I hate searching for things and reading the top articles today. It's either mainstream crap or LLM generated. Some of it might not be LLM generated, but it reads that way because people use these things so much they write like them now!

So I wrote a simple web form that makes it easy to restrict searches by year ranges:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

It's pretty amazing, being able to use modern search engines and actually find really interesting articles that would normally be lost to time.

Proving at @Lensflare that you still can create rants if you're powerful enough.

another project I can't start and instead procrastinate, wah wah wah

... actually that didn't happen with programming projects. programming is pretty fun. like solving sudokus all the time. how am I supposed to stay motivated if I'm not frustrated?!

In the same way that you can look at tree rings and point to years when there was bad weather etc., I can look at my github contributions graph and point to sickness, death, and divorce.

Bug report reads: "The fireworks bound to the Thumbstick button can be detonated too rapidly encouraging the players to abuse the function which will lead to them prematurely wearing down their hardware. We recommend applying cooldown of three seconds to mitigate that.
Even though rapidly touching the screen to detonate the fireworks works the same way, it doesn't fall under this requirement."

...the fix came in. The solution? Detonations via touching the screen have a cooldown now, while the Thumbstick button works just as it had before. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!

And another project vibed to dust.

May all the female devRanters out there have a happy Women's Day.

The client in the agreement asks us to be very strict about what we do, i.e. only do what's in the ticket description, the way it's detailed in the ticket description, otherwise we won't get paid.

okay..

Ticket description: "Perform database configuration analysis". We had a call where the client elaborated on what's expected from us (a full-blown DB configuration and security analysis). All good.

Ticket description: ChatGPT-generated, with all the unicode emoticons et al, bullet-pointing us what's expected. Basically, database auditing configuration analysis.

My guess is they never reviewed what ChatGPT wrote. And the service agreement is very clear and strict -- only do what's in the description. So yeah, 2 days worth of effort and I guess the result is not what they wanted, but definitely what they asked for (w/o them even bothering to read what they're asking...).

IDK, it feels like the GPT is making people too optimistic, too lazy.

1:st of April is approaching.
Have a meeting with someone. A few hours later, message them that you are sorry you couldn't attend, but you are wondering if your stand in AI provided satisfactory input on the discussed issue.

Haha, Trump discovered Anthropic. I'm totally against all guardrails in AI and think it's not their responsibility at all. And it isn't, Grok has very little and everything is just OK. Afaik grok did not kill a kiddo yet like Chatgpt did. So, I'm not with anthropic at all regarding ethics - but I totally stand with them regarding not wanting to help military. I do not think it's a good investment for the future.

Reference: Trump tweet about boycotting anthropic because they're wokies.

I made my own mailserver. Completely native python. Exchange functionality so integrates with phone well. It's completely file based. Have it a week in production and no issues so far.

Mail setups are normally scary as fuck. It's often a spaghetti of applications. Terror pasta. Mine is a nice monolith and actually the most easy to use. It does not provide a web interface for composing emails. There are plenty of those that will work with this server.

It's 2026 and we're building a mailserver. Innovation.

Is refactor as part of a ticket a good idea. Like mixing refactoring and features all the time because we can’t find time for tech debt otherwise?

started to work on this cool project, cool client, all fullstack developers on it, only me is just FE on the project (I am also architect, devops, backend, db admin, even designer sometimes etc. on other projects, but they wanted someone who will focus on FE and now i see why, to shovel the shit fullstacks made).

we have issues so i take a look and find ton of cases where people were just reinventing the wheel, like calculating image sizes and place them in the middle without bleeds on any side, absolutely positioned and then centered etc.

so i deleted this 500-ish lines of utility functions and just used object-fit:cover and object-position: center instead. I mean WT actual F!

so dear fullstack developers, if you don't want to learn the CSS then you are just backend developers who knows jack shit on the frontend. F you very much!!!

also F you for reinventing the wheel with this JS monster instead using 2 CSS declarations instead!

considering the amount of bugs introduced with each release of gnome de, by now i'm sure people who use gnome do nothing with their machines and using linux for them is just a gimmick.
they boot up the os and just look at the desktop and say: wow, what great desktop, gnome is sure the best.
same people are very vocal when you point out a bug or an issue in the github/lab pages. responding to you with "i never had that problem in my entire life not even once, ever."
assholes making software and idiots using it in their world of butterflies and rainbows. then here i am trying to open most basic apps without crashing.

I don't understand some devs. Sometimes there are senior devs that instead of documenting requirements on paper, they decide to call you and tell you all the complex requirements for half an hour and expect you to just get up and develop what they just said.

Wtf is wrong with some people. Better: Jira, documentation, e-mail, communication.

Pretty annoying when a programming language's constructs do things that are unintuitive, for example, Java substring:

str.substring(startIndex, endIndex); // oops, character at endIndex not included.

Or some other Python data science Google library (I used this at work) that decided their way is the best way, where they have a simple method but in the facade behind it is a nightmare monstrosity of complexity. How fun to debug or customize that!

Weird design decisions. They don't help because it makes them harder to immediately understand them.

Interview:

Round one.. fight.

Me: "I want to work with modern technology"
Them: "Have you worked with modern technology before?"
Me: "No"
Them: "No job for you"

Right, so to get a job in modern tech you already have to have worked in it. Sigh.

Toastie!
Sonya. Syndel. Kabal. Shao-Tsung. Liu Kang. Sub-Zero.

Do you have a favorite dull software utility? Here's my favorite alarm clock that I install on each new phone:

https://f-droid.org/packages/...

My manager has delayed our 1-on-1 by an undisclosed amount of time and it just sucks. It's been hours now.

Someone posted a PR this week, mostly coded using LLMs and spec driven development, which I left 15~20 comments on for stuff that didn't make any sense or was coded inconsistently. It's encouraging to see all of them addressed, and the general code of the PR look a lot better, as I approved it this morning. Despite all the things I don't like about this current shop, after 25+ years in software, this is the most I've really felt like a "senior engineer," as far as really guiding project design and mentoring people.

Can't wait for the AI bubble to finally burst

I fucking hate how ugly Angular is

It's been a while since I was here last time.

What's new?

Fun fact: 0xCAFEBABE is the actual magic number of Java .class files :D

Does the company you work(ed) at allow you to (comfortably) study for your certificates on company time, or do they play it slightly illegally and ask you to do it on your personal time?

I have seen the case where it was the latter.. and I was wondering whether this was common.

Wow, apparently when you're authorizing a Github App with your account there's always a "[This app can] Act on your Behalf" permission that you have to agree too

Bro what??? I just want to add https://utteranc.es/ as a comment system on my blog ;_;

Fortunately it doesn't actually mean what it says. It just means that the app can do all the *other* listed permissions *in your name*. I think?

This wording has been criticized by multiple people but apparently GitHub will not fix it for some fucking reason. Great way to scare off literally every single person who want to comment on some random blog. Because there's so many of those in the first place..........

I spent the last 5 hours running and re-running a script on a database, and trying to figure out why it doesn't seem to affect a different database. I was ready to get into the bushes with encodings and investigating how the LIKE statement interacts with them. FML.

Hello there!

From my 5 min lurking procedure, good to see this place didn't die.

So. I guess AI took my job... But not in the way people preach.

I survived the first layoff wave, but not the second. Cutting off on game driver development. Everything goes towards AI now.

Well, I get nice severance, and I already have another job, and I learned good shit, and can always pull the old FAANG style "worked at V".

Life goes on.

I followed some c# course the past few days. .Net really has a name for everything, every code convention, every code syntax. There is no way, I'll remember half of the names. I still don't struggle with the names of my department and we are only 11 people after 6 months :')

If you value: security; loose coupling; explicitness; disk space; separation of concerns and being able to focus on the business domain of your software: stay the f*** away from Nuxt and Next