A Month ago...
Me: when are you going to complete the report
Friend: we can do it in minutes
Me: you can't Ctrl + c and Ctrl +v as there is plagiarism check
Friend: we have spin bot
Me: you do that now itself . if something happens? You can join me .
Friend: just chill

Now ...
Me: done with report
Friend: feeding it to spin bot!

Feeds text related to database security....

Spin bot:
Garbage collector == city worker
SQL statements == SQL explanation
SQL queries == SQL interrogation
SQL injection == SQL infusion
Attack == assault
Malicious == noxious
Data integrity == information uprightness
Sensitive == touchy
.....
Me: told you so...
**spin not == article rewriter

These foreign Indian scammers keep calling me about "computer virus".

Today, the guy told me to press ctrl + Windows key. I told him I use Arch Linux and then told him I use Netscape as my browser, and he still didn't take the hint.

He asked me "how can you have the Windows key on your keyboard and use Linux?".

#stupidfuck

The news:
"Oh no, big tech companies are taking advantage of our information and tracking everything we do. We're too dependent! "

Us:
"Wow this sounds important. *Googles it *"

"Everyone needs to know, *shares on Facebook*"

Wait.....

He went up to the boss, dragged a big white board into his office.

Wrote company name, drew a big d**k pic on it.

Circled the d**k's head, wrote boss' name and drew an arrow pointing to the circle.

Titled the board reason for me leaving.

Last I heard, they filed a case against him. Not sure about the outcome of it.

"I was wondering why Monitors sleep and Keyboards don't.

Then it occurred to me that Keyboards have two SHIFTS. 😆😆" -some guy

So, as the lead UX/UI designer, I was working with the marketing officer on the new e-mail template of the company. It took us at least one week to get a good settle – 'cause, you know, she's so skilled on that – doing back and forth and arguing on every detail.

Then she sent me a PPT file with the content and wording for each kind of e-mail.
After 3 days of work, I finished implementing the template and pushed the project in production.

~3 months later
MO: How's your work going on the template?
Me: Erm, sorry? You mean, the e-mails?
MO: Yes! Can you show me the result?
Me: Well, the result is online for...like...3 months?
*Surprised* MO: Hum, yeah? But I didn't validate it!
*Wince* Me: Well, yes, you did, we worked together on it and we finally found a nice settle.
MO: Yes, but the content? Can you send me one of each kind so I can double-check?
Me: ...
*to the rescue* CEO (and husband of MO): It's OK, I've already validate them.
MO: Oh, ok. But I want to double-check. I'll do it later, ok.

~3 weeks later
MO: Can you tell me how I can receive the registration e-mail?
Me: ...
*to the rescue, joking* CTO: Well, did you try to turn your computer off and on again?
MO: Oh, you really think this will work? Let me save my work first!
Me: *BOOOOM*

TL;DR: The marketing officer of my company does nothing productive and is making the company losing a lot of money, but she also make me lose my time for bullshits.
At least I can laugh about it on devRant.

A friend needed to test an API so, I told him to download Postman to start testing POST request and he ask if he needed to download Getman for testing the GET ones 🤣

So I am at the client's location for onsite consultation of their projects.
The HoD asked me to create an application to accept feedbacks from multiple points urgently. Although I was there just for consulting, I thought why not, I am anyway getting bored here.
So after explaining the functionality, she asked me, when can she accept a working app. I told her that it would depend upon a lot of factors, so give me till evening to figure it out.
When she insisted I told her, that it can take at least a month with all the APIs, logins, UI, QA etc. She was surprised and told me that she expected it in 4 days since the requirements can be fit into a single page of her notebook. (That's how she measures project duration).

I told her it's impossible, given that I am the only one working on it. So she told me that her team can do it in two days. I probably have more experience than her entire team combined, but still I thought they might know some simple magic or faster way, that I might not, so I asked her to discuss with the team and then decide.

After explaining the requirements, when she mentioned that it should be done in 2 days, everyone was kinda frozen. One of them said that it's going to take at least 4 months.

I couldn't hide my smirk 😉

My compartmentalizing skill is not good enough. Wasted last night by doing nothing and falling asleep because of a bad mood. I have shit tons of tasks.

I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

Story time! This happened several years ago, back when I didn't have a computer and I was just using the computers at the university. They had 8 iMacs all in a row, and I would sign into one and do my work.

Now these computers have Deep Freeze on them, which is a fancy hard disk driver that treats the entire drive as copy-on-write, so when anything writes to the drive it makes a copy of the block and writes to that instead. That way all your changes are gone when you reboot. It's a real nifty idea, but it's annoying that you have to reset all your settings the way you like them.

So as part of my setup routine I signed into iCloud. This automatically synced my browser history and my email, and various other things I didn't really care about.

One of those things I didn't care about was Find My Mac. I found this out next time I signed into iCloud and saw the university computer on the list. I had never seen these computers on the list before since normally the computer reboots and forgets everything when you log out. What I think happened is the sysadmin forgot to check the "reboot on logout" option in Deep Freeze. So I was like "I wonder what would happen if I passcode locked the computer?" I clicked the passcode lock option and entered 5555, and it seemed to work.

The next day I come in and the particular computer I locked was gone. I thought "oh God what have I done". So I inquired with the sysadmin (who I really hope is not reading this) and he said "oh, someone got into the Find my Mac thing and locked it down. We were trying different codes, since if we couldn't unlock it we'd have to send it to Apple and provide proof of purchase and that could take weeks. We had tried all the obvious ones like 1234 and that wasn't working so I was about to give up, but then I tried 5555 and it rebooted! So yeah, it'll be back soon, and I decided to try installing OS X 10.11 on it because we'll all need to upgrade sooner or later eventually and it's best to have tested a bit first."

So in the end I somehow made it out with my skin still on, and also with El Capitan on one of the computers, which was the only one I used after that. Not so bad! Oh and if you've manged to read all the way through you deserve a cookie 🍪😄

Atother story about PC hardware and being... Not so careful.

A friend complained about his PSU fan being too loud. I said "well, maybe bearings are dying already".
The next day he messaged me and asked to suggest a new PSU. Ok, I threw him some links.
Leter, he told me what happened:
He decided to clean the PSU, because he thought the noise could be because of dust. So he turned off his PC and removed PSU cover with a screwdriver. While doing this, he accidentally hit the circuit board itself. Then "Puff", black smoke and smell of sth burning. Turned out he didn't switched the PSU off. Luckily, the screwdriver handle was rubberized. I'm glad he is alive ._.

Let me introduce you to my classmate. And these are her first GitHub repo's commits:

dad please

Whenever I think about my future.

So many wifes out there are having this problem right now I guess.

"I'll have what she's having." 😂😂

Project Cortana: Day 1

I have seen a lot of people switching to Linux or other services to get away from all the data collections. It makes a lot of sense as no one would want their data to be sold without their consent.

But I am going to do something different. My aim is to integrate with Microsoft apps as much as possible and review the experience. So here is what I have done so far:

* Use Cortana in desktop and mobile (Android)
* Use Microsoft launcher in mobile
* Outlook as primary email provider (I was already using them as my default provider)
* Use Microsoft To-Do and calendar to keep track of things
* Use OneDrive to store all my files (I am moving them from Google Drive)
* Use the default Mail app on the Windows 10
* Use Onenote (I was using Evernote before)
* Use Edge on desktop and Mobile
* Use Skype instead of Hangouts

It's day one but I think I have already found it quite useful. For example:

* Adding reminder is much easier. I get them on both desktop and mobile which is nice.
* Mail app has been really useful. Especially the focused inbox really helps to get rid of the clutters. Also, I can immediately add a mail to the calendar (like Inbox by Google) which is really helpful.
* One of the features of edge that I have found really useful is that you can send web pages from mobile to desktop in one tap. That is extremely useful.

So far I am loving it.

Also, I tried to make sure that I am not sharing my data with third-party apps as I have turned off "relevant ads" feature.

Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

today a coworker came to me. he had some ideas on a program i made for him (he had the thoughts i did the programming).
he is really thankful for this program as it helps him a lot with his daily work.
we talked about an hour: he told me what he wishes and i explained him what i can do with my abilities.

after this talk i had like 8 to 10 changes to make - more or less big.

from 10 am to 2 pm i managed to work off 5 points, built the release and did the update on his pc.

been a long time seeing someone so happy :)

that was a great feeling. now i get some beer. cheers guys

Not really a big deal, but was fun, during the second year of high school once I made a hidden C# program that would randomly open the CD lid and put it on some PCs of the lab and with some friends we watched the teachers get freaked out by the possessed computers (just to put things in perspective, today they still have windows XP, and their most recent laptops have windows 8 NOT 8.1 !!! And the "technician" says that they must not be updated wtf)

Eventually they couldn't find what was the problem and factory reset the computers

Also, we swapped Google chrome e IE icons and names on the desktop , pure evil

Codenvy.io : 3GBs of RAM per free user

Codenvy Nightly : 100GBs per free user

im in a mindfuck state rn

Seems like there are huge bugs.

Human V1.1

No more to say...

import LongRantKit
import NonRantKit
import TldrKit

I don't like stickers on my laptop because it clutters it up. But today I realized the importance of them.

A few months ago I was sitting at a coffee shop working on a paper and I noticed a guy with this cool sticker on a MacBook Pro: it had the integral symbol to the left of the Apple logo, and to the right of it a lowercase d and another Apple logo. It took me a few hours to realize what it meant, but I finally did and at that point I also guessed that not many people know what it is.

So I, as antisocial as I am, I finish up my work and before I leave I walk up to him and say hi. At this point I'm a senior in high school and I learn he's a junior in the same college I plan to attend. We talked a little before I had to leave and got to know each other somewhat.

After I leave I find him on Instagram and Facebook and friend him and such.

Recently I posted a picture saying I had recently joined the Apple Developer Team, and also recently reposted a memory on Facebook from 5 years ago that was a screen capture of an iPhone 4 simulator running iOS 5 showing off one of my first apps.

Then yesterday I get a message from the guy I met at the coffee shop asking for some help with an iOS project he's working on. We decide to meet today and I spend the entire morning showing him the basics of Swift, Xcode, Interface Builder, etc. I feel like I really helped him jumpstart his app and helped him understand the basics of different concepts.

If he didn't have that integral sticker on his laptop I would have never had this opportunity to finally share some iOS development experience.

For this I would like to thank my high school calculus teacher, with whom I spent many classes at Starbucks because I was an only student. I'd like to thank laptop stickers, and finally I would like to thank the coffee shop.

TL;DR: Said hi to a guy with an integral sticker on his laptop, a few months later he approaches me for help understanding iOS development.

if (eidAlFitr.today())
printf("Happy Eid\n");

Supervisor: let's automate this stuff

Me: great! let's do it to last and future proof it. So, as changes happen we can implement in-place upgrades efficiently without taking the system down

Supervisor: well let's not get too crazy

Algo strikes again