So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

It drives me fucking crazy that if you sell something on eBay and specifically disable best offer, if it doesn’t sell in two weeks, eBay turns on best offer automatically to sell it. And better yet, they send you this arrogant email like “hey guess what? Even though you specifically told us not to accept offers on this item, we disobeyed you and just did it anyway!! Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t our service so convenient and awesome!?”

No eBay, fuck you. You are software which means you do what I fucking tell you to do you useless piece of trash. I hate UX designers that make arrogant and clearly wrong decisions like that. What in the world has to be wrong with someone for them to say “let’s make our software randomly change your settings and do what you told it not to do.” These guys should go work on cmake or systemd or something. Why don’t you go write a program that’s designed not to kill you? When it changes its mind in two weeks it’ll do us all a favor.

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

TL.DR.: Emojis in commit messages + bad commit messages made by Microsoft™ employees.

Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. It would be helpful if I can, you know, understand your commit messages instead of trying to guess wtf _that_ emoji means. That is, if it is the same emoji on my machine. We didn't figure that one out yet. And no, "Some 💄 changes ✨" is not a good commit message, even if you interpret it correctly (which depends on your emoji icon set).

idk about you, but that shitty 💄 emoji tends to be (see image) and I happen to associate that with an XLR audio cable. I had to ask someone else to understand a commit message; a message supposed to be explicit—stating what you changed and optionally why you changed it (you can off-load that part to an issue tracker).

Furthermore, that "Some 💄 changes ✨" commit did none of that. "I made cosmetic changes somewhere for some reason without linking to an issue." If you didn't catch that little detail yet: "COSMETIC CHANGES" is vague as fuck. What is a cosmetic change?

* Does a cosmetic change mean adjusting indentation?
* Does it mean deleting unnecessary abstraction to make the code more readable?
* Does it mean refactoring code to add that beauty factor?
* Does it mean all of the above? Or perhaps a specific combination of these?

Human communication is shit enough, don't make it worse than it already is.

tl;dr: Bossmang blaming my code for a database connection issue thrown from outside of my code. Bossmang doesn’t listen. Bossmang doesn’t want to believe it’s a connection issue.

———

Bossmang: The code you wrote is causing insane spec failures in the release branch! It’s hard to follow because it’s so insane, but the cause is your code not properly handling undefined settings! Look at this! <spec>

Me: Specs pass on my machine. I ran it with both a set and nil value. <screenshots>

Bossmang: It works when you set it to nil.

Me: But a setting that doesn’t exist returns nil? <screenshot>

Bossmang: Not seeming to.... So this is the spec failure from the release: “No connection pool with id primary found. <stacktrace that starts outside of my code>”

Me: ... That’s a DB connection error. It’s also being thrown outside of my code, and from a `super` call to Rails.

Bossmang: But <unrelated> and <unrelated> and <other spec> is failing, and if I set the version, it has <other failure> instead! That calls your code first.

Me: It’s a database error. Also: <explains probable, unrelated cause of other failures, like someone didn’t mock a fucking external api call>

Bossmang: But if I restore a DB backup, it fails again.

Me: Restoring uses a dB connection, which could be exhausting the pool depending on the daemons you have running.

Bossmang: perhaps.

...

Bossmang: I still think it’s related to spec ordering.

🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️
This is tiring.

I'm so over the politics....

System team: So, we've rewritten the entire site and the stats are looking pretty great. We're more than a year into the two-month transition period, and hey, that's cool, no judgement. But now we're gonna hit a license expiration on the old site, so we need to shut it down, or otherwise pay a ridiculously big amount to renew the license.

Business: nooooooooo you can't shut down the old site!

Systems: but nobody is using it

Business: yes, they are

Systems: no, they're really not, we checked and everything

Business: ...........

Systems: ok, well are you gonna pay for the license renewal?

Business: oh hell no

Systems: ok then we're shutting it down

Business: ..............

Systems: ok, it's down

Business: how dare you! We didn't sign off on that! Bring it back immediately!

Systems: are you gonna pay the license?

Business: no! now bring it back!

FML.

Around 2 months ago, I worked at Subway. AMA (just joking. Don't do it.)

I worked there for a week (I could write a lot about the environment) and quit it because of how entitled, lazy, rude and crazy the boss was.

The boss was the usual crackhead woman straight from the dumpster.

She used the Subway Instagram and Facebook pages as her private personal pages.

She told us to follow the Instagram page, like everything and comment on every post.

I didn't do it. Instead I shared the page with my friends and we laughed our asses off.

End of story.

Basically: Shoutout to my dad!

My dad's not an engineer or anything. But he likes building PCs and has a bunch of tech at home.

Well, thanks to him, I had a PC very early on, and of course, I did the typical skiddie stuff it, aka "fake batch virus haha funny" and playing Minecraft.

Well, at some point, after tinkering with mods to enhance the quality of gameplay, I found the ultimate mod: Macro / Keybind Mod.
This mod allows you to bind stuff to keybinds, such as commands or chat messages, or... Macros.

This mod has a custom macro language. (Hint: This is where the fun begins)

Another mod I used was AutoSwitch. However, that mod required a "core mod" (aka library installed in a dumb way). I thought, "why do I install 2 mods to get 1 thing? dumb", and made an ugly macro with lots of nested if-elses, which perfectly emulated AutoSwitch behavior for the Minecraft version I was on.

Yup, I basically got rid of 2 jar files in my mods folder by making my own ugly macro.

The fact that I recreated something in an obscure language, having not even coded any program before, made me grow interest into actual programming languages.

I've got a rant-type question:

Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?

There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.

What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.

*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.

I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.

It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.

I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'

(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)

I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!

(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)

My dear diary,

Today, the guy that convinced the boss to completely replace our functional CMS website (marketing used to update it) with a static one he was writing from scratch in PHP + jQuery, has published our MailChimp Api Key on StackOverflow, because he couldn't make the API to work.

Boss didn't complain, but I don't think he understood what happened. Just asked the guy for not doing that again.

It was a crazy day.

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

I am really not sure what to make of this...

A local digital agency was (and still is) advertising for several positions - 5 positions in fact ranging across UX designer, senior consultant, iOS lead, Android lead.

I interviewed with their CEO once, 3 years ago, when the company was much smaller and was offered the job but politely declined after much deliberation and went for a different job.

A year later the CEO messaged me and said he still remembers me and if I'm ever looking, please get in touch.

Fast forward to 10 days ago; I see the positions they're now advertising, and faced with a declining situation at my current work, decide "I liked that CEO, his growing company looks good - let's go for it"... and launch into their application process for a senior consultant role.

The process is:
1 - Phone screening - I had a 50 minute call in which I got on with the guy well and he more or less immediately told me I'd passed
2 - Coding challenge - A pretty in-depth one, I had a week to do it and, since I continue to hold down a demanding full-time job, it took me the whole 7 days - balls-to-the-wall coding, wife looking after the kids etc.
3 - An hour of pair coding with their engineers to add a new feature to the back-end of the website I'd produced for (3).
4 - An hours general technical interview.

...not an unusually long process perhaps, but pretty thorough, and one they'd obviously planned quite well with nicely designed emails to 'track' each stage etc.

I feel I did quite well on all counts except one: I didn't write Unit Tests for the website backend as I just ran out of time, but I called this out in the documentation (which I was also asked to produce) along with a strategy on how I'd write them. Since they fairly called this out as disappointing in the otherwise very positive feedback, I implemented all the Unit Tests over the weekend and updated them.

So comes the call as to whether I've got the job... their answer was, to paraphrase, "It's all positive, your X, Y and Z qualities are obviously great for us etc. the only thing the guys thought you might need to adapt to was our branching strategies and so we just need to find the right time to hire you", the guy waxed lyrical about how they need to balance the demand for staff with work coming in etc. and how they're still exploring opportunities to grow the team and they want to stay in close touch and update me regularly.

It was all friendly but I said "I need to ask you a direct question; you have several roles actively advertised, did I lose out to another candidate?". "No no no, not at all" he says "It's not the case that I've had another phone call telling someone they've got the job and giving you this call to just hold you at arms length because we might want to hire you later; we think you'd be a great fit for the team but we need to find the right time to slot you in etc. and with regards to the advertising we always advertise because it wouldn't be a good look if we completely shut that down and we always want to talk to people".

So unless he's just lying because he didn't have the heart to tell me I wasn't god enough (despite giving a lot of other glowing positive feedback), or lying that someone else got the job... then I'm left with the conclusion that there was never any job in the first place... they made me go through a week of coding and effort just so I could sit on their waiting list?

Is this a new thing. Seems like bullshit timewasting to me.

fuck these websites thAT ARE GETTING SO GOD DAMN HEAVY THEY LOAD WHEN I TURN OFF THE WIFI.

literally just fuckin shut off the wifi while this one bloated, shitty website loading aND THE WEBSITE DISPLAYED. of course, the gigabytes of javascript haven't loaded so the buttons weren't functional, bUT AT LEAST I COULD SEE THE CONTENT INSTEAD OF A WHITE SCREEN.

if ur gonna have a shitload of assets at least make your websites be viewable while the page is loading

Sins of a goddamn tech author:

1, Writting with NO ABSOLUTE FUCKING ADDITION TO WHAT IS ALREADY WRITTEN A THOUSAND FUCKING TIMES!!

2, Articles with no date of publishing! Not an author issue but fuck you for writting here!

3, Using Screenshot of code instead of text. The only thing keeping you alive is the fact that I dont know where you live. I will, eventually.

4, Reaction GIFs. Lol? Haha? FUCK YOU!

Why the fuck did Oracle change their policies on the official JDK and made the website nigh impossible to use?!

It was shit from the 90s before, and now its still shit just modern.

Why do I have to register do get the JDK, you know Im going to use the fucking 10min mail. I just wanted to setup a freaking build server and I had to go over your retarded website that for some reason *refreshes* and erases the username field everytime I put in the wrong password. Why?

Why is oracle just outright bad at making websites?! Its always a maze to navigate and now it also takes seconds to even load...

This shit is why everyone uses openJDK and adopt. 3 billion devices running java?! Not with your jre/jdk they are not, because It's a pain to get... Don't me even get started on the mess it does on windows server. Why wasn't my JAVA_HOME set automatically?! I lost almost 2 hours because I trusted your piece of shit software to so the one job it has, even reinstalled it completely...

Get your shit together Oracle, this was unacceptable 10 years ago, let alone now

I grew up without having access to PC or internet until i was like 7-8. (This may seems weird to kids today that have internet and PC or phone basically when they can slightly think)

So when i started using PC i started playing games.
ofc they were basic and all.

But as always i started thinking. They were limited. Very limited. Like cant we do better ?
So i started looking at how games were made.
And guess what ?
I found out that it was indeed possible to create a basic game.

I knew this is what i wanted to do in life.
I mean sure i learnt C as my first language cause of 1 book and learnt C book from another book but oh well.

I mean sure i dont want to create games but now 11 years later i still work (Hobby or non paid work. I blame fucking coro*a.) in C basically every single day.

I am so fucking done... I got back from holidays, and guess what? I am assigned to work for 2 teams, as single backend developer (normally we have 2 devs per team). 3rd day in and I am already burnt out and hate my job. Not only that, but fucking POs have no idea what the hell they’re doing, damn stakeholders change their priorities every fucking single day, so while everything must be delivered ASAP, we can finish nothing... And the best part - all managers are on holidays, it’s like a sinking ship without a captain.

It’s decided, I am gonna get out of this shit hole as soon as whole corona crisis ends.

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.