To whoever messed with my devrant-client tests by constantly downvoting the posts and them being hidden from the API, you're a cunt and I hope you break your neck falling out a 12 story building. :)

Here's the final test to verify shit works too: https://devrant.com/feed/recent

Edit: it works, get fucked you humid piece of shit.

Edit2: To give context to whoever might be subscribed to me and might or might not have been bombed with notifications:

Was working on the plugin system for the devrant client and async was giving me hell, the links I posted were to test the plugin that first has to execute a $.get and only then can return a linkified rant-text.

"An error has occurred. Please try again."

WELL WHAT THE FUCK IS THE ERROR? WHY CANT YOU TELL ME WHAT I NEED TO DO TO FIX THE ERROR YOU PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT.

I shouldn't need to submit a form 23 fucking times, changing field values each time, because of an uninformative fucking error message.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

!rant

I'm proud of myself. Thanos salvaged me lol.

#Programming alone

print "Hello World!"

#Programming while someone watches

global _start

section .data
msg db "Hello, World!", 10
len equ $ - msg
section .text
_start:
mov rax, 4
mov rbx, 1
mov rcx, msg
mov rdx, len
int 0x80
mov rax, 1
mov rbx, 0
int 0x80

I..
Want..
To murder...
Someone...

Github after Microsoft purchase

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Forgetting how fast computers are is a thing that I need to stop doing

Last week, I notified a customer about that their webbserver spewed out several thousands of spam emails every hour, and they have to fix it ASAP.
(I also inform them for the 50th times for the last 2 years that they really need to update their websites so we can update from Debian 5).

The owner of the company forward this to their developers.

Today, I got the answer from them denying everything and blaming our "negligence" and they also dared to question all our technical expertise. shots fired

Spend some hours, finding shit on their websites, dug out logs, read documentation and old conversation and compiled that into a huge email that was designed to put them 10 meters under ground.

mfw I pressed send

TIL a new way to crash a computer.
Open a python shell
>>> [i for i in range(10000000000)]

When you try to edit person's phone number in dev environment and see this hilarity.

Glassdoor is the perfect example of how annoying, even just opening a website can be, first it asks for your permission to use your location, then half the screen is filled with a cookie agreement and after you clicked it all away, you get a "download our app" filling just 30% of your screen, now that you clicked that all away, you may use the website, ludicrous.

edit: well fuck, just noticed the app message glitched away when taking the screenshot, you get the idea though

Today, I learned the shortest command which will determine if a ping from your machine can reach the Internet:

ping 1.1

This parses as 1.0.0.1, which thanks to Cloudflare, is now the IP address of an Internet-facing machine which responds to ICMP pings.

Oh, you can also use this trick to parse 10.0.0.x from `10.x` or 127.0.0.1 from `127.1`. It's just like IPv6's :: notation, except less explicit.

"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

What only relying on JavaScript for HTML form input validation looks like

The rant starts here

Best practice is just a theory 😂

This was a computer in my university 's lab. Took a photo of that to send my boss when I won't be able to meet a deadline.

Friend: "the blablabla company is offering a free Java spring course"
Me: "free??? Nonono they might have bamboozled you but they won't take me"
...
Goes to course
Awesome experience and free
...
Gets home...
Me:"WTF? It was free"

!rant && !story

Greetings, peps! New here, how do you people do things around here? Sorry for purposeless post, i kinda need 10 ++'s for avatar 😔

Need testers for my android game, that i posted earlier in the week, check my profile.

Anyone interested?

As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Dang it JS!

Trying to make a not realistic deadline,set today for yesterday. Pleasing clients is what I do.

With a little #catsupport, she is probably wondering why I'm not in bed so she can sleep on me.

It happened.

I wrote "you're missing a tab in your python code" as an answer on StackOverflow.

I was downvoted AND told that I wasn't correct: it was missing 4 spaces and not a tab, according to the python guidelines.

Now, I haven't read them, but my Richard Hendrix fucking intensifies.

Fuck spaces. And if python guidelines talk about spaces, fuck python guidelines too!

*code doesn't work*

-Run three times, just to be sure
-Its NOT the code, must be the project. Full rebuild.
-Run a few more times after rebuild didn't fix it.
-Google the issue.
-Stackoverflow must be wrong. The code is JUST like their solution.
-Run a few more times, but with your lucky underpants
-Reboot. Must be an operating system thing.
-Tea break. Give the issue time and it will fix itself.
-Run a few more times. Still unfixed
-Contact customer support.
-Walmart said they can't help.
-Consider writing your own language without this OBVIOUS flaw
-Kickstarter for c++++
-Raise $50,000
-Start a family
-Contact customer support again
-Run a few more times
-Now banned from Walmart
-Oh shit, missing a semicolon

as a windows10 user, I'd like to coin the term
Restartophbia
[fuhk win-dohz]
a general sense of fear and despair, caused by either seeing the words "please wait", "we're getting things ready", or "update and restart"
Restartophobia treatments include having two or more pc's, or the application of Linux on a regular basis.

> Do I have Restartophobia?
General fear from the Restart is common, and does not necessarily mean you suffer from Restartophobia. But, if you dread opening your pc, or sweat and feel unbalanced every time you open the shutdown/restart options, you might want to check your symptoms