I just gave a 20 minute presentation in front of fifty people, and apparently did well enough that I got five private compliments afterwards, including one from the vice president. 🥳

And all of that without a single drop of rum!

GDPR done right. 😂😂

Going to release the biggest feature I have implemented for Product I work on. Change in more than 150 files and it is very very critical.
Wish me luck..

Just a thought...

Is it illegal to remove a geo blocker from a website by just setting the display to "none" in the dev tools?

Asking for a friend.

Ooh shiny new toy

If drinking coffee doesn't wake you up in the morning, try deleting a table in the production database.

Verified, it worked.

Give that man some HUGE FUCKING COOKIES!

"Can you make the UI look uglier and more ... Traditional?"

Removed CSS completely and gave them an HTML only page. They loved it.

How Finnish companies deal with recruiting in 2017:
https://rekry.io/en

Busted

Multithreading.

Girlfriend: What's your biggest fear?

Me: That machines take over the world.

Girlfriend: What?

Toaster: What?

So adopting this price list. Like right now.

Today we have an exciting devRant announcement! As many observant members of the community have problably noticed, since launch we've been using the domain name devrant.io since the .com was already taken. Today, we're happy to announce, we now own devrant.com and it is now the official devRant URL!

How did this happen you ask? The devrant.com domain was already owned by a developer named Wiard when we launched devRant. It took a while to track him down, but when we did, turned out he saw the good we were doing and wanted to help the devRant community by generously offering us the .com domain for a very reasonable exchange (considering that we are a self-funded bootstrapped startup!).

Since Wiard recently started writing a blog on devrant.com, he had to find a new home for it. His new blog is https://sysrant.com and I encourage everyone to check it out! Great topical/educational dev/sys-admin related articles? Check. Someone who cares about the devRant community and allowed us to leave the firey hell that is .io? Check. So check it out!!

Some technical info:

This change is immediate and all devrant.io non-api requests will now redirect to devrant.com. We might have missed a few things (purposely or accidentely) so we're going to be going through and converting anything that's left. If you use the devRant API, your implementation should not break since API requests are meant to be excluded for now, but I highly recommend switching any API URLs to https://devrant.com so you can avoid issues in the future if we decide to stop redirecting devrant.io API requests. Also one note, there was an issue for about a minute after we turned on the redirected where some API requests to devrant.io might have 301 redirected to devrant.com. If an app you were using broke, try clearing whatever cache the 301 redirect might be stored in and the issue should go away.

Feel free to post any questions you might have here (and please let me know about any issues you might discover!), and once again, huge thanks to Wiard!

Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

Was just asked to take on even more work. Asked for a raise. "there's no room in the organization for a new position". Yes, but you can still pay me more.

I'm not comfortable enough to do more work without more pay. Sorry.

We'll see what happens.

I trust machines more than humans.

Except when I'm hitting that Ctrl+S. Gotta hit it at least like 4 times before I can start believing :-P

No one is perfect. Not even Google Assistant!

My girl helping me fix a small server this morning. Chip off the block!

When your boss learns how to use StackOverflow

At least they were real though...

My job is so f**king unbelievable.

I'll try to sum it up by first telling you about the folks I work with:

First, there is this supermodel wanna-be chick. Yeah, okay, she is pretty hot, but damn is she completely useless.
The girl is constantly fixing her hair or putting on make-up.
She is extremely self-centred and has never once considered the needs or wants of anyone but herself.
She is as dumb as a box of rocks, and I still find it surprising that she has enough brain power to continue to breathe.

The next chick is completely the opposite. She might even be one of the smartest people on the planet.
Her career opportunities are endless, and yet she is here with us. She is a zero on a scale of 1 to 10.
I'm not sure she even showers, much less shaves her "womanly" parts.
I think she might be a lesbian, because every time we drive by the hardware store she moans like a cat in heat.

But the jewel of the crowd has got to be the fucking stoner. And this guy is more than just your average pothead.
In fact, he is baked before he comes to work, during work, and I'm sure after work.
He probably hasn't been sober any time in the last ten years, and he's only 22.
He dresses like a beatnik throwback from the 1960's, and to make things worse, he brings his big f**king dog to work.
Every f**king day I have to look at this huge Great Dane walk around half-stoned from the second-hand smoke.
Hell, sometimes I even think it's trying to talk with its constant bellowing.
Also, both of them are constantly hungry, requiring multiple stops to McDonald's and Burger King, every single f**king day.

Anyway, I drive these dicks around in my van and we solve mysteries and s**t.

A scammer called me today. They were saying that harmful files were moved to my computer and they needed to remove them. I don't think they are ever going to call me again.

S = scammer; M = me;

S: this is tech support we need access to your computer because we detected harmful files and need to remove them.
M: oh my! Hold on, let me go to my computer now. How can you access it?
S: we can just use RDP and delete the files. They are in a hidden folder that is encrypted so this Is the only way.
M: oh ok I believe you. Hm... it looks like my son only allows certain IP addresses to access our computers.. I don't know how to disable this so can you just email me your IP address?
S: Sure...

He then sends me his actual IP address... it doesn't even look like a proxy or VPN.

M: oh my I forgot that you need my password to login. It's really long and complicated... can I just email it to you?
S: Sure!!

I then tell him to hold on I have to find it that my "son" stored it somewhere.

At this time I'm taking a photo of my bare ass and attaching it to the email. I then say in the email "Please note what my job title is in my signature.. I just sent the FBI your name, phone number, email, and IP address. Please enjoy my bare ass, you'll see a lot of it in prison."

My Friend: Dude our Linux Server is not working anymore!

Me: What? What did you do?

My friend: Nothing I swear!

Me: But you were last on it?

My friend: Yes. I just wanted to run a bash file and needed to give it permissions.

Me : WHAT DID YOU ENTER???!

My Friend: Chill man, just this command I found on the internet
chmod -R 600 /
chown -R root:root /

Me: WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN ROOT AND GOD DAMMIT WHY ARE YOU EVEN USING SOME RANDOM COMMAND FROM THE INTERNET. YOU KNOW YOU SHOULD NOT DO THIS OR JUST ASK!

My friend: Ok I did something wrong, how can I fix it?

Me: Did you make a backup or rsync of the server?

My friend: No. I just wanted to run this file.

Me: You holocausted the server. FUCK MY LIFE

Everyone here ranting about a fucking missing semicolon. I can't remember the last time a missing semicolon was the issue...

You wanna know what's REALLY BALL-BUSTING????

WHEN THE FUCKING 10 y/o LEGACY CODEBASE, CODED BY FUCKING PHP WORDPRESS SCRIPTERS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD BUILD AN ENTERPRISE SHIT CAUSE ZF2 "LOOKS EASY" AND THEN FILL IT UP WITH SPAGHETTI, IS SO BAD WRITTEN THAT IN ORDER FOR THE PAGE TO RENDER YOU ACTUALLY ****HAVE**** TO DISABLE ERROR REPORTING SO WHENEVER A FUCKING ERROR HAPPENS ON THE TEMPLATE RENDER COMPONENT OF ZEND FRAMESHIT 2, YOU'RE LEFT WITH A FUCKING BLANK PAGE AND NOTHING IS LOGGED TO THE LOG FILE, SO YOUR ONLY OPTION IS DIE() DEBUGGING LINE BY LINE ON THE 1300 LINES PHTML FUCKFEST OF A VIEW THEY HAVE.

MISSING SEMICOLON? YES PLEASE, GIVE ME MORE OF THAT SHIT

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

*Now that's what I call a Hacker*

MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS

This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.

xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"

xxx: You're gonna love this

xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".

xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.

xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those

Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT

The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...

What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

Looking for a job as a deveoper be like:

Job title: car driver

Job requirements: professional skills in driving normal- and heavy-freight cars, buses and trucks, trolley buses, trams, subways, tractors, shovel diggers, contemporary light and heavy tanks currently in use by NATO countries.

Skills in rally and extreme driving are obligatory!
Formula-1 driving experience is a plus.

Knowledge and experience in repairing of piston and rotor/Wankel engines, automatic and manual transmissions, ignition systems, board computer, ABS, ABD, GPS and car-audio systems by world-known manufacturers - obligatory!

Experience with car-painting and tinsmith tasks is a plus.

The applicants must have certificates by BMW, General Motors and Bosch, but not older than two years.

Compensation: $15-$20/hour, depends on the interview result.

Education requirements: Bachelor's Degree of Engineering.

I went to Paris for my first interview (that was 1989) for a job of Unix kernel developer. All dressed up. I step out of the elevator and see a young punk with scruffy hair and different colour shoes. I reckon he must be the pizza delivery guy. I ask him "dude, can you please point me to the CEO's office for interview". He said "sure, follow me man, I'll show you". We arrive at a desk, he sat down in the big chair and looks at me with a big smile and says "Ok dude, here we are. I am the CEO. Now let's see how good you are!"
I got the job. And 26 years latet, last week, amazing coincidence: I met him again at a trade show in Paris ... with the same coloured shoes. How cool is that!!!