Details
-
AboutI'm a fast typer and a slow eater. I enjoy long walks off short piers. I am the Florida Man.
-
SkillsJavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Lua, C#, c, c++, Java, XML/ XAML, VB.net, MySQL, php, Android, Node, Linux, Windows, Scratch.
-
LocationAmerica (38.8976074, -77.0365946)
-
Website
-
Github
Joined devRant on 1/8/2017
Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
So… made the website again
https://cover-beryl.vercel.app/
If anyone wants a cover, or wanted to put anyone up there let me know25 -
For everybody wondering what's the new endpoint is..
/api/me/subscribed-feed
you can also provide an `filter`, which is comma-seperated with the possible values:
- posted
- commentedOn
- liked
"View more suggested users" does NOT load more. It simply doesn't show everything from the response.8 -
fork() can fail: this is important
Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.
It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.
People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.
Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.
That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.
Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).
Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.
...
...
...
Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.
If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...
See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.
Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?
It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.
Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.
Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...12 -
Mark.
Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:
"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"
...and then I would have a message saying:
"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)
I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:
"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"
...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...
"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"
🤦♂️🤦♂️7 -
Someone mentioned Holy C in another thread and I automatically knew they were referencing the language, based on C, and developed by Terry A Davis from Temple OS and Schizophrenic fame.
I legit felt sad for the man, he was obviously a very talented and smart programmer. You removed all the racial slurs, crazy dialogues and biblical stuff that was caused by his mental illness and you were left with a very brilliant and dedicated programmer.
While Hurd (kernel meant to replace Linux) will fucking never see the light of day after years in the making, Terry was able to generate: his own compiler for his own programming language, kernel, drivers, desktop environment, filesystem TODO by himself. I mean, fuck me dude, he even included games of his own design into the damned thing, using very advanced concepts that were present in flight simulators or doom like fps.
It just bothers me so much, the dude would have probably done amazing non-religious things if it were not for his illness.
If you like reading about this sort of thing, check him out, there are a couple of youtube videos by him. Don't be put off by the shit that he spews in some videos, remember, he was saying shit like that out of a very real mental illness.
Oh, and fuck Hurd5 -
I heard that "options are options" so - maybe we should have even more options. What do you think?25
-
Today I discovered by myself that...
...in a shell...
...when entering a password (e.g. ssh)...
...and you make a typo... 🤦♂️
...you don't need to smack that backspace key like a maniac! You can just use the clear line shortcut: control+U (^U). This clears all input to the left of your cursor and this also works for passwords.26 -
Hi everyone! Sam here, @dfox's gf :) so happy to be talking to you all! Today I will be live-ranting TNW Conference where devRant will be presenting with photos in this thread. Pictured here, @dfox and @trogus setting up our booth. There will also be a stage presentation, a sticker printer on site (because how could we not :)), and energy drink/stress ball giveaway. Stop by and say hi if you're here!!
Go devRant team!39 -
EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
-------------------------
Hey everyone!
Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!
@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.
Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!
p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!51 -
Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.
We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).
Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.
Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.
Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).
Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.
Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.
Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.51 -
Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):
- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)
- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)
- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)
- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched
- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)
- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)
- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)
- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)
- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable
- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)
We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim26 -
I once participated in a programming competition. We named our team "NameNotFoundException". Although we didn't win but a few days later we got a call from the organizing committee. They thought that there was something wrong with their system and wanted to know the name of our team. We laughed our asses off.10
-
!rant
This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.
I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.
- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...
This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.19 -
I accidently left log.debug("bollocks") ;
In an exception handler our customers log monitoring system picked it up and they questioned why and I quote here "why is there a spike in bollocks at 3am?"
That was an awkward conference call2 -
Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"
Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)
In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic
Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them
In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure
Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?
Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...
Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea
Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'
I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:
Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine
Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know
And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews29 -
Not me, but a colleague questioned himself for a while over this one. He simply forgot a semicolon when doing some server maintenance:
sudo yum remove application1 sudo yum remove application2
This didn't just remove application1 and 2, it removed sudo and yum too. One slightly embarrassing call to the ops team later, we had to replace the box.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should automate your server maintenance!6 -
Unofficial devRant Racing Team in Forza Motorsport 7 basing on Ford Falcon in Supercars series - probably most geeky racing team ever!12
-
[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6