Client: "I did not receive the email that should be send after that event. Please fix."
Me:
* Checks code - ok
* Tests feature in locally - ok
* Tests feature in production - ok
* checks values in database - ok
* 2 hours wasted - ok
"Please help me dear CTO, idk what else I could check or how I should even respond to this."
CTO: "hmm, the clients account uses a adminstrative email address for testing. Let me just check if it is in the mailbox."
*checks* "Yeah, that's the email you're looking for, right?"
Me: *experiences relief, anger, blood lust and disappointment at the same time* "Could you please respond to the client for me, I need a break. Thanks"

Example #1 of ??? Explaining why I dislike my coworkers.

[Legend]
VP: VP of Engineering; my boss’s boss. Founded the company, picked the CEO, etc.
LD: Lead dev; literally wrote the first line of code at the company, and has been here ever since.
CISO: Chief Information Security Officer — my boss when I’m doing security work.

Three weeks ago (private zoom call):
> VP to me: I want you to know that anything you say, while wearing your security hat, goes. You can even override me. If you need to hold a release for whatever reason, you have that power. If I happen to disagree with a security issue you bring up, that’s okay. You are in charge of release security. I won’t be mad or hold it against you. I just want you to do your job well.

Last week (engineering-wide meeting):
> CISO: From now on we should only use external IDs in urls to prevent a malicious actor from scraping data or automating attacks.
> LD: That’s great, and we should only use normal IDs in logging so they differ. Sounds more secure, right?
> CISO: Absolutely. That way they’re orthogonal.
> VP: Good idea, I think we should do this going forward.

Last weekend (in the security channel):
> LD: We should ONLY use external IDs in urls, and ONLY normal IDs in logging — in other words, orthogonal.
> VP: I agree. It’s better in every way.

Today (in the same security channel):
> Me: I found an instance of using a plain ID in a url that cancels a payment. A malicious user with or who gained access to <user_role> could very easily abuse this to cause substantial damage. Please change this instance and others to using external IDs.
> LD: Whoa, that goes way beyond <user_role>
> VP: You can’t make that decision, that’s engineering-wide!

Not only is this sane security practice, you literally. just. agreed. with this on three separate occasions in the past week, and your own head of security also posed this before I brought it up! And need I remind you that it is still standard security practice!?

But nooo, I’m overstepping my boundaries by doing my job.

Fucking hell I hate dealing with these people.

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

Yesterday I bought myself a PSP to relive some of my childhood memories, run custom firmware on it and so on. Unfortunately however, the battery on this one is seriously puffed up, and I need one in order to update the firmware from 5.50 CFW (the seller actually modded it too!) to 6.61 OFW (to then install CFW from there again).

I figured that I might as well have a kick at disassembling the battery for good measure, to take out its controller and power it from my lab bench power supply. I set it to 3.70V, double-checked the connections.. nothing. I raised the voltage to 4V, still nothing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the controller from looking at it. The magic smoke is still in there, all I did was removing the housing and snipping off the battery. I measured the cell voltage and it was only some residues at 0.01V. Might be internally shorted or something, normally even dead cells settle back at 3.7V unless you keep them shorted externally.

After seeing this so many times now with controllers, I'm starting to get a feeling that manufacturers actually program these things to look at the battery voltage, and when it reaches 0V, to just make the controller kill itself. Doesn't matter if the controller's electronics are still good, just fucking kill it.

If true, that is very, VERY nasty. It would also explain why batteries in laptops especially all have different form factors, despite having used regular 18650's internally for a very long time. It would explain why they're built like tanks. It would explain why manufacturers really don't want people in there. Yes there are safety issues and you're literally diffusing a bomb. Since recently we've also got space optimization.. anything for half a mm of thickness, amirite? But doing it this way is fucking disgusting. There is absolutely no reason for the controller to kill itself when the cell dies. Yet it seems like it does.

PS: I've posted the original picture on https://ghnou.su/pics/... now if you're interested. I noticed in my previous rant that devRant really squishes these down.

If you're not into sad ones then better skip this.

Parents wanted a good boy rather than a happy boy so they got one... I wanted to learn programming and make games. I was kinda good at school and kinda not good at socialising. Or not good at being wanted around since my stuff is shit and everybody else's good. Standard bullying applies. Still adults back then promised work hard, learn and it will be worth it. Follow your dreams said internet. So I did. Tried the university 4 or 5 years maybe, completed 2, no degree. Nobody said that socially anxious, depressed never-had-any-girlfriends with mood swings struggle getting through one-size-fits-all institutions. But I learned programming. Nobody really cared. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. All friends on depression forums. Tried learning driving then failed couple times and put this until I have money to throw at the bottomless pit of learning driving.

For the reasons that can be summarized as "my parents fucked up and my country fucked up too" I migrated. New country, migrant, warehouse jobs in the area with warehouse jobs for migrants. Worked a bit then went for a sort of uni level course or software development again, probably the easiest way to prove "I speak English too" on my CV. Barely made it, of course. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. All friends on anxiety online chat. I worked on one game but then ran out of time. It was time to look for employment. Made portfolio (from scraps of old projects), looked for half year (online), didn't find it.

Decided to move from low rent no jobs area to high rent with jobs area. Got factory job, worked maybe 6 days then quit mid day since my brain had a wave of extremely low mood mixed with "THIS IS NOT WHAT I LEARNED FOR". Btw 5 days of that work went to the scammer pretending to be a staffing agency. Workplace didn't respond and I didn't have an "official" address so didn't talk about it. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Got one friend locally.

So that's 3 years ago.

Then by some miracle I got into my first software job. Some miracle constituted of going to local dev meetings and talking to a really generous man that happened to be looking for people. I did some ugly web development there, then the company found out they're not doing well and laid off half of devs including myself. Kept all the project managers for some reason, I guess you don't have to code projects if you can code existing clients. It was stressful but I found next employment within a month, which is where I am still. For next to minimum wage. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Getting old, losing hair.

I found I have problems doing work. Had days and days during which I've written like 10 lines, maybe. Of easy stuff. Nightmare. Life is pain and it's all I can think of some days. I'm approaching 30. Still anxious, male-male street hostility present as always, burnt out. Can't afford own house, can only rent a room. At this point I've been like nowhere, had almost no relationships (online doesn't count), and almost done no fun stuff in life (discovered a hema club recently which is the last thing keeping my sanity). I think I've heard all advice there is, all about how privileged I am in this day and age, taking ownership, exercising, hard work, positivity (can suck my undesired d...), todo lists, sleep, omega-3, vitamin d, no shortcuts, more work. I feel like I've wasted 10-15 years. To be honest about the feeling I feel like the world has wasted my 10-15 years. I feel like absolute trash. There has been a lot of bad things and very little good ones. Recently it's been more nothingness. The best free time to be sit at home with your partner off work with plague outside: wasted. I've been off for almost as many months as worked past year. Games completed: 0. Sex had: 0. Hope lost: yes, most of. Weakness is a sin, world is made for fuckheads, terrorists win, no gods to hear your cries.

So I want to ask you guys and gals, should I pursue my gamedev dreams? I maybe have the base skills, but I struggle to use them because attention deficit or something that keeps my brain processing all the past misery rather than working. I don't think I have enough charm to be anywhere for pretty face. I think my personality isn't too great by now either. At least the public one. Still I want to do creative stuff, dark, crazy, ridiculous stuff. At least somewhat fun. But I feel like a burden. If I was a studio I wouldn't employ myself. Will I be able to do the job properly? Gamble. My energy is mostly spent and I can do only so much about it.

But maybe it's not what I should want, I don't know. I'm rather lost recently and don't think there's much goodness gradient to follow anymore.

Sorry for a messy post, I don't really know where to get stuff out of my head and in what order. I tried therapist, didn't work.

Old man rants about anime.

I fucking hate anime and everything else surrounding it. I make exceptions but I hate seeing that shit everywhere. I acknowledge the fact that some of them are good. There's just so many of them in every area of life that if someone raves about a good game or comic and it's fucking anime art style of whatever the fuck you call it, I dismiss it.

What I hate the most is the chibification of characters in video games. Companies would re-create classic games and make them look worse through this. I get the point of style changing over time and wanting to put a modern twist to it but this style is so overused. Literally most of the "art" you see online is fucking anime.

I know I'm gonna piss off some hardcore fans but at least now you know to stay the fuck away from me with that shit.

Fuck you haters, I'm not dying of corona so PHP dies with it.

PHP is an amazing language. It has evolved nicely has almost all high performing functionally you need build in. Has a good package manager eco system. It's insanely fast (since 7.0, older versions where just fast with opcache).
Most of the called out inconsistencies are actually because it is consistently following C/POSIX equivalent or people that don't understand dynamic typing (it doesn't mean any shit will stick).

https://awesomeopensource.com/proje...
Fuck off with your JS backend solution because it's faster...

This is a big thanks to all the amazing members of the PHP community that worked hard to make PHP the great language it is today!!!

I used to think I was average, dumb even. I learn, investigate, fix, create things, and I get paid. Everywhere I go, I meet developers who know more than I do. They know all the new tools and I just couldn't care unless I have to use them. But given a few months, the fantasy dies. I don't expect them to be perfect but it often turns out, they can't even do the simplest things or figure things out.

The more I work with other people, the more I learn that doing these basic things are the norm but only in my fantasy. I'm not gonna get into a philosophical argument on what "basic" means, let's assume "read and write". In my head, it only makes sense that if you're paid to do something, you can do it or at least learn how to do it. There's no shame in asking for help but you should learn over time and not be a burden to your colleagues. It's okay to fuck up but it shouldn't be a regular thing.

I wondered if it's just in my country but I had to remind myself that most of the people I worked with aren't even here then I thought, "Well, maybe it's just these types of companies." Then I was hired by some company in Silicon Valley, I thought "Wow, I guess I'm pretty good at deception." A few months in, same shit. Yeah, yeah, stereotypes, I know. I don't care about your damn "just because a company is blah blah blah". I don't fucking care, man. I lived long enough. Just listen or read. Whatever thought you have right now, whatever emotion you have right now, let it go. I know your fingers are itching to type those words and point out the flaws in my "logic" and nitpick every side I chose not to write about. Listen, I'm not trying to argue with you.

Anyway, I notice this on devRant too. I can't count how many times someone posted something and another guy writes an essay in the comments section making all kinds of assumptions. All that energy would have been saved if they did something very basic - read. It's almost always the case of not reading or having very poor reading comprehension. The most notorious ones give such strong emotional reactions even on things that are so absurd, it has to be a joke and then they go around "correcting" people's "statements" like the smart people they think they are and they just look like clowns arguing with themselves.

The point is.. nil. I'm just rambling.

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

CSS, I fucking hate you.

I fucking hate my job, because of you. I'm pulling my hair out every day, all day because I have to put up with your bullshit. If it weren't for you, I'd probably enjoy design.

You're not even programming. You're the mistake that happened when web-design developed too rapidly for the devs at the time to keep up and produce intuitive, functional tools. That, or they were just fucking sadists.

You're a band-aid that's started to rot, but we just keep sticking pretty stickers over you and pretending like the wound isn't festering.

I wish I could spend more time learning C and C++. Then I could go get a real job as far away from you as is virtually possible.

. . .

Look, just this once - just for today - could you please do what I fucking ask you to. I mean, I'm just asking you to do your fucking job. That's all.

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

People have been telling you what needs to be done so many times. You saw that those tickets were created just now and you keep asking me if we have them, do we have them now, and giving updates like you're so fast that backend has to catch up with you. Someone gives you a mock-up, you setup the buttons, and think you're all set. Maybe if you had any skill to debug your own shit, you wouldn't be eating up so much of our time with your inability to send proper requests, read error messages and documentation.

Sir, you are a joke that took nine months to develop, stopped right fucking there, and you're not even funny.

So management wants this:
As soon as a customer reports a bug, management wants to have an "emergency button" to let their inexperienced hands make production fall back to the last stable version, without having to pass through IT and wait for them to fix it. If the server catches a 500 error, this process should be done automatically. All because they don't want to give us more time writing more thorough tests...

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

really fucking hate those PM types who will hear a smart sounding term or buzzword used by a developer, and then proceed to overuse it (mostly incorrectly) in every fucking conversation as if it's le mot du jour.

or better yet, when the fucking parrot proceeds to drive a meeting with PO's by regurgitating verbatim your explanation you gave to him 2 hours before as if he knows that the fuck he's talking about. oh but when someone asks a question for clarification - "hey dev, you wanna take this one?"

hey PM, you wanna lick my balls?

Holy shit. In a meeting that literally makes no sense. We're taking credit for work by claiming story points. Story points. How the hell does that work? Especially since we have told management CONSTANTLY that story points are abstract LOE shit and NOT time spent. Yet I suggest if we REALLY want to estimate who worked what we track time spent I get shot down. You can't get a concrete measurement from an abstract concept. Also, we're being encouraged to argue over who does what? What does THAT help? AND we're not even reestimating if we over or under estimating, but being forced to massage our numbers into the estimate. What the fuck?

Migrating to another sub domain for the 4th time.
First they say 'oh this sub domain is just for demo and you can freely test your code on it .
Few days later they say the same thing to another team and then :

- 'dude ! Is the website down because of your code ?'

- 'The code is not complete yet ! I've been adding some features! '

-'Is it possible that you migrate to another demo sub domain? Content production team wants to upload more content on that sub domain '

-'Sure ! Why not :('

So Yay just asked me to replace pulseaudio with pipewire. I was hesitant because I have meetings to attend and I don't want to have to fuck around with my audio config once again.
But it simply works.
PipeWire can replace pulseaudio simply by uninstalling pulse and installing pipewire-pulse.
Next I'll see if it can replace JACK as easily. If so, if I no longer have to juggle two fundamentally incompatible audio servers to do audio processing, then FOSS has just solved one of the greatest obstacles in its path to reach feature parity and performance superiority to Windows.