementing features with Amazon Web service...
I wish you good luck. 👍

Integrating Google recaptcha into my web service. For some reason it always errors, both on a production and development environment, correct domains configured, and with he simplest setup. I'm fucking lost, documentation assumes it actually works. Similar errors on stack overflow and Google groups either got no answers or have obvious issues.

Fuck this man

soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.

end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev

so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state

i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games

i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play

just need to rant it out rn

I remember someday from a few years ago, because i just got off the phone with a customer calling me way too early! (meaning i still was in my pyjamas)

C:"Hey NNP, why si that software not available (He refers to fail2ban on his server)
Me: "It's there" (shows him terminal output)
C: " But i cannot invoke it, there is no fail2ban command! you're lieing"
Me: "well, try that sudoers command i gave you (basically it just tails all the possible log files in /var/log ) , do you see that last part with fail2ban on it?
C: "Yeah, but there is only a file descriptor! nothing is showing! It doesnt do anything.
Me: "That's actually good, it means that fail2ban does not detect any anomalies so it does not need to log it"
C:" How can you be sure!?"
Me: "Shut up and trust me, i am ROOT"

(Fail2ban is a software service that checks log files like your webserver or SSH to detect floods or brute force attempts, you set it up by defining some "jails" that monitor the things you wish to watch out for. A sane SSH jail is to listen to incoming connection attempts and after 5 or 10 attempts you block that user's IP address on firewall level. It uses IPtables. Can be used for several other web services like webservers to detect and act upon flooding attempts. It uses the logfiles of those services to analyze them and to take the appropriate action. One those jails are defined and the service is up, you should see as little log as possible for fail2ban.)

Just upgraded my internet service from a WISP, that could only get 1mb down and 1 up on a good day with lots of packet loss, (hack job company no improving infrastructure) ... for reference in live out in woods in northern Michigan.. sooo there arnt many options... DSL, don’t cross the river to me, neither does cable or fiber. Cell signal doesn’t work either as you can see.
So I had to try out satellite... went with viasat... got put on viasat-2 and holy shit first time in 4 years since living here have I been able to stream, and download and upload to my servers without having to take a nap. But the experience of dealing with what I did for 4 years definitely caused me to be more creative in what I do, and how I process data, and transmit data. Definitely an experience that taught me lot and gave me a lot of knowledge.
But now I’m in what I will consider “phase 2” there will be faster internet to come... Ariel fiber is being ran by the power company... but they are min 2 years out.. and Elon’s sats will also be next sooo good times to come..
Yeah yeah I know the ping rate sucks.. but guess what... I don’t play games so I don’t care... and as far as voip or web conferencing goes yeah there’s a slight delay/lag.. but I just tell them.. when you call me or conference with me pretend I’m not on earth.. boom the latency is explained then hahah.

Stakeholder: Users are unable to buy tickets on the website. IT says Azure’s health check is showing an unhealthy status.

[It’s Sunday. Web Engineering is not on call so no one sees this right away.]

Stakeholder: IT restarted the Azure website twice, but users still can’t place orders.

Me: There was never an issue with the Azure site. That health check is inaccurate. There is a rewrite rule that sends the Azure supplied domain to our custom domain. The Azure health check doesn’t like that so it returns an unhealthy status. The problem is the ticketing server that the website has to communicate with. The ticketing server is overwhelmed and can’t handle more requests. IT should have checked the ticketing server’s logs. This has happened before and it’s never been an Azure issue. It’s a ticketing server issue.

Stakeholder and IT: Oops 😅

—-

JFC. Stop trying to make this web engineering’s problem. Stop trying to make it look like engineering dropped the ball. The ticketing server has experienced this issue multiple times. The ticketing server is maintained by a different team. The website’s symptoms are always the same and there are steps you need to take before you make the decision to restart the website, which will cause the website to show a blue screen of death that says 503 service unavailable for a few minutes. And we have a switch to shut off all transactions. Why do you not want to use it when it’s clear the website can’t process transactions???

One day every 2 week, we got to spend the Friday just learning and trying stuff. No working on projects unless it's critical.
On these days, I feel like I learn much more than in the rest of the weeks.
Today I built (normally Python developer) a web service using Rust.

Came across this in a part of a web service I inherited from a junior we fired last year.

I am no C# expert, but I do believe there are better ways to read a byte array from a JSON string, am I right?

My company is getting a new website. This involves getting new hosting.

I made the old one, and it's all just static html. I'm not that attached to it but it's an important detail.

The bosses want the switch to the new site to happen instantly, but I pointed out that with DNS propagation times etc it can't really happen that way.

So I suggested the new web guys host our old site for a few days and we change the DNS now. Then when they want to launch we don't have to wait for the DNS and they can just swap it out.

This involves dropping 10MB of html files into the web directory on the new server.

For this service they are charging us for 2 hours of their time!

I guess I'm in the wrong business...

I'm thinking of self hosting all my small web projects,

I have this old laptop running ubuntu server heedlessly I used to store and stream pirated movies, after multiple embarrassing moments with free backend/platform as a service options and not finding a cheap VPS, this seems like the way to go. I don't get much traffic on these sites i just want them to be available when i need to present them.

then there's tons of other features that are locked behind a paywall,

I once had to store images in the database because heroku wont accept file uploads and the project hadn't been paid, in short, I was dead broke

Why has authentication of web services to be so fucking complicated?
PAM, OpenID, LDAP, SSO...
Every fucking service supports something different and I have a hard time finding a decent tutorial on LDAP and the likes.

Service workers, I love y'all ❤️. You make web development so much more fun.

I've got a kinda basic networking question I can't quite figure out

How does a push notification work?

Like, on an Android app. A good example is an authenticator. Say I don't login to the service for 4 months.

Then, one day, I try to log into the web portal and it prompts me to accept the request on my authenticator app on my phone.

Immediately, there's a push notification on my phone.

Wtf.

Is there a socket open for 4 months? Does it send requests every few seconds for 4 months? I can't imagine that either of these options scale whatsoever: both horrendously waste bandwidth and server connections.

How the fuck does it work? I don't even have the first idea.

Me: [jira comment] We have similar text for the mobile version of the site already. [includes screenshot of what site looks like now] Are you sure about this?

[radio silence for a few hours]

Me: [slack] I want to follow up.

Web Operations: What’s the issue?

Ooh k. Slack messages can have a tone.

Me: I just want to confirm we’re not repeating copy.

Web Ops: We’re not.

I complete the ticket and submit for review. The C-suite for my department reviews.

C-suite: [to web ops in JIRA comment] This looks weird. Is this right? [sends screenshot of my work because there is repeated copy, like I said there’d be]

Web Ops: [in JIRA comment] Oh, I thought X was questioning the request. X changed the wrong text.

C-suite: The website has always looked like that. You’re looking at X’s screenshot for the current website. Look at the screenshot I sent over.

Later, I complain because web ops was completely unprofessional with the comment about “questioning the request.”

C-suite: Web Ops is working hard. It’s our busy season and it’s their first time dealing with it. You know, I’m going to teach them some css and html so they can make content changes in the CMS and they’re not sending over changes so often and bothering you.

Me: [to myself] 🤨 wtf so it’s ok for web ops to treat me like dirt. And in writing. And with service that’s version controlled—JIRA emailed web ops comment to me. And lol no 😂 on teaching them how to code. That’s such bullshit. We all know you’d never allow them to edit the CMS because they’d fuck up the site. And they wouldn’t do edits anyway because it’s beneath them. And idk how this relates to web ops gross behavior.

A few days later.

Me: I was offered a job elsewhere. Here’s my two weeks notice.

C-suite: Can you push back your last day? It’s our busy season.

Me: Nope. Bye Felicia.

I created an ASP.Net Web Application as my personal Web site. Tested it locally then wanted to test it in a live environment. I purchased a domain/hosting package then publish via FTP. Point it to homepage and nothing shows up. I call customer service and they say it's hosted on a Linux server but their options don't show that it is Linux based. So I had to change it to a Windows platform that it should have already been on. SMH 😣

We just launched our web app service a month ago, clients pay thousands for it! of course still no raise.

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)

Due to a service window, we were requested by customer to set up a separate instance of the same web application so they could keep working.

The separate instance was set up and all parties were informed.

Customer and project manager complain that people are still using the old instance, to which I replied I sent an email informing which instance should be used.

Their response: "You wrote to use the new instance, but you didn't write NOT to use the old one."

Two (2) senior developers and one (1) senior tester left our team and I am left with two (2) Java legacy applications that are hard to maintain. Here is a list of things I hate about these old webapps (let's call them app A and B):

1. App A depends on 80% web services. If one web service for a product or warehouse goes down, work flow is impeded while prod support team checks with the core services team for repair

2. App B is a maven project with multiple modules dependent on libraries that are dependent on company's internal libraries. So if we want to upgrade to OpenJdk 9 and up, the project will definitely produce a lot of errors due to deprecated/unsupported codes

3. App A is dependent on Tibco and I have no experience on that

4. App B's continuous integration build tool is Jenkins and the jobs that build it has a shell script that wasn't updated during the tech upgrade enhancement. The previous developer who did the knowledge transfer to me didn't tell me about this (it should be considered a defect on her part but she already resigned)

5. App A when loaded in eclipse IDE is a pain to work with since it is only allowed to build a war file using ant. I have to lookup in quick search instead of calling shortcuts (call hierarchy) because the project wasn't compiled via eclipse.

6. It's impossible to debug app A because of #5

7. Both applications have high priority and complex enhancements and I have no other teammates to help me

8. You never know what else can go wrong anytime

So, my favourite language is Python, and for web developing I use Pyramid, and to stay in my "comfort zone" I use brython for client scripting, don't take me wrong, I love javascript, but for just a bit of performance lost I like being able to use all my pre-existing python code if I need to...
So, this was my first work experience, for a military industry, we had to make a service for uploading big files and sending them via email.
I heard one thing that shot me out of my "comfort zone" (I'll call it cf from now on)... "Use php"...
So, I already had written in php and I've always disliked it, perl-ish and broken as a bethesda game (i like bethesda games, but they are broken)
Another thing: javascript vanilla or jquery, never liked jquery either, so I decided to use vanilla js...
So, after 6 months of work, my partner and I finished it...
Well, more than one year later that mess we had to make to satisfy our boss' most absurd desires is not online yet, I search it on google every month, so yeah, 6 months of my life wasted (also, it was a "stage", so not only I didn't get any recognition, but they didn't give me any money)

I hate the current state of internet based service providers. They are collecting so much data, it's scary and borderline stalking.

A simple search on Netflix changes ads shown by Google. I watch a lot of Japanese/Korean drama and now my ads are in Japanese. What the actual fuck.

I run windows 10 on my main rig because of steam and windows only games. One day I was searching for filezilla in windows search. Since it is now handled by the same UI as cortana, it searched it on the web too. So now I have ads related to ftp hosting in Japanese.

Sometimes I feel like just formatting my system and install debian on it. But those games man. May be I can live without them.

Can we bring back the internet from 2008. It was so much better back then.

I was once working on a grand vision of a suite of analytical tools, which later turned into a single web app, which later turned into a desktop app, which eventually turned into a command line app, which ultimately turned into a background service that writes the results of a small subset of what it was supposed to do into database tables.

Service status pages that poorly reflect actual service status are so annoying. Ex. GitHub is having a lot of latency issues with processing updates and like 5 people in my office noticed it while their status page still says everything is fine.

This isn't to explicitly call out GitHub since many service status pages behave like this, but it definitely shows a general weakness in these health checks. I've seen similar issues with tons of services, web hosts, etc. Monitoring is definitely hard but will hopefully keep getting better.

IBM Cloud seems to be the only cloud computing platform that has a responsive website.

Admittedly I have only used GCP and AWS, I haven't touched Azure yet. Both GCP and AWS have incredibly slow web portals that take ages to load after every single click.

IBM Cloud is the only cloud service platform when I clicked a button and it loaded the next page like a normal website. It honestly felt surreal to navigate through all of their services. I have no clue why AWS and GCP are both so bad, it reflects really poorly on their services. If they can't get their own web portals to run quickly, why should I expect their services to be fast and reliable?

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

Jesus our security infrastructure people are stupid. They are telling us to secure a service that we don’t want accessible directly by the role “member” setup to be accessible by “member”. All because they “don’t want us changing identities in the middle of a chain of web service calls”. They are like “don’t worry, the fire wall keeps them out”.

That’s like saying “here’s the key to the bank vault, but you won’t ever get past the security guards so it’s okay that you have it.”

I swear this company is stone stupid.

I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).

And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.

Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!

I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.

I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.

I once wrote an http interceptor for which was supposed to check the internal cache for user data and only do some work with it if they were (we manually controlled what and who was in cache). There were two methods on the service cGetUser and dGetUser I of course called d which it turned out loaded the user profile from the database which would be fine if it weren't done in an interceptor .. on a web service... With a little over 25000 requests per minute.. on each node..

Tldr. I accidentally wrote a database ddos tool into our app...

Our time recording software (based on SAP) triggers a blocking synchronous web service call every single time you do *anything*. Imagine having to wait 10 seconds every time you:
- put a number in a cell
- select a row
- press anything on the screen

Oh and when you lose connection nothing is saved and you have to start again (wtf was it even sending to the server)

Service I was needed to integrate to our system had such poor documentation and a separate pricing tier to access their APIs...

... Not having it. Used Guzzle to perform both the authentication and their search page, then made wrote a function to web scrape the result.

Job done. 😎 And yes, I have no shame to say I love PHP.

Is GoDaddy any good? I've seen that Google has opened .dev domains floodgate and I was wondering about starting my own page. Dunno which hosting service to choose and if I even should make my own website considering I'm not a Web Dev 😅

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

My current side project. I’m doing a POC to upskill in functional programming. A Java/Dropwizard web service calling onto business logic written in Clojure. The bit im excited about is an HTML engine im writing in Clojure. So instead of inter-mixing raw HTML with code, my views will be written entirely in Clojure

my two friends and i might start an app/web development service.

the question is: how are three high school kids going to find clients that are ok with high school kids maintaining their apps & websites?

Having a hard time finding work. Jack of all trades, master of none. Went to college for a while, but never finished a degree. Mostly self taught and can easily learn on the fly.

Can program, 3d design and model, ins and outs of unreal engine 4, web stuff, can do IT work, knows VR standards and tricks, powerful desktop and powerful laptop, plenty of uhd cameras, knows Android and ios, etc.

Where do I look? What can I apply for? Can I make money on my own? Can I provide a service? How do I sell that?

HALP 😫

Best debug ever?

Some years ago we had to do a web project as group. It was a cinema like website with backend and front-end.

So in the end we arrived at the presentation and while scrolling the code I found commented out some authentication controls 😅😆 (probably for debug reason lol)
Whatever, meanwhile, while I was talking with the professor two of my mates were whispering... Turns out they found what he mail service wasn't working. And what's best than fix it, push it to the Heroku server and restart all? XD
The professor noticed some little lag in a button and asked "what's happening?"
"oh, nothing we just restarted the server "

Working on a new release. This release was tested locally and pronounced good. The release went to the QA environment. QA responds that a new feature is doing nothing. There are no errors reported, and work is being done on the UI, but is not get getting persisted to the database so all changes are lost when the session is lost. Do some investigating. I find that a web service had the code in two of its methods commented out. Why? No idea. No response yet from the developer who just had the two methods return a boolean denoting success while all other operations were commented out.

I need an appropriate punishment for this...

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

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

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

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

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

Users complain about advertising and how it is annoying to have to see these ads just around the page while they just want to see the main content. So what do they do? They decide to use adblockers which start pushing web admins to find another method to make money. So half the time they offer the service for a lot more than normal which makes people not want to pay for it. So now I decide to push into the embedded crypto miners, which sadly cut in half my earnings but it’s so I can still make something and then people start to complain about this even though it doesn’t bother them in anyway

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT

This web service is more stable than i thought :) More than 6 months connection time.

Get told a colleague finished work on a new web service thing on Friday.

So I fire up SOAP UI. Get an error due to problems with a sql statement. Look through code, issues already fixed so I build the project ct add the new dll to the app, another error, this time a column included in a select statement that doesn’t exist in the table being queried.

Colleague is on holiday, there are no comments in the code and there’s no source control.

Boss wants to know if the column needs to be added, or whether colleague added it and then decided not to use it.

I think I have an idea what it is meant to happen, but my only exposure to this project is as a 30 minute intro, and we didn’t look at any of these parts.

And sadly I left my crystal ball at home today fml

What the fuck is this trend of pricing cloud services by the minute? I mean It's fucking great and all that I buy 2 minutes with a sql db but who the fuck actually does that?

After another night working on a server I (strongly) suggest we move our shit to a cloud service. It's cool providing I promise the costs don't rape us blind folded. Seems easy enough, right? Nope it's not.

6 hours later, halfway to becoming a fucking network engineer and I'm more lost than ever.

Seriously can't the fuck AWS and google cloud show a monthly price - even an estimate for generic shit like $x for the average crappy wp blog!

If anyone has some helpful info / experience on the true cost of hosting generic web apps - the retardedly simple app I'm trying to price is:
1 php web application with 150 domains, 3gb mysql db and 30gb ssd.

I gets has 45000 sessions with 250000 page views.

Your help would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm leaning towards deploying a clone sending 250 000 random requests and praying my $300 cloud platform credit will cover the bill.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

My boss is in a meeting (davanti a un caffè) with someone who is "a technophile" and "really knows about AI". He was amazed some months ago by the images they were generating using their paid service (right after that, I showed him Bing AI and the conversation ended).
We have discussed using AI previously, and we have been developing web apps for 5 years now.
These are the messages I've been receiving through the last hour and a half and haven't read; I guess it's information he considers will be important when we meet later:

- LLM modelo de lenguaje
- Large language model
- Chat gpt 4O
- API
- Aplication programe interface

This are all things I've mentioned either within the past months, or ieri *itself*, as he mentioned he was meeting this guy.
I'll keep you posted on new messages.
I wonder if that guy says he's a "prompt engineer"...

Web service consumer: hey I need you to add new methods to this service

WSC: hey I need you to change the functionality

WSC: hey here are four new lists of fields to return from your service.

WSC: hey what are you doing the schemas are completely different now!! This has caused a lot of work for us

Hey I just met you
And this is crazy
But here's my mail address
So spam me maybe

When you write an efficient piece of code and because the legacy database is too slow to return the data, you have to find a way to delay your processing instead of finding a way to speed up the database web service.

Just finished the prototype of my HTML5/Canvas implementation of a visual novel engine. The actual script exists behind the scenes on a REST like web service (to act as a sort of drm). The assets for the game and UI layouts are stored in what I call a shit file. Their is s a utility called the shitpacker that creates a shit file from a directory structure. The name of my engine is the Pyst engine. Pyst stands for Python Stub...as the game script is actually a subset of Python that I created. Eventually I will probably move Pyst to JS so I could hypothetically support offline games.

Hi,

Would, someone who is doing web development, like to help me code a porno service agency? I will be the main pimp who will escort my bitches to our customers who will pay for the bitch they find attractive through the system that we code so the payment will go automatically after they make a purchase. They get the bitch, i pay the bitch some fee and the rest goes to both of us as commission. Ain't none of this physical. All of the products are digital. Customers get pics or vids thats all.

Best Regards,
SukMikeHok

Those of you with an app or productivity web service, do you charge monthly? If so, why? I understand if it is your primary source of income, but do you have ethical or integrity reasons related to price? I've been contemplating this lately and I'd like more Dev input.

After waiting a while for another programmer on another team to provide a web service that I needed to call from a client side web form, I received word that it was ready. I could not get it to work because CORS headings were not being set correctly. After contacting them and letting them know, I got an email update to the team letting everyone know that they were waiting on me. After explaining that CORS headings were not there, I just built a PHP page to proxy the request, results and set the headers correctly so I can move on. I will remove it when they get their side fixed... if they ever do.

Spent 4 hours debugging a script. Running the commands manually in cli worked fine but not when run as a web service. I've done similar things before so I was confident it should work. I tried literary everything I was going crazy. Turns out that Atom added some garbage characters only visible in other editors.. And this was not the first time! Fml..

!help

Does anyone know how to use certbot on a Debian stretch azure web service app to generate an SSL cert?

I've got the cert generated and Apache to serve it but it's giving me errors.

I need to bind it in azure somehow but I can't figure out how to export the cert.

I work daily on a project, in which, rather than buy in a decent message bus a bunch of half interested, unqualified developers were tasked with hammering together an in-house solution. This monstrosity has around six layers of abstraction, separate objects per project and dynamically loading converters between the components. It's largely not unit testable, certainly not integration testable and has already wasted more money in developer time and Bugfixes than a half decent external solution would have cost.

Every time I have to change an object in one part, start the associated web/win service and do a "update service references" I die a little inside.

There are so many better ways but we'll never be able to change because "there's no time for that"

And all for some up front savings

I work for a service based company. We got our hands on a really good project a few months back and were really excited to work with the client because they are solving a really good problem. So much so that they received awards and stuff too.
Turns out they are real high headed cunts who think that everyone works beneath them. They don’t respond back, don’t reply for days and when they do, they ask for a 60-70% change in previously working apps and web. They take things so lightly that we’ve been production ready for 3 weeks. They called us and asked us the reason for delay and they still haven’t provided us with production creds. Fucking asswipes.

Question:
My application (web app & mobile app) needs to interface with a users email to read mails for further processing

Is there are library (py, js) or service that I can leverage that abstracts the access to the mail servers (IMAP, POP3, Exchange, Google API, Outlook API etc.) and provides a single interface (possibly REST API) to access the mails?

It feels redundant to implement each of the above methods of email access, as I see it being a feature in many applications out there, but I am not able to find a library or service that provides it.

Any advice or suggestions with implementing each of them is also welcomed

Thanks in advance

So there is this big shot at work who makes out to the management that he knows it all. I'm pretty quiet normally and dont let on. The manager kiss his ass daily. He was an apprentice 6 months ago. So we all in some shitty meeting today about some based web service that uses a Linux host. Then in the meeting he asked me if Linux was free? Hahahaha haha. What a fucking idiot! I mean I get that people don't know everything but that
S a whole new level of stupid! 😅🤣😅🤣

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)