It's well known that Amazon uses robots in their warehouses, but I had no idea that they stock them randomly? They just put new products wherever they fit best, scan the box (obviously) and once finished, the robot just drives off on his merry way to god knows where.

And since this is Amazon, they spend the time and money to optimize the entire process in every aspect so this *is* the most efficient way to store (and later pick) products in definitely.

It is kind funny, with all the precise machinery, optimized processes and 1984 like surveillance of their employees, it turns out that distributing things randomly is the most efficient way to run an Amazon warehouse. Like, no AI, or something based on ratings or on historic trends. Just random.

(Link to video https://youtube.com/watch/...)

Had to write a recursive MySQL query today and, oh lordy! It's not intuitive at all.

It works now so I'm happy, but I spend more time on it than I'm willing to admit...

(source: https://mysqltutorial.org/mysql-rec...)

Found this gem in my news feed yesterday and can't get it off my mind: catch exception, sleep, goto try-block and, well, try again:

$attempts = 0;
start:

try {
$attempts++;
// (...)
} catch (Exception $e) {
if ($attempts <= 10) {
usleep(100000);
goto start;
)
}

Did we go full-circle? Is "goto" the next big thing? Is this a late april fools joke? What am I missing here? This can't be real.

Source: https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/back-t...

Bad dev habit: code first, ask questions later.

Other than that I'm pretty much perfect <3

My favorite office prank is sending *VERY URGENT* emails to devs with ominous feature requests camouflaged as *FIX BUG ASAP* and then don't reply to followup questions for three weeks.

Works every time.

$ shutdown -h now

"I have learned 679 ways to render HTML. At least once or twice a year, I learn a new way to render HTML and at least 2.3 frameworks to help me on this journey."

This is from an article that popped up in my news feed yesterday. It's quite cynical and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but this HTML-part struck in an odd way.

All this fucking technology BS just to spew out some good old HTML.

I am sad now.

(href: https://blog.logrocket.com/develope...)

*happy nerd-noises*

With unlimited time, I would finally be able to brut-force each and every password in the world!

Also, I would take a nap <3

Imagine, not only did they cracked the cipher, they also found and fixed a bug in the original message after 51 years.

Absolutely brillant!

Zodiac code explanation: https://youtube.com/watch/...

Do you have any recommendations for API monitoring?

I'm looking for something along the lines of jetbrains or postman http-tests but for multiple environments + notifications (teams, mail, ...).

Doesn't have to be fancy (6 environments, ~25 routes with a couple assertions each).

I was thinking maybe https://assertible.com/?

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

// example.json
{ "hasCustomerAgreedToTermsAndConditions": no }

Slightly irritated by my IDEs warning, I squinted back at my code. It took me a second too long to spot my mistake. First, I was baffeld at my own incompetence. Then I grew defensive about it. "Why not?!" I thought. "Less typing, so efficient, so much time saved, so wow!"

I realized at that moment, that it was probably best to call it a day and go to bed.

And so I did.

<blockquote class="blockquote"></blockquote>

thanks bootstrap

I have to create an account just so I can switch to dark mode?! wtf is this shit! My blood is already boiling.