Soooooo got fired on my day off!! 😁😁😁 Y am I sooo happy??? Bc the company's president sucks, and glad to be gone!!

So, I come in on my day off trying to help him with a promo for an app I was working on, and ass face come in with a chip already on his shoulders.

Him: So what are u going to show me?

Me: A walk through of the app.

Him: No, what specifically are u going to show me?(already getting upset)

Me: The whole app. Like from the login screen and everything else.

Him: No! I need to knw specifically what your going to show me! Like this button, that menu, this function!!!(boiling point)

Me: That's what I said, "the whole app"

Him: Do u want to be suspended a whole week??!!!

Me: (smiling) Yes!!

Him: You knw what, ur gonna tell me what the fuck ur gonna show me or--

Me: Gets up, grab my phone and head towards the door.

Him: If u leave, ur done!!

Me: Dnt care. (Continue out the door)

Him: (yelling) That's it, ur done!

Me: Happy 😁😁😁

!dev

If you comment shit like "mUsIc ToDaY iS gArBaGe" and "iM fRoM tHe WrOnG gEnErAtIoN" on YouTube, you deserve to have whatever rights you're given stripped from you.

We live in the most technically advanced time the world has ever seen. We have music available 24/7 from literally all over the world. So shut the fuck up and listen to your preference. Nobody holds a gun to your head and makes you listen to today's music. Don't like it? Don't listen.

It's not brain surgery and this doesn't make you unique or quirky as much as you want it to, nor is it a personality trait.

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

I actually just wanted to say - what a great time it is to be a developer.

C# has stolen so many good features now that it's pretty awesome.
JavaScript and typescript are really fun to work with.
I really love angular.
Docker is great!

I can setup pipelines and deploy an angular app for free and really easily with github-pages.

I can use linux inside windows.

I can use cloud providers to do all sorts for really cheap.

I can plug my cable-free oculus quest VR headset into my laptop and build a game pretty easily with unity (thanks to all the great oculus helper prefabs).

I can use tesseract and data science technology inside my browser!!

And I can go to medium and udemy and learn all sorts of things.

Honestly...

Just saying.
I'm actually really loving being a developer right now.

And if I do have off day, I can rant on here!

My dev role model is my senior who taught me JavaScript when I was a noob. He was so cool. One of the few real programmers who enjoy their work in a clusterfuck world of idiots who pretend for money.

His philosophy sticks with me even today. I was new to the industry and the long hours of low pay intern work were getting to me. But he kept reminding me that programming still has this cool, engineering side where you blitz stuff out on a keyboard and build awesome shit.

I owe him my career because without him I'd still be one of the other stooges who bitch about the job and avoid studying. But since working with him, I never speak bad about my profession. Programming is a beautiful profession, even if the people I work with are sometimes dumbfuck dicks. And he taught me that distinction.

A memorial for my favorite rant of all time "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Assembler Chicken: First, it builds the road ......

C Chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways.

C++ Chicken: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you' d simply refer to him on the other side.

COBOL Chicken: 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING.
IF NO-MORE-VEHICLES
THEN PERFORM 0010-CROSS-THE-ROAD
VARYING STEPS FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL
ON-THE-OTHER-SIDE
ELSE
GO TO 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING

Cray Chicken: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side frazzled.

Delphi Chicken: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped on the other side.

Gopher Chicken: Tried to run but got beaten by the Web chicken.

Intel Pentium Chicken: The chicken crossed 4.9999978 times.

Iomega Chicken: The chicken should have ' backed up' before crossing.

Java Chicken: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, then the server will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets.) See also WMI Monitor.

Linux Chicken: Don't you *dare* try to cross the road the same way we do!

Mac Chicken: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there's no way to tell it how to cross the road.

Newton Chicken: Can't cluck, can't fly, and can't lay eggs, but you can carry it across the road in your pocket.

OOP Chicken: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message.

OS/2 Chicken: It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so quiet that nobody noticed.

Microsoft's Chicken: It's already on both sides of the road. What's more its just bought the road.

Windows 95 Chicken: You see different coloured feathers while it crosses, but when you cook it still tastes like........ chicken.

Quantum Logic Chicken: The chicken is distributed probabilistically on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your choice.

VB Chicken: USHighways! <TheRoad.cross> (aChicken)

XP Chicken Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on running.

The Longhorn Chicken had an identity crisis and is now calling itself Vista.

The Vista Chicken dazzled itself with its own graphics.

South Africa Electricity:

This is after I lost my 7th 3000VA online UPS...

In South Africa we have 240V power most of the time which is great, but then there is scheduled power outages (because our electricity companies cannot "handle the load").

When we have a power outage we have automatic generators which brings everything back up although there is still the 1 minute drop which has weird spikes and odd voltages before switching to the generator (as the generators wait until they are stable)

This has being destroying our equipment, we had a $2000 repair bill 3 TIMES for 3 SEPERATE Xerox Machines that have surge protectors although their circuit board somehow fried.

We have lost 7 3000VA UPSes (3 different brands) and 5 voltage regulators we put to protect the UPSes.

The one UPS that fried just had 2 dead fuses, I decided to replace them (unplugged the batteries to avoid 240V) and when plugging the batteries back in there was a huge spark and flame and the metal and plastic melted onto the board and turned black (the metal pins to connect the battery are non existant now)

I am done with electricity...

P.S. 2 of our generators also got hit by lightning as we are high on a hill and ALL the plastic cable coverings inside the generator were melted

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike."

Story: Password hashing and UTF-8

Context: PHP 5.6, 270kloc 15+ years legacy project. ~3 years ago. tl;dr at bottom.

Password hashing & verification was done with an obsolete way of hashing passwords. I was given the task to update our password handler to from now on generate passwords with PHP's good built-in password hashing function.

It was decided that old passwords still needed to work, instead of prompting users to set a new password. The old password verification still had to function in conjunction with the new.

The previous password handler was split into multiple classes, due to (I assume) poor structuring and shoehorning in an object oriented approach. Furthermore, it abused global variables.

A new password handler had to be created.

I implemented the new password verification and creation methods (which now used PHP internal password functions), and it worked perfectly. Then to get the old password verification to work.

I removed all obsolete methods from the old handler, and was left with a hashing function which took in a password, salt, and a secret key. I copied this code into the new handler.

It failed. It returned "Password does not match" for old passwords. I was unsure what had happened here. I did all sorts of shotgun debugging. I ended up with two versions of the login page next to each other, which used the old and new code respectively. I started modifying the original code, extracting variables, logging, you name it. I ended up with exactly the same snippets of code in both password handlers, and yet it failed.

The culprit? The character encoding.

Because this project was over a decade old, the .php-file had the encoding 'windows-1252'. When I created the new password handler, my IDE set the file encoding to 'UTF-8'. Then when I copied the secret, my IDE converted the string to 'UTF-8', effectively changing the value of the secret and causing any password verifications to fail. The solution was to manually create a string using the byte values in the old secret.

<rant>
It is these extreme, obscene, scenarios which makes working with legacy projects a living hell. In this scenario, it was my IDE at fault for changing the character encoding.

But my IDE is not the root problem. No, I blame it on the lack of maintenance from previous developers. Not keeping the codebase up to standard causes problems like this in the long run.
</rant>

tl;dr: copied hash secret to a file with another encoding. IDE changed the byte values for those characters, causing password verification to fail. fml.

May 2020, for me, was still a massively shit month. All of my tech has eaten some amount of shit:

- Spare PC: Board and last spare PSU up in literal smoke all at once.

- PS3: Suddenly rejects *just* the OEM HDD. Also refuses all CFW for seemingly no reason despite being hacked.

- Xbox One: External HDD is having more and more corrupt reads and is taking longer and longer to serve data.

- Wii: Nearly ate shit as the OS disappeared mid-game for fucking no reason but thanks to my 5-year-ago forethought, saved. (God bless pre-boot homebrew menus)

- Phone: grabbed it to read an overheat warning with cold-ass hands, screen exploded.

- Desktop: Literally just now, PSU and possibly GPU fucking died mid-game.

Anything else? You still got like 4 days, you still got time to fucking kill me, May, you fucking bitch

IT guy just pop into the office to make a test. They deployed Chrome on a network not connected to the Internet to access some webapp and want to find why it is so low to start.

I said, it is most likely trying to update itself but get firewalled by a badly written rule that drop the packet instead of rejecting it, so it waits and timeout.

I suggested Chromium as possible solution.

The guy replied : "Chromium is open source, too much open, every one can read the code and hack it, very unsecure."

I died inside.

My coach during my first internship. The first 4 weeks he took the time to pair program at least 3 hours a day with me. He needed the time for his own work but still invested in me. His technical prowess was insane. His code was so easy to read that it took me less than 3 weeks to get to know the 500,000+ lines codebase. He could explain the most complex stuff at such a fundamental level. After those 4 weeks of coaching I wasn't an intern anymore. I was an actual member of the team. Also learned a lot of useful non-technical skills like planning and communication from him.
Then after those 4 weeks he resigned and started working for another company. At the time I found it a dick move. It took me months to realize he managed to get an intern with 0 experience so comfortable around a code base that everybody treated me as a worthy colleague and engineer. It was a matter of days before people would ask me hard questions and I found I could answer each and everyone of them.

Pure sensei this guy was. Such a different level of knowledge and ability. I hope to become such a model for all of my students.

Linus Torvalds on C++

“C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using
the nice library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, that may help you program, but causes:

- infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me
that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny)

- inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.”

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/...

It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.

This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.

I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.

My ISP just called, because I didn't extend my 2 year contract. The reason is that paying 13 euros for 50/30 (Mb) internet when I can get 600/60 from another ISP for 20 euros or 300/30 for 15 euros sucks. Additionally, my current ISP only offers 100/30 at maximum according to their website...
Guess what?
They just offered me 1Gb/100Mb over the phone for a FUCKING 20 EUROS. What???

Humility... NASA discovered a star that has a strange drop in light level periodically. To the tune of 20%. NASA also determined that this was not due to a planet or naturally occurring body (Not sure how they determine that, but a lot of smart people work at NASA. So I am going with it for this discussion.) They have theorized that this object is evidence of a type 2 civilization mega structure, perhaps a Dyson sphere. The time it takes the light to get to us from this star is ~2000 years. So that civilization "had" a mega structure with the capability to harness the power of a star 2000 years ago. What are they doing now? Humbling, amazing, exciting, I hope we get to talk to them! (Also hoping they don't kill us all.) Really, I just want to see how fast their computers are. Yes, selfish wish.

Hi, here's how things are working now:
– Me and MerryBandOfDumbasses1 are doing project 1.
– Me and MerryBandOfDumbasses2 are doing project 2.
– Me has project 3 for work with this adorable boss I'd hate to disappoint. (Anyone watching Brooklyn99? He's my Captain Holt)
– Me has to deal with thesis.
– Me is having trouble keeping her head above the water. (emotionally speaking)

Conclusion: Me is fucked.
The end.
*grins for the camera* 😀

Me and my gf are looking for a house. Since we’re both on temporary contract we want a declaration of intent. For arranging a decent mortgage. My gf get’s called and signed within a day, getting compliments and a thumbs up.

I get called after three days; yeah eh we need to talk about this. I can’t sign this right now. A talk with both director and HR. Let’s get stressed...

K&R Like it or not, everything that we use was impacted by the advantage of having the C Programming language on our side. C is still to this day a cornerstone of what a a language should be, nothing more nothing less.

John McCarthy the creator of Lisp and the one that coined Artificial Intelligence as a topic, a term, without him if else statements would have probably taken a while longer to figure out the way my boy did. Lisp will make you a better developer.

Alan Kay, creator of OOP, yeh we had ways to emulate this with C before, bit without his contribution to what I believe to be the purest form of oop we would not haveany additional things. Smalltalk is still the best programming language in my humble opinion.

Terry A Davis, disciplined, and crazy, the man built a skyscraper by himself, God knows what he would have done if he weren't afflicted by mental illness.

Linus Torvalds, for many different things, creator of the kernel that would power my favorite operating system.

Ryan Dhal, took the world by storm with Node.js

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon