Morning conversation with wife.

As she puts a stainless steel water bottle on the counter

She: can you make a water bottle for our daughter before school.

Me: I'm not sure, does it have to look like this one, I don't have any training working with metals. But if I have full control over the design. I may be able to come up with something.

She: that not funny, why do you always do that.

Me: do what, that is exactly what you told me to do.

A little later.....

She: I'm running late, can you make sure "everything" up stairs is unplugged..... (She means her curling iron)

I can't wait until she comes home.........;-)

My bash aliases explains how lazy I am.

"Is my presence still required?"

5 magic words which serve as a free escape out of every endless meeting, while telling your boss how ambitious you are, and your coworkers that their tangential discussions are boring as fuck.

Customer is always right.....

Committed to sustainable productivity..

Misunderstanding between the IT Department Staff member and the Finance Department Staff member in one of the establishments...

User: Hi, our printer is not working.

IT Service: What is wrong with it?

User: The mouse is jammed.

IT Service: Mouse? Are you sure it’s a printer, as they don’t come with a mouse?

User: Do you think I’m stupid? I’m telling you it’s the printer!

IT Service: I'm telling you, it can’t be the printer! They don’t have a mouse!

User: Oh really?... Mmmmm... I’ll send you a picture.

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The customer is always right.
Listen to him/her and believe what he/she says.

Don’t jump into conclusions!

Journalist: How would you describe bad code?
Developer: "No comment"

I saw a piece of code that, to my knowledge of software engineering, should have never worked in the first place. The code doesn't know that, and it works anyway.

I call this a "bumblebug".

Answer to all bosses, managers and TLs...

Zebra next level

"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.

Happy day! 🎉🎉🎉

So I've been playing some DnD with friends.
And we've been working with some lego characters, whiteboard markers and plastic sheets to draw on.

But that's always a mess:
The ink was old and did not come off again for the most part
The sides of the map curled up and and made the lego character fall over
The lego characters were too big
And more...

So I thought, why not make it digital?

And so I did.
I used UWP to make a master and a client, both using the Windows Ink api to be able to draw.
Some circles with an initial served as characters, and everything was synchronized using a TCP library I wrote half a year ago.

Yesterday we tried it out.
We all (including me) were sceptical if it would work well because the 'analog' clumsy way we did it before does have a certain charm.

But at the end we were all very enthousiastic about it and we'll be using it next time too!
It's awesome to be able to create programs for your own use :D
That's why being able to program is such a great thing!

Now I need to restructure everything, make it more efficient, add a turn order display, make the map zoom- and moveable and more and more....