Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

"Ok, the site looks fine. Now let's move the style tag into it's own file."

*makes css file*

"WHY DOES IT HARDLY EVER LOAD!?!?, I checked the syntax trice"

*Spends 20 min. Asking friends for help, but none of them knows a reason*

"Time to ask the teacher, I guess"

*Teacher comes over, but has no clue either*

Teacher: "Give me the files, let's test it on my laptop"

*Css doesn't load there either*

*Teachers pair programming and trying some serious debugging technics. No progress*

*I decided to look at the sourcecode while refreshing the site*

1. Refresh: Css is loaded properly
2. Refresh: Css is gone, and source turned into various asian symbols.

Looks at the (default) file encoding: UCS-2
WTF NOTEPAD++, I SPEND 2 HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE YOU DECIDED THIS WAS A PROPER ENCODING!

Web programming seems fun.

This is some next level goto bullshit...

... when you as an internee with limited access, gets your early off friday ruined by a flooding attack and one of the clients on that server somehow has your number..

I'm tired of taking breaks, only to find bugs IRL.

I draw the line at my grapes throwing an exception!

Debugging the crane game app, my ISPs aggro DHCPv6 query vs their WAN6 scripting and the label printer at Quest Labs was annoying enough.

I don't even know how to tag this.

A day ago I tried ordering a coffee and doughnut on Doordash. I thought, I must be too tired/missing something. Dunkin' Donuts didn't have doughnuts on the menu, despite the header of "Donuts and Bakery", I called them... A few minutes later the reason was found. Their PoS system upgraded, changing the formatting of the doughnut options so a minor bug caused it to show as fully updated, despite actually disabling the doughnut menu options... today it's the weirdest, possibly inappropriate-looking, grape I've ever seen... and I grow 5 varieties of grapes. Maybe if I get drunk enough(wine?) later, I'll be able to not debug or re-engineer anything for a few hours.

Any suggestions on how to stop iterating through a debugging loop IRL 24/7 is certainly welcolmed.

Now, wtf do I do with this, mildy disturbing, grape?

<!doctype confusedRant 😕>

Plot: we need to release our website in two weeks which holds at least a thousand pages. All these pages are manually migrated from the old website, which doesn't have a database. Current status: 650 pages/1000 are completed, 40 different templates need to be adapted. I'm alone on these templates, my colleagues create the pages and fill the new database

So I'm working on the templates a WebDev coded for our website on a licensed CMS, and had this decently simple html block that looks like a square and consisting of roughly this (Emmet style):

a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p

After adding another <a> element inside the p, I noticed that my <a> wouldn't display and bust the whole look of the square.

Just for more details, the CSS the dev made is ultra specified (meaning each element is too precisely "described" : div.class .child .child2 { /* styles */ } when it could be .class .child2 for example). Also, the templates he made need to be compatible with any "module" the website has, thus the need of this high specificity

So I fired up the DevTools to check what happened, and had:

Expected: a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p > a
Actual result: some new a.area were wrapping the <strong>, the <p> and the <a> I just added. The source code was not showing any of this but just the rules I initially wrote - the expected result

Wtf?! I thought the JS the dev made was adding elements. I disabled said JS, and bam, these a.area were still wrapping everything!! What black magic would add these stupid tags I never asked for.

So I went looking in the CSS files in case some wizardry was happening, but everything was OK.

I tried changing my structure, changing tag (swapping a.area to p.area or without .area), HTML just said "nope, have those please".

Eventually I rewrote my own module out of frustration after three quarters of an hour fiddling with this stupid "module". I hate losing time for such shenanigans and under a lot of pressure because of deadlines.

Still haven't figured why those <element>.area would wrap everything out of nowhere...

Just acquired a udemy course and got kinda disappointed when the man reads a part of a URL which involves a # sing and reads it as "hash-tag"...
Wtf. I hope it's worth the money

I would have needed to smoke enough crack to think that learning a new language was a good idea and then even more to start. As soon as I hit having to learn things I move straight onto black tar heroin.

jinja templates make me look towards html in a whole new light. are we 'inserting' data to an already rendered page? am i really mixing server code with ui ? It doesn't feel so. there are if else and loops being executed for html code, like wtf?

I don't know but everything feels so good. like i was literally hating every piece of website i was writing in php. everytime i wrote <div>....</div> followed by <?php ... ?> followed by another html tag /php tag in a fuckin php file, i wanted to kill someone from w3c.
WHY THE FUCK ARE WE ALLOWING THE MIXUP ?WHY IS PHP FILE HOLDING HTM TAGS? WHY?WHY?WHY?

But this... this is beauty. their is separation of concerns. jinja has some big powers, we can loop, repeat, make clauses, inherit other html classes, load html content into blocks, set variables,
but main concepts like file handling, response/request handling,calculations,etc are all being done in separate python files. I know that these jinja templates also might be running python in background, but atleast a developer cannot fuck up that code.
we can be sure that if correct jinja codes are written in html, then it would load correctly. And wherever devs doesn't fuck up, the output is better to understand and more maintainable/scaleable

Today, I saw a car has NationalGeographic tag on it but drives just like Dakar Rally, wtf with this people :/

It's now 3am and this issue has been keeping me up for inner an hour... In Entity Framework..

I have a 2 tables/classes in a relationship: Item has many Tags.

I'm trying to delete some Tags using context.allTags.RemoveRange({list of tag objects I want deleted}) but now for some reason it's trying to reinsert/duplicate all Items and thereby violating all uniqueness constraints.

Guess will post the source code TMR but this is like wtf?

OK, So at my school I work as the assistant webmaster of our school newspaper. I joined the newspaper before my 'boss' but was demoted when he joined because nobody had anything for me to do? Yeah I was confused too. Anyway now I was working on making Bois for the writers and to format it I'm using simple html. So now the scene is that I and my boss are sitting side by side working on these Bois. I finish like 5 bios and look over to his screen and he hasn't finished the first fucking bio and he is still puzzled on how to fucking format it with a fucking paragraph tag!!! Later on he asks me how I format them I just say with p tags and the occasional br. He looks confused still so I ask if he knows html, he quickly googles fucking html and then replies no!!! SRSLY?!?!!!!? yOU ARE THE HEAD WEBMASTER AND YOU DONT KnOW HTML???? WTF NOT TO MENTION THAT HE GOT ALL THE CREDIT

So pissed off at aws. My goal is to deny the creation of any taggable resource without having a specific tag on the organizational level. (tag policies, service control policies, etc)
Tag policies do not have any effect if the resource is created without any tag. WTF.
I managed to put together a service control policy, that makes it impossible, but since not all resources are taggable, I had to list every taggable resource in the policy and put every read action on a condition. Surprise: the policy exceeda the max size limit. FML.

Trying to run a web page from arduino with some js in it to draw a graph. And it craps out with some error about start tag.

It works fine saved as an html file on my laptop.

Wtf?